Chris Covelli recently posted at the si-community forums about his new Softimage autorigger, which is in beta.
Not only is it an auto-rig for rigging components but it also provides and then manipulates a base mesh for the character. It's an extremely promising plugin.
O2 will be offering 4 new phones in April: the HTC Desire S, Sony Experia Arc and the Sony Experia Play, which is notable for it's Playstation-centric store/interface plus a slding gamepad featuring analog and digital joysticks. Could be quite popular. There is also a tablet on its way.
T-Mobile have announced the imminent arrival of the LG Optimus Black to their network. A nice looking and very slim Android phone but single core only.
Vodafone has the largest selection of coming soon Android phones at time of writing this article:-
Samsung Galaxy S II - sequel to the highest selling Android phone to date - the Samsung Galaxy S.
HTC Desire S - arguably the most popular model from HTC gets a refresh. HTC has the most disappointing 2011 smartphone lineup of all the big players, due to their contract with Qualcomm. Qualcomm is taking it's time bringing its own dual core mobile CPU to market, so no HTC phones announced at Mobile World Congress feature a dual CPU. However, Qualcomm's MSM8660 has two Scorpion cores clocked at 1.2GHz and the Adreno 220 GPU so they could end up having the last laugh. Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 - the honeycomb tablet from Samsung.
The Sony Experia Play , Arc and Neo -which the full complement of new Sony Android phones.
Samsung Nexus S (available now from Carphone Warehouse. )
Three is, at time of writing, the only carrier offering the LG Optimus 3d, which recieved some stunning benchmark results over at Anandtech. Set to arrive in June.
The OMAP4 / SGX 540 seems to be the dual CPU/GPU combination to beat right now.
UPDATED: 4th March 2010 - Nothing of note has appeared on Orange's website as yet, so I can't report anything in regards to what they will have on offer later in the year. Suffice to say that as of yet, the Motorola Atrix 4G has not been announced for any UK network yet.
Stonetrip's Shiva3D engine can create stereoscopic 3D games optimised for Texas Instruments OMAP 4 platform for mobile devices. This demo, first shown at Mobile World Congress, 14-17 February 2011, shows Convergence.
If you've any doubt about Omap4's performance check out the benchmarks recently posted by Anandtech.
Paul Smith has recently uploaded several very informative ICE tutorials, further expanding peoples understanding of just how flexible and near-all encompassing ICE is for solving general 3d problems. Here's a couple of notable ones:
Mark Schoennagel of Autodesk shows off a sneak peek of a beta version of Arnold, rendering insanely fast inside of Softimage. 3,200,000 spheres rendered with an ambient occlusion shader in mere seconds.
I don't know which is more impressive, the near instant arnold rendering or the 3 million spheres simulated with Lagoa.
