I’m a big fan of the class of ‘unbiased’ render engines, the look of them is just something cool. The caveat as we know is the render times can be huge but the concept is the setup time is where you’ve saved and won. Meindbender has done a bunch of work for Cartoon Network and while their pieces are witty on their own the use of Maxwell to simulate plasticine models is extraordinary. Very cool stuff and story.

NurbsAndPolys.com has republished the original subdivision modeling primer originated by Glen Southern and is open for viewing at NaP wiki. As a wiki resource, this publication should flourish and be maintained with current techniques.

http://wiki.nurbsandpolys.com

For all you modelers out there, Nurbs And Polys recently opened a modeling forum that plans to be an open and informative modeling community. Based on the idea of community driven support, it would be a great place to start posting suggestions for topics to support it’s resource forum and soon to be built wiki. With the demise of a couple of popular modeling forums it definitely would be a good place to move to.

Props to my friend Policarpo (an amazing artist) for posting me on this one. Blur has released some beta tools (no warranties implied) to make life easier for Max and XSI users.

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As development ensues, Autodesk posted an interview with Dave Cardwell on AREA with a sneak peek as what is to come with Mudbox 2. In a lot of workflow we use sculpting programs like Mudbox to create normal maps to define low polygon models.

Within the demo, Autodesk is boasting 25 million polygons on screen with HDRI lighting, GPU ambient occlussion and other goodies. Check it out.