The LA Times has a very interesting article on Henrik Wann Jensen's research on translucent materials.

SplutterFish announces the Brazil Rendering System 1.0, a new fully-integrated rendering suite for 3ds max. Brazil r/s is a full-latitude, floating-point renderer, built on a fast, efficient raytracing engine. It sports many advanced features such as camera and film effects, motion blur, depth of field/bokeh lens simulation, sophisticated filtering, anti-aliasing, and highly-evolved illumination and shading models including raytracing, caustics, global illumination, non-photoreal capabilities, and support for all the standard artistic "fakes". It is also compatible with a variety of volumetric and hair rendering systems. This commercial version of Brazil r/s will be available in Fall 2001.
Read the whole press release at Splutterfish.com. (more...)

Simon Bunker has posted some HDRI shaders (download) for use with BMRT and a couple of Max scenes that work with these shaders and BMRT via MaxMan (Animal Logic's Max to Renderman plugin).

The specifications for version 1.3 of the OpenGL standard are now available from opengl.org in a 1.8meg PDF file. (more...)

3hird Dimension has signed a non-exclusive distribution agreement with Digimation for worldwide distribution of quCat

Intel announced that it has developed a new software technology called Light Field Mapping (LFM) that helps to create more life-like 3-D images for interactive applications, such as games, by correctly modeling light reflection properties of 3-D objects. LFM has the potential of making interactive photo-realistic computer graphics possible on the PC, improving texture mapping. Intel Labs researchers will present technical details of this technology at SIGGRAPH.
More information and some animations created with LFM techniques available at Intel.com.

"New version features the first automated stereoscopy creation solution and ColorCode 3-D

CGW has a short article on Bionatics' plant creation applications.