May 31st, 2010
The process of 3D Animation is magical and obscure to the general public and often even some of our clients. This humorous video is an entertaining watch and goes a long to help explain the process.
The problem with 3D animation appearing so bewitching and almost anything being possible, is that people don’t understand certain 3D workflows can be extremely linear, and therefore certain things cannot be adjusted after the fact, without losing a great amount of work (this video is highly simplified, but it presents a few of these issues clearly).
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November 25th, 2009
Above: Bill Gates looking envious of Steve Jobs in Pirates of Silicon Valley movie . Today this situation is massively reversed, with Bill having much more money, and Microsoft still the undisputed leader in sales, and market share.
I recently watched the 1999 film, Pirates of Silicon Valley which is based around the creation of the personal computer. The plot is heavily focused on the rise of both Apple and Microsoft (and Xerox’s blunder) and the inspirational but flawed leaders, who set out to conquer the world with computers that are for everyone. The two main characters are of course Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. I thoroughly recommend this movie, even if your not a geek it’s worth seeing, because there is no other movie like it. Oh and by the way, the trailer online doesn’t do the movie justice, and has a number of scenes, that were not in the final movie.
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October 14th, 2009
- An interesting read about Curious Film, a leading New Zealand Production company, which uses Autodesk Flame for High profile NZ advertising (Such as Tui), from Autodesk Area.
- “Introducing the bra that is meant to be taken off” (Bra that doubles as two gas masks!) , article by CNet
- Photoshop Cs5 preview of fast new algorithms for image editing here. Also it seems Adobe are finally are going to redevelop the brush engine, to be more advanced like Corel Painter. Hopefully once this tech demo is implemented into Photoshop, there will a wide assorment of specific brushes, grouped into logical categories, like the excellent collection of brushes and tools found in Corel Painter. This last link shows off redeveloped healing brush, patch tool, and content aware filling.
- Full length Toy Story 3 trailer now available, looks great at 1080p
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September 18th, 2009
Above: Artist sketching using multi-touch, to zoom into details. Check out video here
Do you need to sketch on the move or jot some notes down, in a natural and unobtrusive way? Autodesk have just announced and released a mobile version (iPod Touch and iPhone) of their dedicated sketching software, Sketchbook Pro 2010. While the mobile version doesn’t feature all the features present in the desktop version, it still features a gesture based interface, layers, a variety of soft, and hard brushes, pencils, photo import, texture brushes, airbrushes, and custom colour palettes. Also the application is built around multi-touch, you can zoom, crop, rotate, etc with multiple fingers. Check out full feature list here. Or a video showing some of the features here. Keep on reading for my thoughts on the PC version, and why I think this application has something to do with the highly rumoured Apple Tablet.
Update: Check out this leaked concept video for Microsoft’s own tablet
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August 27th, 2009
Interactive learning tools are a very effective way to present complex ideas, in a directed but interactive manner. The user can instantly repeat or play a particular segment, and interact with the training at any time or place of their choice. Interactive Learning tools can be seen as another tool to enrich knowledge taught in more traditional methods, or even as a complete learning methodology.
Note: If above 3D module does not load please download Acrobat here, or download the file, by right clicking here and choose save to disk, then open it in Acrobat. On the Mac platform the latest Firefox version can have issues, so use Safari instead.
Which brings me to a discovery I have made recently, a workflow which enables 3D models to be presented in an alluring, accessible and interactive way. The PDF platform has a massive following, due to becoming the default way to distribute e-books and a multitude of documents. Modern PDF files allow hyper-linking, interactive buttons, video, embedded flash content, vector and raster graphics, 3D content, advanced security, interactive field data, and much more.
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August 24th, 2009
Far Cry was a technical marvel five years ago, coming from Crytek a fresh start-up company in Germany, the game stood out for its tropical island setting, breaking stereotypical industrial complexes, and hard surfaces present in most other first-person-shooting games. The player could see many kilometres (PC version especially, lack of RAM on consoles), the water was very realistic, and the player could use various vehicles, such as speed boats, hand gliders, trucks, etc. This mix proved hugely successful, and Far Cry become one of the top selling games of that year. The game run on the CryEngine (1.0), which was extremely fast at rendering indoor and outdoor environments, with realistic lighting. Let’s take a look at the evolution of the CryEngine up to the current version.
Oh and off topic, check out the much anticipated Avatar trailer here (get the full HD one!). Also check out Embassy’s work (Modelling,UV’s) with Luxology Modo on District 9 here at CGSociety, or a more general overview at VFXWorld.
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July 31st, 2009
With Siggraph 2009 only a matter of days away (August 3rd - August 7th, US Time) many digital artists will be salivating at the tasty thought of what developers have added to their favourite applications (well at least I am).
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July 8th, 2009
Even if you find the story absurd, devoid of character development, or find the acting laughable, nobody can deny the sheer mastery and quantity of visual effect in Tranformers 2. Personally I think they did a great job, remember this was a cartoon in the 80’s and its target audience was young kids. For some mind boggling facts regarding the production of Transformers 2, check out this page at Geek Tyrant. I have listed some of my favorite quotes below. After absorbing that crazy info, and if you have an interest in visual effects check out these links. CgSociety have got a good article covering Alice, the robot woman, and Reed Man, the super thin praying mantis robot. VFX World have also got a longer article, which covers the effects in a broader spectrum. Favourite Snippets from Geek Tyrant below.
If you rendered the entire movie on a modern home PC, you would have had to start the renders 16,000 years ago (when cave paintings like the Hall of Bulls were being made) to finish for this year’s premiere!
If you had all the gold ever mined in the history of man, you could build a little more than half of Devastator.
TF1 took 20 Terabytes of disk space. Trans2 took 145 Terabytes. Seven times bigger!
The pyramid destruction simulation was 8 times bigger than the old rigid simulation all-time record holder at ILM.
If all the texture maps on the show were printed on 1 square yard sheets, they would cover 13 football fields.
IMAX frame render times: As high as 72 hours per frame!
Can’t wait to see how crazy Transformers 3 will be, by that time who knows it might be fully in stereo (3D), then the IMAX render times would be 144 hours per visible frame. With stereo you need two slightly different camera views rendered and overlayed.
May 15th, 2009
Software doesn’t grow like a weed, it grows like human thoughts, because software is human thoughts. Humans aren’t always thinking what they are suppose to be thinking of though, they get side tracked or lose focus on the task at hand. That is why we as artists, the people who use software, must make sure the developers are in touch with all of their audience (not a small pool of beta developers). Otherwise after many years of development, your favourite piece of software could become an overgrown weed, ready to be pulled out by its roots.
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April 20th, 2009
Another gadget? I’m not an exclusive gadget blogger, but this thing is so damn cool, especially for people who have never seen a 3D mouse in action. I’ll let the pictures speak for themselves for a while, because I think it’s important to give a brief introduction about 3DConnexion and my experience with the Space Navigator; the low end 3D motion control solution. The main focus of the blog will be to point out the problems I experienced with the SpaceNavigator, so you know how excellent the new SpacePilot Pro is. Read the rest of this entry »