IFilm has put online streaming versions of some of the short films presented at this year's SIGGRAPH. If you've missed the event here's your chance to see them.

Animated Translucency v0.98 by Grant Adam - Animated version of the Translucency script, builds translucency data for sequences. Multiple object support. Needs jblib and jbfunctions from www.johnburnett.com.
MaterialEditSelected v1.0 By Shawn Lewis - Selects/edits the texture of the currently selected object(s).
HairPlanter v2.0 By Jarek Dukat, ported by Swami Lama - Lets you plant hair on your objects. It generates lots of simple renderable shape objects to simulate hair.
TopCAT v0.12 by Borislav Petrov - Lets you expose parameters of modifiers on the stack or the base object to the top of the stack by creating Custom Attributes and wiring them to the original properties. (more...)

DivXNetworks announced that DivX 4.0, the newest version of their codec (compressor/decompressor), is available for download. The new version features improved performance, faster encoding speed and near-DVD visual quality.

Lots of new images. Check 'em out!

Spheron is offering a digital camera that captures HDRI panoramas in a 2-minute scan. Check out also Spheron's gallery for some very nice panorama images (sample).

"A quick report on the show, all the things we showed, and a review of many of the questions asked"

"SAN FRANCISCO --(Aug. 20, 2001)-- Discreet announced that it has signed a second licensing agreement with Microsoft Corp. to create, publish and distribute Discreet gmax game packs for multiple Microsoft game titles. The highly anticipated epic role-playing game (RPG) Dungeon Siege(TM), developed by Gas Powered Games, is the next confirmed title to be published by Microsoft to include support for gmax software, and is scheduled for delivery in 2002."

Industry professionals give their views on animation on the Internet. Read the article at Digital Animators.