The 3DQUAKERS team is happy to annouce its newest training title for Softimage ICE, ICE FL...
Softimage 2012 was just announced at GDC. Following is a list of the new features.
ICE Tutorial: Animating with Bezier!
A nice ICE tutorial about non-simulated particles using the built in Bezier interpolation in Softimage 2011. Bradely Gabe presents us with a good tutorial on an alternative way to animate particles. This is particularly interesting for it provides added control since that particles are not simulated.
HDR Tutorial: Setting up Image Based Lighting
sIBL-GUI is a standalone Python application, available for Windows, Mac OSX and Linux. Instead of building hardcoded lighting setups, it uses the setup information from sIBL-sets to fill in setup templates. These templates a code snippets, written in your 3d app's native language and tailored for a particular renderer. For example, you'll find templates for Vray Domelight in Max, mental ray in XSI, or Turtle in Maya. The templates are pulled from an online repository, so you're always up to date. It's very easy to create new templates, even for new applications.
SlipstreamVX tutorial
Thiago Costa, a collaborator of Exocortex, put together this introductory tutorial of the SlipstreamVX real-time smoke and fire simulator.
Momentum tutorials
In this tutorial series, Momentum developer Helge Mathee introduces the basics of the Momentum Bullet-based physics engine inside Softimage.
emFlock tutorial
emFlock is a plugin for Softimage based on the ICE platform. In this tutorial, the author showcases the different aspects of this unique plugin.
Momentum 2 tutorial
This tutorial shows how to create floating text using Softimage and Momentum 2
Avatar costs 500 Million USD
You'd have to say that the New York Times' Michael Cieply is a pretty crafty reporter. He knew that the best way to get us to read a sober, intricately detailed financial analysis of 20th Century Fox's economic involvement in "Avatar" was to stick something in the lede that would grab our attention -- like the news that the movie's price tag was approaching $500 million.
Download the beta version of the Thea Render SoftImage plugin.Pixar Point Based Occlusion
A brand new technology for creating CGI effects that has already made a big impact on feature film production. It is called point-based rendering, and this powerful technique makes creating global illumination effects for feature film far more practical and efficient than before. In fact, this year the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences awarded the creators of this innovation, Per Christensen, Michael Bunnell and Christophe Hery, with a Scientific and Engineering Academy award.
The History of 3D Studio
An interview with Gary Yost of the Yost Group, the original developers of 3DS MAX, discussing how the software came about from the DOS version, and his current view of the 3D industry as a whole.
studioNEST's Melena is a hair styling and simulation framework based on the Autodesk Softimage ICE platform. Its toolset features various hair generation tools, effects as well as custom simulation nodes and forces. By supporting lattices for styling as well as for simulation Melena enables artists to create directable simulations. Melena has been used in production for creating the stylized hair for the No Pets Allowed project that we are working on, and is now released under GPL for download.. 
The standalone mental ray 3.8 is fully equipped with numerous powerful features such as Iray rendering mode; stereoscopic rendering; IBL mode, etc. However, while some of these new features are not yet fully integrated with 3ds Max, and others are only available via the command line or via plug-ins such as ctrl_ghost_settings.
ET_AnimStore is plug-in that allows you to store poses for a character and use them at a later time in Softimage, by Eric Thivierge. The author is also looking for feedback for future development.