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With the divide between 2D and 3D becoming increasingly indistinguishable, I thought I'd share some information about an interesting alternative to Nuke’s default scanline render node and indeed much of Nuke’s current 3D shading tool set.

So it’s almost bank holiday weekend and your old pal Ash is gonna give you another one of his awesome tips before you spend the next three days drinking your body weight in alcohol and watching The Avengers… seriously, how awesome is that film?!

It's important to only isolate three separate elements per ID pass, or the technique becomes redundant. For example, if I had made both the windows and door red in the image for Part One of this blog, then any colour correction I applied to the red channel in NUKE would affect them both. You've already seen a broad example, but there's no reason you can’t use ID passes to focus on more specific areas of your render. The image above shows an example of an ID pass refined to specialise in the windows only. This kind of pass would be useful if the texture I added to the window transoms (red bits) had rendered far too dark, but everything else rendered correctly, as I would be able to adjust them without damaging the rest of my render.

Pixomondo has expanded their impressive global network of VFX studios yet again. Recently they established their twelfth facility at the Celtic Media Centre in Baton Rouge, Louisiana to service local film and commercial productions as well as provide support to the other international studios. With over 150,000 square feet of design-built stage spaces, the Celtic Media Centre is perfect for meeting the demands of any production. This is the largest studio facility in Louisiana state, and with the generous tax incentives currently in place in that region, this looks to be a great move for the Oscar winning VFX company.

This is just a little reminder that the release of Adobe CS6 is just around the corner, but for those of you itching to upgrade, you should think about getting round to it soon. Adobe are currently running a pretty good upgrade promotion that will keep you up-to-date with the latest and greatest features in Adobe Creative Suites. When you buy a full CS5.5 license between now and May 6^th, you get an upgrade to CS6 absolutely free. Just to be clear, this will also save you money, as the CS6 price will undoubtedly be significantly higher. That’s a good incentive if ever I heard one, for upgrading now!

So we have a new class of students for the Visual Effects Production course and I thought I’d quickly run through what this class has been up to recently and where they’re at now in their studies. We are currently on week four and they have just started their first major project after covering the ins and outs of Maya (the industry go-to package in VFX). So far, we have covered modelling, UV’ing, texturing, some lighting and rendering and a bit of Photoshop just to mix it up a bit. To put all they have learnt into practice, they have been asked to create a CG object, integrate it into a backplate and to make it look photo-realistic.

I am part of a generation that has been particularly spoiled by the advances in stop motion animation. I remember watching TV shows like Noddy, Fireman Sam, Pingu and Postman Pat and films like The Nightmare before Christmas, James and the Giant Peach and Chicken Run as a kid and being in complete awe.

Industry proven among some great names in the VFX industry, SCRATCH has played a significant role for an impressive list of film and documentary titles. Developed by software vendor, ASSIMILATE Inc., it is the highly flexible and comprehensive tool for digital workflows, giving you a range of features at your disposal. SCRATCH can manage dailies, versioning, conform, colour grading and finishing all within one application. Often referred to as a ‘post-house in a box’, this tool has a great many qualities to impress.

Here is my usual jumble of news to start off this week. There are tutorials, news of various software releases, a cool "Making of Rango", and really sweet advert for Twinnings tea, and lots more. Feel free to add anything I may have forgotten.

It's the time of the week when I share with you the news that picked my interest over the last seven days. This time, there are the following goodies on offer: a cool making of from Framestore, some great new tutorials, a trailer of Pixar's "Brave", a new trailer for Spiderman and lots of education news related to Michael's latest announcements regarding education reforms.