UVPHACTORY recently completed work on the Great American Foodscape, which is a projection mapped video walk-though experience that is hosted by the USA Pavilion at Expo Milano 2015. You can watch the making of video on their Vimeo channel.

FXGuide recently interviewed Luca Fascione, the Head of Rendering Research at Weta Digital, about the CG industry and of course, rendering. You can watch the full interview on the FXGuide Youtube channel.

Pixar's Universal Scene Description (USD) is an efficient, scalable system for authoring, reading and streaming time-sampled scene descriptions for interchange between graphics applications. The system facilitates the creation of scalable collaborative pipelines and aims to bring standardization and efficient exchange of scenes among 3D applications, while trying to preserve file referencing and non-destructive editing capabilities.

USD is being tested by a number of studios and developers, and Pixar intends to release it as an open source project by Northern Hemisphere's summer 2016. Read the press release and find out more on Pixar's website.

Dreamworks' Lead FX Jason Mayer has posted his latest reel. Created with Houdini, Maya, Nuke, Mantra and various proprietary tools. Watch it on Vimeo.

The Blender Foundation has made available the opening of the film Cosmos Laundromat. The 10-minute pilot "First Cycle" was directed by Mathieu Auvray based on a story written by Esther Wouda. Once again, impressive work created with Blender. Watch the film on YouTube and find out more on Project Gooseberry's website.

For those fortunate enough to be there, Thinkbox will be showcasing the soon to be released Deadline 8, and Deadline On Demand at Siggraph 2015 in Los Angeles this week. Deadline On Demand allows users to pre-purchase render hours and scale up their rendering needs via the cloud, and manage those renders through Deadline 8. For more details on this story, you can visit the Thinkbox website.

FXGuide has posted an article on the breakdown of Digic's, 'Witcher 3' cinematic. You can read the full article on the FXGuide website.

The Document Foundation has released version 5 of its open source office suite. The new version brings a significantly improved user interface, with better management of screen space and a cleaner look. In addition, it offers better interoperability with office suites such as Microsoft Office and Apple IWork, thanks to new and improved filters to handle non-standard formats. Other improvements have been added to every module of the suite, and Windows 64-bit builds (Vista and later) have been added. LibreOffice 5 is available for Linux, Mac OS X and Windows. More on The Document Foundation's site.