Autodesk has completed the acquisition of substantially all the assets of Skymatter Limited, the developer of Mudbox 3D modeling software. On August 6, 2007, Autodesk announced an agreement to purchase Skymatter’s assets. This acquisition expands Autodesk’s offering for the film, television and game market segments, while providing additional growth opportunities for other design disciplines, such as 3D automotive and industrial design. Mudbox is now complementary to the Autodesk 3ds Max and Autodesk Maya software products, providing artists with an additional suite of tools for modeling, prototyping and detailing.

SIGGRAPH Encore is an online collection of presentations from the annual SIGGRAPH Conference. You can download presentations for a fee, but for a limited time, until Oct. 31 you can watch them online for free!! It’s a great oportunity to see more than 1100 video presentations from SIGGRAPH 2003, 2004, 2005 and 2007! Click the image to go to their website.

Via: BlenderNation

Our friends at CG Arena have a new interview, this time with Francesco Mai, an artist which always create abstract organic shapes and doesn’t like to create animals or characters. Click the image to read it.

Follow the link on the image to read an Interview with Martin Gårdeler of Ghost Studios, creators of “Sony Ericsson Tennis”, a commercial for a new Sony Ericsson phone which has a new special feature: When listening to mp3’s on the phone, you can “shake” it to randomize the playlist, and jump to the next song. To illustrate this, they make the “tennis ball launcher” to change as well. So, every time the tennis player in the film shakes her phone, the machine gets “upgraded”. This is done in the Transformers style.

Shipping late november, EXOTIQUE 3 brings together the world’s most beautiful CG characters in genres ranging from science fiction, fantasy, anime, to photo-realism and stylized realism. Featuring 292 pieces of artwork by 197 artists from 45 countries and printed to the high standards that Ballistic Publishing is renowned for, you’ll be completely inspired by the original character art in EXOTIQUE 3!. Follow the link on the image to see a Flash preview of the book!

The fourth annual International animation festival is being held in Turkey’s culture capital Istanbul on the third to the eighth of December. The Call for Entries of the Animation and Visual Effects Short Film Competition is open, with the field open to all international animators. There will be no entry fee.

The Gnomon Workshop is presenting their sixth workshop weekend, December 1st-2nd. Featuring artists who will present professional production techniques on subjects including, illustration, character/creature and concept design, modeling, anatomy for artists, 3D rendering, penciling for comics and more.

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ZAppLink is now available for ZBrush 3.1. This new version expands upon what ZAppLink was capable of under ZBrush 2 through several new features:

* Integrated editor selection so that you can easily set the application that ZBrush will link with.
* No need to use Projection Master. ZAppLink integrates with it automatically, making it a breeze to use Photoshop in your texturing and polypainting.
* Create ZBrush stencils in Photoshop via selection tools.
* Save and Load views of your model.
* Send your stored views to Photoshop all at once.
* Create a character strip with all views of your model.

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At CGArena they have another nice making of, this time is for the image “Master of the Bottle”, by artist Khalid Abdulla Al-Muharraqi. The tutorial covers from initial sketches to final rendering and compositing. The image was made in modo 301, zBrush and LW 9.

San Mateo, Calif. — Oct. 8, 2007 — Luxology® LLC, an independent technology company developing next-generation 3D content creation software, yesterday announced that Pixar Animation Studios and Luxology have finalized an agreement under which Pixar has licensed its Subdivision Surface Patents to Luxology. The agreement covers key Pixar proprietary computer graphics technology that will enhance Luxology’s products. Luxology is making no specific announcements as to when this technology might be incorporated into future Luxology software offerings. The specific terms of the agreement are confidential.