The latest VFX breakdown by Milk for the film Adrift is uncomfortable viewing for those that suffer from seasickness! Watch it on Vimeo.

MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab, ETH Zurich, and Adobe have demonstrated a new deep learning algorithm designed to isolate a subject from its background, similar to the Subject select tool found in the recent updates to Photoshop.  This algorithm differs in its ability to identify semantically meaningful regions of the image including the ability to create soft transitions between them.  Read more on NVIDIA's blog.

Nevercenter has announced the release of Silo 2.5.5, an incremental release that adds a segmented bevel with adjustable rounding. The new feature is added to the existing Bevel tool. Watch a video of the new tool on YouTube

Cinesite has released a breakdown reel for its work on Avengers Infinity War. Watch it on YouTube.

At SIGGRAPH 2018 OTOY and Epic Games demonstrated a preview of Octane 2019 integrated with Unreal Engine 4. Features shown in the preview included:

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Esri has posted a recording of a VES webinar in which they reveal Palladio, a new plugin that enables importing CityEngine data into Houdini. Watch the full presentation on YouTube. 

NVIDIA has published an article by J Turner Whitted, one of the pioneers of raytracing, explaining the background to his 1979 paper  An Improved Illumination Model for Shaded Display that was an important contribution to today's ray-traced computer graphics techniques. (more...)

Epic has announced that a number of free guides to Unreal Engine are now available for instructors, including Unreal Engine VR Cookbook, Game Development with Unreal Engine 4, Sams Teach Yourself Unreal Engine 4 Game Development in 24 Hours, Unreal Engine 4 for Unity Users (coming soon), and Unreal Engine 4 for Design Visualisation (also coming soon).  (more...)