The Previsualization Society introduces their first "hair of the dog", day-after St. Paddy's Day social mixer! If you're feeling a little woozy from drinking green beer on Wednesday, a little more certainly won't hurt yah! Come on down to the Culver City Hotel bar March 18th at 7:30 pm and meet the founders, socialize and chat with folks in your industry. Get there early for extended happy hour prices! We're looking forward to seeing you there and bring an industry friend!

Check in at the lobby. Cash Bar.

Previs MasterClass

The Previsualization Society began shooting its first MasterClass for Autodesk's AREA January 30th and 31st. Designed to illuminate the basics of the previs process and share a bit of its history and future goals, the founders of the Society were interviewed in order to share their personal experiences in the previs field. Specifics on this MasterClass will be coming soon from Autodesk and the Previsualization Society.

Furry Ball GPUMAN

Art and Animation Studios readies v1.1 of their software Furryball. This GPU renderer exists totally inside the Maya framework and offers realtime hair dynamics, reflections, refractions, ambient occlusion and more. Their feature list includes: 

• Fully GPU accelerated rendering
• 30 - 300 times faster than software renderers
• Fully integrated into Maya - any change is immediately visible in viewport
• Efficient polygonal geometry handling and caching
• Hierarchy of settings nodes
• limited particle support
• Powerful hair system engine
• Dynamic hair and fur using Maya dynamics
• Hair geometry creation entirely on GPU
• Very fast and effective hair/fur rendering
• Millions of hairs rendered interactively with real lighting 

Apple - iPad

Over grown ipod Touch or something better? Lets hear your opinion! How could this device be integrated into the previs workflow? Check out the specs here. 

CG Society: B-Movie CG Challenge XXV

The CG Society has announced their new CG Challenge. Fashioned after the classic "B" style monster and sci-fi movies, this challenge should produce some fantastic results. There is a video "team" and video "individual" category that could be an excellent opportunity for some talented previs artists to consider. Some nice prizes too!

Octane Renderer

Reactive Software announces the pending release of OctaneRender, their new fully interactive, unbiased GPU rendering software for CUDA equipped Nvidia video cards. The sample shown above rendered in just 30 seconds using this technology. 

Some of Octane's features include: 

• Physically based / Spectral Light Transport
• Unbiased and directlighting/ambient occlusion 
• QMC sampling and MLT sampling
• instances
• Motion Blur
• Pause/resume render
• Output of render passes, Z-depth map and normal maps
• Alpha channel rendering with real-time UI compositing over images
• support for multiple GPU's
• Image textures incl support for loading over 40 different formats
• HDR, Canon RAW, and OpenEXR HDRI image textures
• Output of HDR and LDR real-time GPU tonemapped images
• Output of raw HDR images (exr, hdr, canon RAW)
• Real-time control of DOF
• Shift lens
• Z clipping
• Interactive focal-length adjustment in user interface

Octane Renderer is available for Windows 32/64, Linux 32/64 and Mac OSX.

The Previsualization Society has now added Vimeo+ support for streaming its videos. Stay tuned. Our new video library will be coming online soon. 

ATI FIREPRO v8750

CGChannel has an interesting graphics card review on the FIREPRO v8750 and how it compares to the Quadro FX4800/5800 lineup. Additional information about the card's performance utilizing various 3D applications is also included. Generally, NVIDIA is considered the manufacturer of choice for 3D animators, but does this ATI card close the gap for previs users?

©2009 StudioGPU

• Displacement mapping using hardware tessellation.
• Stereoscopic camera support.
• Cartoon Shaders. 
• Configurable Anti-Alias settings.
• Render passes/layers.
• OpenEXR support.
• Floating point Velocity Maps.
• 64bit support. 

Machstudio Pro remains one of the few realtime hardware rendering solutions available. Strong integration with the Autodesk lineup could provide interesting implications for the previsualization and independent CG film markets.