According to Andrew Kramer the Optical Flares videocopilot.net new lens flare plug-in will be available January 25 2010.

Optical Flares is according to videocopilot.net  capable of building amazing 3D lens flare presets with precise and realistic qualities. The lens flare   presets are supposed to be shared online?

Planned features of Optical Flares lens flare plug-in:

• Auto-position of lens flares
• Real-Time lens flare with with preview of the different lens flares
• Dynamic lens flares
• Possibility to manage lens flare attributes like dust, chromatic aberration and aspect ratios
• Share lens flares with others on videocopilot.net

RED GIANT SOFTWARE did release Mojo. Mojo provides a simple way to make your footage look like an action movie. Modern blockbusters often use a subtle coloring effect to warm up actors’ skin tones while backgrounds and shadows get a cool blue treatment –– but the trick is to do it while keeping your talent in focus. Magic Bullet Mojo gives you this modern Hollywood look in seconds, with easy customizable controls to suit any footage. The three Skin controls let you fine-tune skin tones within the overall Mojo effect. Skin Color nudges the skin tones of actors of any race, eliminating unwanted color casts.

I have been using Mojo the last months during the beta phase and have found Mojo a reliable and really easy to use tool which enhanced my footage quickly.

3D Serpentine brings big-time 3D effects to Motion Graphics and Video artists. Creating 3D noodles, also called path extrusions, is no longer difficult nor time consuming. Now you can do them live, right inside of Adobe After Effect. If you know how to make a 3D path in After Effects you can create fanciful 3D noodles with the 3D Serpentine plug-in.

Create cool 3D effects like moving film strips (Examples here) , shooting stars, animated marquee signs, swirling tubes, winding helixes, twisting extruded text, arrow pointers and self-tying ribbons.
Zaxwerks has a demo movie for you:  Click Here to watch the 3D Serpentine demo movie

3D Serpentine features

• Auto-Orient
  Powerful Zaxwerks-only auto-orientation technology insures that the 3D objects look good at all points along the path and don’t suffer from the twists and distortions that most other 3D programs have.
• Cross Sections
  For instant feedback, basic cross section shapes are included such as stars, rectangles lines and circles; but you can also use AE’s drawing tools to create any cross section you wish, even ones with multiple parts.
• End Cap Control
  End cap controls give you instant pointed, beveled, rounded or domed ends.
• Importing Custom Head and Tail Objects
  Head and Tail objects can be imported from Zaxwerks ProAnimator or Invigorator, enabling you to use any 3D object as the beginning or end of the noodle.
• Materials and Lighting
  Noodles can be colored by an image or movie. They can be rendered in solid, cartoon, wireframe and hidden line styles. Bump and reflection maps can be used to give the objects texture and brilliance. All 3D Serpentine objects respond to the After Effects camera and lighting.

A older Beta video about Zaxwerks 3D Serpentine

According to Zaxwerks 3D Serpentine works in Adobe After Effects on Macintosh ( Host: Adobe After Effects CS3 and CS4, G4/G5 Power Mac or Intel Mac,  Mac OS X 10.3.9, 10.4.11, and 10.5.2 and higher & 512 MB RAM ) and Windows ( Host: Adobe After Effects CS3, and CS4,Pentium 4 or better,Windows XP service pack 2 or Windows Vista & 512 MB RAM)

Jerzego Drozde Jr (aka Maltaannona) released his newest plugin. Youveelizer helps you to apply UV mapping with pixel bender, the plugin supports normal maps as well.  When you apply Youveelizer to a layer with a UV render pass to apply a texture to a rendered 3d object, or to a Normal render pass to add reflections. All 3d objects should be rendered out from 3d Studio Max, Maxon Cinema 4D or other 3d package capable of rendering UV and Normal render passes.

If you wonder about UV Data and what it is all about read more about UV data here.”UV space is a parametric definition of an object’s mapping used in computer graphics. Its main goal is to provide a means of correlating the geometry of an object with other data generated within the program. This can include not only textures and rendering data, but also parameters of the object itself. For surfaces generated from curves, this would, for instance, be valid for the tension and continuity. Another common use is the placement of one object on another’s surface. “(Lutz Albrecht)

More on UV data

• Integrating 3D applications with After Effects – Part 1: Working with UV data
• UV Mapping with Pixel Bender

ImageSorter is an image browsing application, which allows an automatic sorting by color, date taken, name, or size.

Kompetenzzentrum Mensch-Maschine-Kommunikation an der FHTW Berlin describes ImageSorter as ” The idea of ImageSorter is to find images of which you remember how they look but you forgot in which folder they were. If one or several folders are selected, all images from these folders will be visually arranged such that similar images are close to each other. In this sorted display it will be much easier to find a particular image. Selected images can be copied, moved or deleted (right mouse click).
ImageSorterdoes cache thumbnails and sortings, therefore after images have been loaded once, everything will be much faster.

The current version of ImageSorter (4.0 BETA) sorts images by the similarity of their color layouts. Future versions of the program will support additional ordering criteria. All images within a folder are sorted in such a way, that similar images are positioned close to each other. This sorting scheme makes it much easier to find a particular image within a huge image set.

Naturally also ImageSorter does not understand or recognize image content and cannot distinguish between different people or landscapes. However this program does not need a query image and is suited to display large sets of up to some thousands images in a visually well organized way that can easily be navigated.”

Imageworks has released 5 projects as open source. The open source software can be freely used by large and small studios around the world.

Imageworks’ production environment, which is known for its photo-real visual effects, digital character performances, and innovative technologies to facilitate their creation, has incorporated open source solutions, most notably the Linux operating system, for many years. Now the company is contributing back to the open source community by making these technologies available.  The software can be used freely around the world by both large and small studios. Each project has a team of passionate individuals supporting it who are interested in seeing the code widely used.  The intention of the open source release is to build larger communities to adopt and further refine the code.

• Field3d, a voxel data storage library
• Scala Migration, a database migration tool
• OSL, a programmable shading language for rendering
• Pystring, python-like string handling in C++
• Maya Reticule, a Maya Plug-in for camera masking

Field3D
Field3D is an open source library for storing voxel data. It provides C++ classes that handle storage in memory, as well as a file format based on HDF5 that allows the C++ objects to easily be written to and read from disk.

The library was initially developed at Sony Pictures Imageworks as a replacement for the three different in-house file formats already used to store voxel data. It is the foundation for Imageworks’ in-house simulation framework and volume rendering software. It is actively used in production.

Scala Migrations
Scala Migrations is a library to manage upgrades and rollbacks to database schemas.  Migrations allow a source control system to manage together the database schema and the code using the schema.  It is designed to allow multiple developers working on a project with a database backend to design schema modifications independently, apply the migrations to their local database for debugging and when complete, check them into a source control system to manage as one manages normal source code.

The package is based off Ruby on Rails Migrations and in fact shares the exact same schema migration table to manage the list of installed migrations.  The Scala Migrations library utilizes the clean Scala language to write easy to understand migrations. Scala Migrations provides a database abstraction layer that allows migrations to target any supported database vendor.

OSL (Open Shading Language)
Open Shading Language (OSL) is a small but rich language for programmable shading in advanced renderers and other applications. OSL is similar to C, as well as other shading languages; however, it is specifically designed for advanced rendering algorithms with features such as radiance closures, BRDFs, and deferred ray tracing as first-class concepts.

The OSL project includes a complete language specification, a compiler from OSL to an intermediate assembly-like byte code, an interpreter that executes OSL shaders on collections of points in a SIMD manner, and extensive standard shader function library. These all exist as libraries with straightforward C++ APIs, and so may be easily integrated into existing renderers, compositing packages, image processing tools, or other applications. Additionally, the source code can be easily customized to allow for renderer-specific extensions or alterations, or custom back-ends to translate to GPUs or other special hardware.

Pystring
Pystring is a collection of C++ functions which match the interface and behavior of python’s string class methods using std::string. Implemented in C++, it does not require or make use of a python interpreter. Rather, it provides convenience and familiarity for common string operations not included in the standard C++ library. It’s also useful in environments where both C++ and python are used.

Maya Reticle
Originally developed at Sony Pictures Imageworks, spReticleLoc is a Maya C++ plug-in plus MEL code that creates a reticule for a camera.  It allows for various camera reference masks to be displayed when looking through the camera, such as filmback, projection gate, and pan and scan attributes.

The value of predefined parameters can be displayed in selectable areas, such as the camera focal length and name, current aspect ratio, frame number, name of the show and shot, Maya scene file name, current user name, etc.   Arbitrary textural information can be displayed as well.

More on Imageworks:

Imageworks’ most recently completed projects include G-FORCE, WATCHMEN, VALKYRIE, BODY OF LIES, EAGLE EYE, HANCOCK, SPEED RACER, BEOWULF, and I AM LEGEND.  Upcoming projects include ALICE IN WONDERLAND, CATS AND DOGS 2, 2012, and Sony Pictures Animation’s CLOUDY WITH A CHANCE OF MEATBALLS.

Imageworks’ achievements have been recognized by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences with Oscars® for its work on SPIDER-MAN™ 2 and the CG animated short film THE CHUBBCHUBBS!. In 2008, SURF’S UP was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature. In 2007, two of Imageworks’ projects, SUPERMAN RETURNS and the all-CG animated feature MONSTER HOUSE, were nominated for Academy Awards in the Outstanding Achievement in Visual Effects and Best Animated Feature respectively. With those two nominations, Imageworks became the first studio to be recognized in the same year in these distinct areas, an indication of the diversity and quality of the company’s capabilities. Other Oscar® nominated projects include THE CHRONICLES OF NARNIA: THE LION, THE WITCH AND THE WARDROBE, SPIDER-MAN™, HOLLOW MAN, STUART LITTLE and STARSHIP TROOPERS, for a total of ten nominations.

Martin Tomka the key person behind Simartom.com has released T-Gen  2 a tree and plant generator which fully integrated into Softimage XSI.  Many Softimage XSI tools are supported to change materials, geometry or  hierarchy. Almost all parameters of T-Gen can be animated.

T-Gen 2 features:

• New core – On average T-Gen 2 is 3x-4x faster
• New Dynamics – you can now use XSI forces to simulate tree and plant dynamics.
• New distribution options – new distribution types are random and point distribution.
• New noise types – you can now use perlin noise to get more natural look of branches.

• Advanced appearance and distribution settings
• Node-based tree and plant hierarchy
• Multicore support
• Plant dynamics
• Geometry optimization
• Animatable trees and plants
• Intuitive interface
• Seamless XSI integration
• Powerful free version
• Export of plants

See also:

• T-Gen Documentation
• T-Gen Tutorials
• Feature list
• T-Gen Downloads

T-Gen 2 should work with XSI6.02, XSI6.5, XSI 7.0, XSI 7.5

(There is a bug in XSI 7.5 that prevent you from using more than 1 force. In older versions you can connect up to 100 forces.)

Speedtest T-Gen vs. T-Gen 2

Force Test (New Dynamics Feature)

Distribution Options

T-Gen Manager