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).
The Foundry, developers of Nuke, have purchased Mari from Weta. Mari is an extremely scalable painting application, including highly complex deforming meshes, that was built in tandem with the production of Avatar, and allowed the dense world to be realised. Interestingly Weta will still develop features for this product, so the two builds will continually merge at given dates. The Foundry know how to build products, by jump starting development by purchasing them after being rigorously developed and tuned on full scale Hollywood blockbuster films. Nuke was originally created by Digital Domain and used on many of their films in the 90s, and in the last decade. Mari is targeted for public release on Windows and Linux 64bit platforms. Article byCGSociety here, and video interview by fxPhd here.
Google enters a new market, the home media box, as a new front against competitors with products such as Apple TV, Tivo, Windows Media Center, and many others. Google’s main differentiating aspect to their product, is their expertise with search and vast video libraries.
Here is some interesting research by Alias-Wavefront (now owned by Autodesk) from the late nineties. The Boom Chameleon running Maya software, is a motion capture device with screen. This could be recreated in a much more portable way these days, if a light version of Maya were created for the iPad, or similar device. The iPad could be used on movie sets, to check out virtual sets, and make simplistic layout changes. This would be a very inexpensive way for many different departments to check out a set before it is built, or fully developed as a virtual set. More Boom Chameleon here and here.
Recently I have seen Bill Buxton (in the previous Alias Videos ) pop up in some Microsoft research demo’s, regarding natural user interfaces, this guy is a genius and a brilliant speaker. I wonder when the public is going to see a mainstream product from Microsoft to show the results of their research. Microsoft have great tech, they just aren’t very quick at turning it into commercial products.
Project Natal is looking good (CES 2010 Video here, and here), but come on Microsoft when are you going to give it a real name (Project Birth), not a code name? Playstation Move is the perfect name for Sony’s motion control device - the name is important. Playstation Move preview here and excellent development diary here.
Microsoft Office Labs 2019 Vision Montage
This is very cool and most of the technology is quite probable at some point.
Microsoft Project Gutav is another Microsoft Research group experimenting with advanced painting software. Hopefully one day available in a portable tablet! If your interested in Microsoft’s other natural input technologies, Microsoft Surface is worth checking out - a large multi-touch, multi-person surface designed for large commercial clients. Though much of Microsoft’s Surface technology could also be directly applicable to a portable tablet.
Oh and if anyone thinks Microsoft copied Apple regarding touch based interfaces, research has been on going world wide for decades by many companies. Besides Microsoft actually released Microsoft Surface one month before the iPhone, Apple’s first touch device. The first iteration of MS Surface had all the same functionality and more as the iPhone, regarding touch control interface innovations - Microsoft just focused on the business market. Also Microsoft have fully implemented touch interaction natively in Windows 7, with OSX currently having no touch support.
Talking about future technology, here is the Playstation 9 preview video - yep pretty extreme.
What’s the biggest video game development blunder ever? Duke Nukem Forever and it’s nightmarish production. This article explains in a detailed chronological manner, what went so wrong, leading to a twelve year development cycle, and the eventual demise of 3D Realms - a great lesson in how not to make a game.
Marc Petit, Senior Vice President of the Media and Entertainment Division of Autodesk gives a tour of the Toronto office where Autodesk Maya, Mudbox, Alias and Sketchbook are created. Also for Max, Softimage, and Motion Builder users, here is a video glimpse of the Montreal office - which was once a ship building warehouse!
Wickedly realistic Porsche commercial, celebrating Porsche’s 60th Anniversary, showing a family tree of cars. SideFX Houdini used for rendering, effects, and car rigging. Traditionally Houdini has been a weak modelling application, because of it’s procedural workflow being cumbersome, and lack of specialist modelling tools - so It would be interesting to know if Houdini was used for modelling.
Do you want to know how a 2D film can be converted into 3D film, like Alice in Wonderland? Or just curious about 3D films in general? Here is an overview of the process. “In any case, not every 3-D director agrees that conversion works just as well. James Cameron, for one, has criticized Tim Burton for using this approach in his upcoming feature, Alice in Wonderland: “It doesn’t make any sense to shoot in 2-D and convert to 3-D.”
The competition between Microsoft and Apple has entered a new era, Apple’s market value exceeds Microsoft ’s slightly for the first time - with Google trailing not a insurmountable distance behind. Intriguing given the fact Microsoft makes more revenue(x1.5) and profit (x3) than Apple. Market value represents shareholders perception on the company’s potential. Hopefully Apple keeps delivering, otherwise market value (share price) decreases. Competitors like Microsoft have time to react, and spend up large on innovation using larger built up cash reserves. Microsoft has fantastic research teams, producing amazing technologies they just need to focus on building products that encapsulate these. Great news for consumers, everything in the computer world will speed up a bit more…
See graph below for revenue comparisons, interesting Sony makes a lot of revenue…I bet that doesn’t equate to the most profit - televisions and electrical equipment must cost a lot to build, unlike replicating software. Also worth noting that with Windows 7 released this year, Microsoft will see a nice bump back up to higher revenue this year. Windows 7 has become the fastest selling operating system of all time.
Oh and poor Steve Jobs (in relation to Bill Gates) misses his chance to make 10 billion dollars.
“Trouble in the Boom Times”, an enlightening overview of the nature of business and competition amongst Hollywood visual effects studios - a very rare article for the mainstream media to cover. Lee Stranham, a writer for The Huffington Post, and experienced production artist for feature films, has written an open letter to James Cameron regarding these issues and more, in an endeavour to broaden the awareness.
Also worth noting, since both these articles don’t mention it, is that it is very common in Hollywood films for many artists and even entire effects houses to be missing from the credits - there is a predefined number of artist’s allowed in the credits. Apparently having too many artist’s makes the film reel longer, and therefore more expensive. Yet because of unions even coffee runners and helpers legally must be in the credits.
20 years of Photoshop, an article explaining the creation and development of Photoshop, up to present day.
The History of 3D Studio Max for the 20th anniversary of Max.
For visual effects artists, this will be of interest - Maya 2011 has been out for a month or so. Mac users finally got some love from Autodesk with a 64 bit version, though predictably the word is that the Mac version is more buggy than the Windows version. The most significant new feature is a complete rebuild of the interface (on Mac, PC, and Linux) around the Nokia QT framework . Maya 2011 is a huge upgrade, probably the biggest since Maya 7, or even earlier versions.
This release has improvements in assets, skinning, rigging, fluids, nParticles, modelling, performance, script highlighting , auto completion, multithreading, new hypershade and colour picker design, and countless small additions and refinements. For a full list of these changes click here, and for a review click here. The main Maya homepage shows a very sparse overview of new features. I think Autodesk feel content enough with Maya still being the industry standard for visual effects, that they don’t bother putting much effort in showing off all their new features like other smaller companies, such as Luxology Modo, SideFX Houdini and Maxon Cinema 4D.
Smoke 2010 has been released from the grip of proprietary expensive hardware, and is now available on the Mac platform - though in comparison to After Effects, this is still an expensive application! Smoke is an editing and finishing application with excellent tool sets for colour correction, 3D compositing, 3D type, keying, and effects.
