Shotgun

Shotgun is a new take on “production tracking”, providing access to critical and dynamic project information to everyone working on a project. Shotgun runs right in a browser, so all content is available to everyone on any platform and in any location.


Everyone has constant access to the latest project schedule, which can be filtered, sorted, and grouped and then saved off as live reports.

Create tasks and milestones, view and edit with interactive Gantt charts

Drill in to "Workrooms" for all the "Things" in your schedule, like Shots, Assets, Sequences, and more, to see how they are...

"My Tasks" page for everyone with an account

Track bid and logged time on each task, then see summaries

View task "roll up" summaries on reports for Sequences, Shots, Assets, etc.

Rapid task creation with customizable task templates

API hooks enable task related automation

The system is completely open, with a flexible python API that lets you quickly integrate into your pipeline.

Open Python API provides full CRUD access to all data

Tap into the event stream for event driven triggers

Special tools for integrating Asset Management and Code repository systems

Extend the UI with URL page and tab widgets

Shotgun is now in private beta.

Open Dynamics Engine

ODE is an open source, high performance library for simulating rigid body dynamics. It is fully featured, stable, mature and platform independent with an easy to use C/C++ API. It has advanced joint types and integrated collision detection with friction. ODE is useful for simulating vehicles, objects in virtual reality environments and virtual creatures. It is currently used in many computer games, 3D authoring tools and simulation tool.

Link to the website of Russell Smith, the primary author of ODE, is here.

CG-Source.com

CG-Source.com is a site dedicated to deliver the highest quality textures possible. The quality and resolution is unmatched by any other site. The current average resolution is 101 megapixels per texture.


Futher more free tools like the FloorGenerator and MultiTexture Map is given away for free to help improve your renderings.

www.cg-source.com

Bullet 2.71 Physics SDK released: Disney Maya Plugin, CUDA experiments

Bullet 2.71 Physics SDK has been released.

Walt Disney Studios contributed their in-house Dynamica Maya Plugin for Bullet physics simulation. This Dynamica plugin has been used for their 3D animated movie Bolt. Furthermore some initial work on integrating a btCudaBroadphase has been introduced, to accelerate Bullet performance using CUDA on NVidia GPUs. So expect some more performance increases in upcoming releases.


Download the compiled releases here.

Maya and NVIDIA Cards

Working on Maya scene and it would start flickering and jumping around the scene whenever you try to interact with the 3d view? Here's a simple fix. Go to your Nvidia display properties tab and turn OFF the Threaded Optimization setting.


If you are usinge Nvidia GeForce graphics cards/drivers and find that the Maya scene view does not refresh correctly, you can set the following environment variable in the Maya.env file to reduce flickering/stale view that may occur:

MAYA_GEFORCE_SKIP_OVERLAY=1

Enjoy.