One of the biggest uncertainties facing artists in the UK at the moment is the effect of leaving the European Union on the creative industries. UK based producer, writer, researcher and statistician Stephen Follows speculates about this in a report about the effect of leaving the EU on the UK film industry. His findings are based on the British Film Institute document Impacts of leaving the EU on the UK’s screen sector  (made available last week thanks to a freedom of information request), a House of Lords report titled Leaving the European Union: Impact on the Creative Industries, and a panel he hosted at the Royal Institution.  Despite admitting that it's difficult to predict the exact impact of Brexit while negotiations are in their infancy, Stephen summaries four positives and four negatives that are plausible based on our understanding of the current situation: (more...)

Foundry has announced a partnership with Japanese developers J-Cube to distribute Multiverse Studio, an advanced asset interchange tool that wraps around modern standards such as MaterialX, USD, and Alembic. It provides a unified toolset to transfer complex assets for Maya and Katana on all platforms, promising significant performance gains in all areas compared to Maya's built-in and 3rd party tools, including improved read-speeds of up to 100 times faster. J-Cube has also announced the release of Multiverse Studio 4.4 which introduces beta Redshift support, fixes several bugs and introduces a new licensing system that allows individual licenses to be used for Maya, Katana and any other apps that are compatible in future. Read the full press release on Foundry's website and find out more about the tool on multi-verse.io.

Moscow based studio CGF, has posted a breakdown of the VFX work they delivered for the film, Bolshoy. Watch it on Vimeo.

Arturo Orgaz Casado has released his latest reel showcasing VFX from projects like Star Wars, Godzilla, Edge of Tomorrow, and more. Watch it on Vimeo.

Cartoon Brew speaks with ILM VFX Supervisor, Scott Farrar, regarding the latest Bumblebee sequence in the recently released, Transformers: The Last Knight. You can read the full interview on the Cartoon Brew website.

Perceptual Computing Laboratory has released a short video demonstrating the detection of faces, bodies and hands for multiple people using OpenPose, a C++ library created using OpenCV and Caffe. According to its authors, OpenPose "[...] represents the first real-time system to jointly detect human body, hand and facial keypoints (in total 130 keypoints) on single images".  Main features of the library include: (more...)

Chaos Group has announced the release of their latest version of V-Ray for 3DS Max. V-Ray 3.6 introduces support for 3DS Max 2018 and a new hybrid rendering mode for its CUDA powered GPU renderer to enable artists to take advantage of their GPU and CPU hardware simultaneously. Also included is support for NVidia NVlink to allow compatible graphics cards to share GPU memory; a full light select render element including GI, reflections and refractions to make light-mixing possible in post; and support for Cryptomatte, an open source technology developed by PsyOp for automatically generating ID mattes with support for motion blur, transparency, and depth of field. Visit Chaos Group's website to get the full details on this latest release.

Vancouver-based Image Engine has posted two new reels showcasing their creature , environment and simulation work.