Autodesk announced that it has signed an agreement to acquire the software product line from Media 100, a provider of digital media products. With this acquisition, Autodesk's Discreet division will add streaming media capabilities to the Discreet family of products, allowing customers to create, distribute, re-purpose and publish media content for consumption via the Internet, corporate Intranets and IP-enabled devices such as cell phones and PDAs. (more...)

Paul Debevec has updated his page with information on HDR Shop, an image editor designed to view and manipulate High-Dynamic Range images. The software allows you to create a high-dynamic range image by assembling images taken with a standard camera and may be freely downloaded for non-commercial purposes. There's also information on a device called Light Stage 3.0 that provides direct illumination of an actor with light generated according to a virtual environment (a real-world implementation of image-based lighting).

CNet's Builder.com has a great tutorial on using 3ds max and Macromedia Director to create a 3D character for the web.

Wisconsin-based Virtual Partners offers beginner and advanced Max classes and has now added intermediate through advanced Forensic Animation classes (September 13th-15th).

Pixar has made available the list of features for the next release of Photo Realistic RenderMan (PRMan). Check it out at Pixar.com.

Here's Digital Dimension music montage of some of their 3D work for NASCAR ON FOX.
Copyright FOX Sports, Images courtesy of Digital Dimension.
3D animations were created with Discreet's 3D MAX and composited with eyeon's Digital Fusion.
High Resolution WindowsMedia8 (18MB), Lower Resolution WindowsMedia8 (6MB) (more...)

Darkling Simulations' DarkTree 2.0 procedural shader creation software is now available. This release brings new features such as much needed workflow enhancements, lots of new procedural components, "tweaks" (macro controls that can alter single or multiple parameters in the tree) and better integration with max. DarkTree 2.0 is scheduled to start shipping on August 28, and is priced at $479 (downloadable version at $459) for new users and $125 (downloadable version at $105) for registered users of DarkTree 1.
More information available at Darksim.com.

"PrometheanFX