Gnomon Workshop has released a new training course by VFX Art Director Alex Nice about his process for creating both flat 2D illustrations and 2D-to-3D interactive scenes. (more...)

Foundry - the publisher of Modo, Nuke, Mari, katana and others - has announced the appointment of Jody Madden as new CEO. Madden originally joined Foundry in 2013 and has held positions as Chief Operating Officer and most recently, Chief Customer Officer and Chief Product Officer. Prior to joining Foundry, Madden spent more than ten years in technology management and studio leadership roles at ILM, Lucasfilm, and Digital Domain. Read the full press release on the Foundry blog.

Ivan Maximov has released a new version of his MCG modifier for 3DS Max that creates topology-based weaving patterns. It costs $14.99 from Artstation, Gumroad, or CGTrader.

PostPerspective has published a review of the Hitfilm Pro 12 editing, compositing and visual effects application published by FXHome. "[...] HitFilm 12 will fill a lot of holes for individual content creators. If you love learning new things [...]HitFilm 12 will be a good investment of your time. " Read the review in full on PostPerspective.

Union VFX has released a reel of their invisible VFX for Stan and Ollie for which they helped anchor the film in the 1930s and 1950s. Watch it on Vimeo.

Disney Research presents a method for tracking the invisible jaw bone of an actor based solely on footage of the head, without the need for any markers. According to the paper, it works by "learning a non-linear mapping from the skin deformation to the underlying jaw motion on a dataset where ground-truth jaw poses have been acquired, and then to retarget the mapping to new subjects."  Read the publication on the Disney Research website and watch a demo on YouTube. 

Senior Visual Effects Supervisor Tim Ledbury has published a breakdown reel for Wes Anderson’s stop motion feature Isle of Dogs. It shows a selection from some of the 950 shots created by the fully in-house team by combining over 8,000 practically shot model and puppet elements. Watch it on Vimeo. There are also a couple of interviews with Tim Ledbury on VFXChoice and AWN that might be of interest. 

Newtek has announced the release of Lightwave 2019.1.  (more...)