First issue of 3DActive in this year brings new ZBrush series. In this new series our artists will be taking an animal and will show us how to turn it into a ferocious armored beast and how to add armor to it. In the first installment of this stunning series Bruno Camara will be showing us in great detail how he created his Armored lizard. 3Dactive 077 also brings a continue of Gavin Goulden’s steps in his fantastic Swordmaster series, where he will be showing us how to unwrap our low poly games model in a clean and efficient fashion. 

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has announced that 10 films remain in the running in the Visual Effects category for the 84th Academy Awards. All members of the Visual Effects Branch of the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences will view 10-minute excerpts from each of the 10 shortlisted films on January 19 and vote for five final nominees for the award. The 84th Academy Awards nominations will be announced on January 24, 2012.

Evermotion starts New Year with releasing another pack from their very popular series. Archmodels vol. 106 includes 50 highly detailed models of trees with textures, shaders and materials. The models are ready to use and you can immediately put them into your scene and render. This release also contains 3 cover scenes. There included with all models, materials, lighting and scene setup. All scenes are prepared for vray 1.5 with 3dsmax 2008. The collection is download only with size around 7,29GB in 110 files. A small gallery from the trees included in the pack is bellow together with information about the formats which are available in the collection.

This time we can look closer on VFX which was used in Twilight Saga Breaking Dawn Part 1 with Jeff Campbell. Jeff Campbell is a VFX Supervisor in Spin VFX. SPIN’s primary contribution on this film was to add the backgrounds to all the sound stage green screen windows on the main set of the Cullen House. With no actual glass in the windows of the set, many shots required the addition of room reflections or character reflections. They had to make 600 shots only in 3 month.