BREAKING NEWS
LATEST POSTS
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Apple, SpaceX, Microsoft return-to-office mandates drove senior talent away
A study analyzing Apple, Microsoft, and SpaceX suggests that return to office (RTO) mandates can lead to a higher rate of employees, especially senior-level ones, leaving the company, often to work at competitors.
Some company leaders are adamant that remote work can disrupt a company’s ability to innovate. However, there’s research suggesting that RTO mandates aren’t beneficial to companies. A survey of 18,000 Americans released in March pointed to flexible work schedules helping mental health. And an analysis of 457 S&P 500 companies in February found RTO policies hurt employee morale and don’t increase company value.
https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/RTO.pdf
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DreamWorks Animation to Release MoonRay as Open Source
https://www.awn.com/news/dreamworks-animation-release-moonray-open-source
MoonRay is DreamWorks’ open-source, award-winning, state-of-the-art production MCRT renderer, which has been used on feature films such as How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World, Trolls World Tour, The Bad Guys, the upcoming Puss In Boots: The Last Wish, as well as future titles. MoonRay was developed at DreamWorks and is in continuous active development and includes an extensive library of production-tested, physically based materials, a USD Hydra render delegate, multi-machine and cloud rendering via the Arras distributed computation framework.
Note: it does not support osl and usd handling is limited. Cycles may still be a fair alternative.
EDIT
MoonRay review: DreamWorks Animations’ superb rendering software is free for all
A high-performance Monte Carlo ray tracer that’s capable of both DreamWorks’ trademark stylised look and photorealism.
It has all the required features for that setup, including Arbitrary Output Variables (AOVs), which allow data from a shader or renderer to be output during rendering to aid compositing. Additionally, Deep Output and Cryptomatte are supported.
With support for OptiX 7.6 and GPU render denoising with Open Image Denoise 2, MoonRay is able to deliver particularly impressive results, especially when working interactively.
MoonRay has moved to a hybrid CPU and GPU rendering mode for its default state. It’s called XPU, and in many ways combines the best of both types of rendering workflow.
VFX Reference Platform 2023 is probably the biggest addition because it enables the use of MoonRay directly in Nuke 15.
MoonRay has already achieved great success with an array of feature films. Now the renderer is open source, the CG world can expect to see a whole new swathe of MoonRay-powered animations.
For
- Features for VFX workflows
- Open source
- XPU rendering
Against
- Designed for big studios
- Steep learning curve
FEATURED POSTS
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Bennett Waisbren – ChatGPT 4 video generation
1. Rankin/Bass – That nostalgic stop-motion look like Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. Cozy and janky.
2. Don Bluth – Lavish hand-drawn fantasy. Lush lighting, expressive eyes, dramatic weight.
3. Fleischer Studios – 1930s rubber-hose style, like Betty Boop and Popeye. Surreal, bouncy, jazz-age energy.
4. Pixar – Clean, subtle facial animation, warm lighting, and impeccable shot composition.
5. Toei Animation (Classic Era) – Foundation of mainstream anime. Big eyes, clean lines, iconic nostalgia.
6. Cow and Chicken / Cartoon Network Gross-Out – Elastic, grotesque, hyper-exaggerated. Ugly-cute characters, zoom-ins on feet and meat, lowbrow chaos.
7. Max Fleischer’s Superman – Retro-futurist noir from the ’40s, bold shadows and heroic lighting.
8. Sylvain Chomet – French surrealist like The Triplets of Belleville. Slender, elongated, moody weirdness.
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Disney’s Moana Island Scene – Free data set
https://www.disneyanimation.com/resources/moana-island-scene/
This data set contains everything necessary to render a version of the Motunui island featured in the 2016 film Moana.
