Known for its top quality CG work, Lancashire and Manchester-based RealTimeUK is celebrating its 20 years with a video that shows a compilation of its productions, which also portrays the evolution in realism and complexity that computer graphics went through during the past two decades. RealTimeUK was founded by Tony Prosser in 1996 with three Apple Mac computers, nowadays the studio uses 3DS Max as its main software. Read an interview with Tony Prosser on the origins of RealtimeUK on the BBC and watch the 20 years celebration video on RealTimeUK's website.

InstruMMents announced 01, a pen-like device for digital measurement of contoured surfaces. 01 is designed to capture dimensions and 3D curves of irregular objects. It logs, converts and shares the data through your mobile phone. 3D curves can be exported in CAD format. More on Indiegogo.

The short film co-directed by Daniel Martínez Lara and Rafa Cano Méndez is finally available online after touring film festivals. Alike was created with Blender and has earned numerous awards, including "best animated short film" at the Goya awards. Watch Alike short film on Filmnosis.

Ireland-based Screen Scene, has released some breakdowns for the work they did on Season 5 of Ripper Street. Watch it on Vimeo.

Luis Pages is now offering his FX Power User course for free. The mostly Maya-based training series, includes over 80 hours of training in Maya on topics like particles, soft & rigid body effects, and overall workflows, and even touches on RealFlow. You can access the training videos via the VFX Learning website.

Art of VFX recently spoke with VFX Supervisor, Louis Morin, where he discussed the work done on the recent film, Arrival. You can read the full interview on the Art of VFX website.

NVidia announced that v3.14 of its renderer for Maya is now officially available and commercial licenses can be rented. A free version can be used for single frame rendering, and the company charges for enabling sequence rendering within Maya and production rendering on the network or in batch on any machine. Version 3.14 brings final frame rendering directly to the Maya viewport with progressive interactivity. High quality GI is now twice as fast as before with an easy to use GI-Next solution, which is also GPU-accelerated, delivering a 10-20x speedup by adding just one top-end GPU. (more...)

New features in DGDM's asset manager for Maya include: (more...)