New free videotutorial from CGArena. On this one, artist Giorgio Luciano covers the interior lighting, materials & rendering in 3ds max using Vray (explained color mapping, gamma).

The CGSociety has just launched a new competition with over $22,000 of prizes. It is a short competition for images only.

This competition celebrates the very essence of the creativity that defines digital art: the ability to create artistically and technically excellent images of things that are impossible in the real world.

The competition started yesterday, October 25th, and closes on January 7th.

1st Prize: 2 x NVIDIA Quadro FX 5500 cards and 1 week ‘all inclusive’ holiday valued at $10,000 (USD).
2nd Prize: NVIDIA Quadro FX 5500 and a $500 (USD) American Express Gift Card.
3rd Prize: NVIDIA Quadro FX 3500 and a $500 (USD) American Express Gift Card.

Click here to see the full list of prizes

The British Academy of Film and Television Arts has announced the winners of its Video Games Awards for 2007. Click on “Continue reading” to view the list, or click on the image to go to their site.

Via: CGSociety

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A new public beta of CrazyBump is available.

CrazyBump is a tool which uses image recognition to bake normal and displacement maps from 2D source textures. It has been in testing at major studios for over a year, and is now in public beta testing.

More information is available at crazybump.com

This new beta test adds multi-threading and SSE support, along with other performance improvements.
Full release notes are available here

Our friends at CGArena have just published a new making of, this time about the image “Transformers - Death Blow”, by Alon Chow from Taiwan.

3DWorld has a nice tutorial on how to achieve a realistic rendering with Maxwell Render. Check it out following the link on the image above.

Via: Animwatch

CGSociety has just published the making of for their Exotique 3 cover image, by artist Marta Dahlig. She went one step further and added some new elements to the image, don’t miss it!

Via: CGTalk

New interview from the people of 3D Total. This time, featured artist is Lee Perry-Smith, lead character artist for a computer games firm in Nottingham. Follow the link to read the whole interview.

Via: 3DM3

On this tutorial you’ll learn 9 easy tips on how to light and render your models to achieve a nice render. The tutorial is for MentalRay under 3ds max, but it can be adopted for any software.

Via: 3DM3

Comet Digital, LLC has just announced that Autodesk, Inc. has acquired the cMuscleSystem plug-in and technology.

Existing cMuscleSystem customers with Autodesk Maya Gold Subscription, formerly Platinum Membership, will now be supported by Autodesk Product Support. Follow the link on the image to read the full notice.

Via: CGTalk