BREAKING NEWS
LATEST POSTS
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President Trump Says He Will Implement 100% Tariffs on Films Produced Outside the U.S.
https://variety.com/2025/film/news/trump-tariff-foreign-film-national-security-1236386566
Jon Voight has presented his Hollywood rescue plan…
While President Trump dropped his 100% foreign film tariff bombshell over the weekend, Oscar-winner Jon Voight was already at Mar-a-Lago pitching his industry revival plan. The presidential “Hollywood ambassador” has been making the rounds with unions, studios, and officials to craft his proposal—and now we’ve got the details:
•For filmmakers, Voight proposes stackable federal tax credits (10-20%) on top of existing state incentives. His plan would expand Section 181 provisions, allowing producers to write off 100% of costs in the first year. Instead of blanket tariffs, he suggests targeted penalties of 120% on productions that could have filmed in America but chose foreign locations just for tax incentives.
•For infrastructure, the plan includes tax credits for building or renovating theaters, studios, and post-production facilities. It would create job training programs to ensure Americans have skills for high-paying industry positions, with special emphasis on developing production capabilities in heartland states.
•For streaming platforms, Voight wants to revive regulations that once prevented networks from owning the shows they aired. Streamers would need to pay producers premiums (25-40% of production costs) for exclusive licenses, return more ownership rights after license periods end, and share copyrights 50/50 with content creators.
•For international work, the plan proposes co-production treaties with countries like the UK to enable collaboration without triggering tariffs. It includes exemptions from penalties for legitimate international partnerships that truly require foreign locations. -
Vulkan Gaussian Splatting – Real-Time GPU-Accelerated Gaussian Splatting with NVIDIA DesignWorks Sample vk_gaussian_splatting
https://github.com/nvpro-samples/vk_gaussian_splatting
vk_gaussian_splatting is a new Vulkan-based sample that demonstrates real-time Gaussian splatting, a cutting-edge volume rendering technique that enables highly efficient representations of radiance fields. It is the latest addition to the NVIDIA DesignWorks Samples.
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Foundry Nuke W_hotbox – A fully customisable ‘favourites menu’
https://www.nukepedia.com/python/ui/w_hotbox
W_hotbox is basically a fully customisable ‘favourites menu’ that pops up for as long as you press the shortcut and disappears as soon as you release. The buttons that make up the menu represent python scripts and change depending on you selection. The ‘Hotbox Manager’ offers you an user friendly interface which allows you to add new buttons on the fly. Those buttons are directly accessible via buttons that appear in the menu under your cursor.
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Yasuharu YOSHIZAWA – Comparison of sRGB vs ACREScg in Nuke
Answering the question that is often asked, “Do I need to use ACEScg to display an sRGB monitor in the end?” (Demonstration shown at an in-house seminar)
Comparison of scanlineRender output with extreme color lights on color charts with sRGB/ACREScg in color – OCIO -working space in NukeDownload the Nuke script:
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TED 2025 Rob Bredow – Artist-Driven Innovation in the Age of AI
https://robbredow.com/2025/05/ted-artist-driven-innovation/
https://www.ted.com/talks/rob_bredow_star_wars_changed_visual_effects_ai_is_doing_it_again
Rob Bredow speaks at SESSION 3 at TED 2025: Humanity Reimagined. April 7-11, 2025, Vancouver, BC. Photo: Gilberto Tadday / TED -
Chongqing the world’s largest city in pictures
https://www.theguardian.com/world/gallery/2025/apr/27/chongqing-the-worlds-largest-city-in-pictures
The largest city in the world is as big as Austria, but few people have ever heard of it. The megacity of 34 million people in central of China is the emblem of the fastest urban revolution on the planet.
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Fluent 4.0 released for Blender hard surface modeler
Beyond the boolean support, this add-on also provides cloth panel, grid, head screw, wire and pipe tool.
https://cgthoughts.gumroad.com/
https://superhivemarket.com/creators/cg-thoughts?ref=82
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Arto T. – A workflow for creating photorealistic, equirectangular 360° panoramas in ComfyUI using Flux
https://civitai.com/models/735980/flux-equirectangular-360-panorama
https://civitai.com/models/745010?modelVersionId=833115
The trigger phrase is “equirectangular 360 degree panorama”. I would avoid saying “spherical projection” since that tends to result in non-equirectangular spherical images.
Image resolution should always be a 2:1 aspect ratio. 1024 x 512 or 1408 x 704 work quite well and were used in the training data. 2048 x 1024 also works.
I suggest using a weight of 0.5 – 1.5. If you are having issues with the image generating too flat instead of having the necessary spherical distortion, try increasing the weight above 1, though this could negatively impact small details of the image. For Flux guidance, I recommend a value of about 2.5 for realistic scenes.
8-bit output at the moment
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Scientists claim to have discovered ‘new colour’ no one has seen before: Olo
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/clyq0n3em41o
By stimulating specific cells in the retina, the participants claim to have witnessed a blue-green colour that scientists have called “olo”, but some experts have said the existence of a new colour is “open to argument”.
The findings, published in the journal Science Advances on Friday, have been described by the study’s co-author, Prof Ren Ng from the University of California, as “remarkable”.
(A) System inputs. (i) Retina map of 103 cone cells preclassified by spectral type (7). (ii) Target visual percept (here, a video of a child, see movie S1 at 1:04). (iii) Infrared cellular-scale imaging of the retina with 60-frames-per-second rolling shutter. Fixational eye movement is visible over the three frames shown.
(B) System outputs. (iv) Real-time per-cone target activation levels to reproduce the target percept, computed by: extracting eye motion from the input video relative to the retina map; identifying the spectral type of every cone in the field of view; computing the per-cone activation the target percept would have produced. (v) Intensities of visible-wavelength 488-nm laser microdoses at each cone required to achieve its target activation level.
(C) Infrared imaging and visible-wavelength stimulation are physically accomplished in a raster scan across the retinal region using AOSLO. By modulating the visible-wavelength beam’s intensity, the laser microdoses shown in (v) are delivered. Drawing adapted with permission [Harmening and Sincich (54)].
(D) Examples of target percepts with corresponding cone activations and laser microdoses, ranging from colored squares to complex imagery. Teal-striped regions represent the color “olo” of stimulating only M cones.
FEATURED POSTS
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VFX pipeline – Render Wall Farm management topics
1: Introduction Title: Managing a VFX Facility’s Render Wall
- Briefly introduce the importance of managing a VFX facility’s render wall.
- Highlight how efficient management contributes to project timelines and overall productivity.
2: Daily Overview Title: Daily Management Routine
- Monitor Queues: Begin each day by reviewing render queues to assess workload and priorities.
- Resource Allocation: Allocate resources based on project demands and available hardware.
- Job Prioritization: Set rendering priorities according to project deadlines and importance.
- Queue Optimization: Adjust queue settings to maximize rendering efficiency.
3: Resource Allocation Title: Efficient Resource Management
- Hardware Utilization: Distribute rendering tasks across available machines for optimal resource usage.
- Balance Workloads: Avoid overloading specific machines while others remain underutilized.
- Consider Off-Peak Times: Schedule resource-intensive tasks during off-peak hours to enhance overall performance.
4: Job Prioritization Title: Prioritizing Rendering Tasks
- Deadline Sensitivity: Give higher priority to tasks with imminent deadlines to ensure timely delivery.
- Critical Shots: Identify shots crucial to the project’s narrative or visual impact for prioritization.
- Dependent Shots: Sequence shots that depend on others should be prioritized together.
5: Queue Optimization and Reporting Title: Streamlining Render Queues
- Dependency Management: Set up dependencies to ensure shots are rendered in the correct order.
- Error Handling: Implement automated error detection and requeueing mechanisms.
- Progress Tracking: Regularly monitor rendering progress and update stakeholders.
- Data Management: Archive completed renders and remove redundant data to free up storage.
- Reporting: Provide daily reports on rendering status, resource usage, and potential bottlenecks.
6: Conclusion Title: Enhancing VFX Workflow
- Effective management of a VFX facility’s render wall is essential for project success.
- Daily monitoring, resource allocation, job prioritization, queue optimization, and reporting are key components.
- A well-managed render wall ensures efficient production, timely delivery, and overall project success.
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Zibra.AI – Real-Time Volumetric Effects in Virtual Production. Now free for Indies!
A New Era for Volumetrics
For a long time, volumetric visual effects were viable only in high-end offline VFX workflows. Large data footprints and poor real-time rendering performance limited their use: most teams simply avoided volumetrics altogether. It’s similar to the early days of online video: limited computational power and low network bandwidth made video content hard to share or stream. Today, of course, we can’t imagine the internet without it, and we believe volumetrics are on a similar path.
With advanced data compression and real-time, GPU-driven decompression, anyone can now bring CGI-class visual effects into Unreal Engine.
From now on, it’s completely free for individual creators!
What it means for you?
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