The Blender Institute has released a three-minute teaser for a full-length animated feature based on the Agent 327 comic series by Dutch cartoonist Martin Lodewijk. The short was co-directed by Hjalti Hjalmarsson and former Pixar artist Colin Levy. Watch it on Agent 327's website.

For the Agent 327 movie itself, the Blender Institute is establishing Blender Animation Studio, a separate department devoted to feature animation, for which it aims to recruit a team of 80 artists and developers from its international network. To help raise the film's proposed budget of €14 million, the Institute has signed with leading talent agency WME, which represents Hollywood directors Martin Scorsese, Ridley Scott and Michael Bay. (more...)

A preview video of the papers that will be presented at this year's SIGGRAPH is now available. Watch it on YouTube.

Next Limit has made available a point release of their fluid simulation software RealFlow. New features include enhancements to their multiphysics solver Dyverso which can now simulate both viscous materials such as honey as well as "viscoelastic" materials like foamy mattresses. Dyverso has also received some other smaller features such as vorticity boost that allows you to emphasize the vorticity movement in your simulation. To learn more about the new release, visit RealFlow's website.

SideFX have posted the hour long video presentation that the team from Entagma recently gave at FMX 2017, discussing Houdini and their workflows. Watch it on Vimeo.

Territory Studio was responsible for creating some of the motion graphics and UI elements in the recently released film, Ghost In The Shell. You can visit their Behance page to have a behind the scenes look at their work.

Elastic has created the opening graphics for the recently released series, Iron Fist, on Netflix. Watch it on Vimeo.

Athens based Ixor VFX has released their 2017 showreel featuring product, commercial, and VFX work. Watch it on Vimeo.

Richard Oud, lead animator at Guerilla Games, has released an impressive reel showcasing some of the robot animations in the Playstation 4 game Horizon Zero Dawn. Richard's role during the 6 year production was to focus on the robots ensuring that the style and feel animations was consistent across the team. The video represents a small selection of the animations he created mostly himself. Watch it on Vimeo.