An impressive breakdown video has been posted for the FMX 2017 trailer, Elemental. Watch the breakdown on YouTube.

Cartoon Brew has posted an article looking at how visual effects from Double Negative helped bring The Fate of the Furious to the big screen. You can read the full article on the Cartoon Brew website.

FXGuide has posted an article discussing the upcoming features set to be included in Nuke 11. The article also touches on Foundry's new product, Elara, which is a cloud-based service for post-production that centralizes infrastructure, creative tools and pipeline. You can read the full article on the FXGuide website.

The latest version of Blackmagic Design's editing and grading application brings 10x performance improvements, a new audio postproduction suite with Fairlight audio built into the software, collaboration tools that let multiple people edit, color and mix audio from multiple systems in the same project at the same time, new editing and grading features, and a price reduction of its Studio version from $995 to $299 (permanent licenses, no rental). (more...)

Researchers from Disney and the University of Southern California have developed a method for capturing dynamic hair and automatically determining the physical properties for simulating the hairstyle in motion. The output consists of both the static hair geometry as well as its physical properties. The hairstyle can be easily edited by adding additional external forces, changing the head motion, or re-simulating in completely different environments. More on Disney Research's website.

New features in the latest version of Render Legion's Corona Renderer for 3DS Max include: 200% speed boost in scenes where direct lighting from HDRI environment is dominant, interactive rendering is virtually real-time thanks to subsampling, significantly improved distributed rendering, portable Corona Image Editor application, triplanar mapping, improved rendering of round edges, Corona Scatter improvements, free set of IES profiles, free photographic LUTs, reduced memory requirements, etc. (more...)

ILM FX Artist Steven Knipping, has posted his latest demo reel featuring work from the recent Star Wars movies, Age of Ultron, Tomorrowland and more. The demo also includes some new tutorial footage from his Applied Houdini tutorial series. Watch it on Vimeo.

Solid Angle has posted a video showing the new features in the recently released v5 of its Arnold renderer. Watch it on Vimeo.