There’s a new kid on the block and its name is Pascal!

GPU rendering is a popular solution for significantly faster render speeds. We’re seeing a growing number of manufacturers develop solutions that harness GPU and the development team at Next Limit are riding that wave with Maxwell Render 4 - coming very soon.

Here at Escape Technology we’re deep into planning our next Creative Rooms event. We host it twice a year and this will be the fourth iteration. What’s exciting for us this time is that we’ve outgrown our old venue and have had to move.

The other week we at Escape Technology sent out a promotional email about Adobe Stock. Once upon a time I was one of those naive people that thought all stock imagery was a fallback option - the cheat’s answer to not having an image.

The arrival of September can only mean one thing (apart from the end of summer, the start of school, jacket weather and conkers): IBC is back. Mark Coleman and Dom Minall are travelling out from Soho to Amsterdam, while Neil Kalsi and Fabio Ticca are attending from the Escape Technology office in Munich.

Here at Escape Technology we've worked with many new studio start-ups and seen a great many of them enjoy success and rapid expansion. But with growth naturally comes growing pains and when studios increase their number of artists significantly - one of the most pressing areas becomes the central storage.

Virtual Reality has been the topic of the moment for quite some time now. 2016 has been touted as the year of VR but, all things considered, we have yet to see it really take off.

D3 returns from a summer break with a new venue on Friday 16 September. Escape Technology are sponsoring with Autodesk, so come down for a drink and a catch up. 

Bringing the conversation from SIGGRAPH to London, TechTalks is back and this year it’s even bigger. Taking over BAFTA for two nights, there’ll be presentations from the major studios and from our CTO Lee Danskin.

In my work here as creative lead at Escape Technology, I see a lot of different marketing campaigns from a wide variety of vendors and manufacturers. We genuinely believe in all the products we sell and the people we work with, but sometimes the creative just doesn’t match up.

Maxwell 4 is due for release next month. Buy a copy of Maxwell 3 today for 30% off, and get a free upgrade to V4 when it comes out in September. 

With Autodesk’s new subscription-based model you get the latest versions of programs including Maya and 3ds Max. Until October, you can trade in perpetual licenses of Autodesk software and get 50% off three-year subscriptions, including industry collections.

The immediate impact of Brexit on the financial markets has forced the major technology vendors to increase their sterling prices to keep them in line with prices in other currencies.

MARI is the Oscar-winning 3D painting tool, used by artists on a host of Oscar-winning films. And for 48 hours only, we’re selling new seats at a 40% discount.

Our friends at INK created the Guide to Computing, an intriguing insight into the dawn of computing that virtually preserves these analogue devices for the digital age.

As we expected, this year’s SIGGRAPH has been dominated by VR. But for me and Jason who are out there at the moment, there was one particularly major piece of news we were looking forward to – although it comes with a caveat.

It is with great sadness I announce that Richard McGuinness is moving on from his role at Escape Technology. Clearly only because Blackberry are stopping production of their Classic range of phones (Rich has been through so many and is distraught that production has halted. There are no replacements left out there, and he can’t function without one!)

Film collective Pallas Pictures have just released their new short TERGO, starring a powerfully emotive CG robot adrift in London. Director Charles Willcocks talked to us about how he used MARI to bring the lead character to life.

The Develop Conference is back in Brighton this July, showing off the latest in indie development and clever technology. We’re buying the drinks with Autodesk at Games by the Sea, the best party in town. 

HP has recently released the new Z Turbo Drive G2, showing impressive speed in comparison with SSDs and hard drives. This latest Z Turbo is also a trailblazer for new storage technology. Our Senior Systems Engineer Tim explains why.

It’s nearly that time again. And of course, with SIGGRAPH being the most important event in the VFX technology calendar (after Creative Rooms…) there’s nothing that could keep us away. Escape Technology’s Lee Danskin and Jason Jenner will be soaking up the indoor lights in Anaheim this July, so come and find us and our partners there.