3D News World: 2010

Friday, July 23, 2010

Southpaw to unveil new Digital Asset Management Solution, TACTIC 3.0, at SIGGRAPH 2010.

Southpaw Technology will unveil TACTIC 3.0 at SIGGRAPH 2010. The new version will provide studios with a more open, flexible solution for speeding the creation of digital assets across highly complex digital productions, like those found in feature film, visual effects, animation, and cinematics.

Autodesk has bought Illuminate Labs, a privately held maker of lighting technology for game development. Illuminate Labs' Beast middleware solution and Turtle plug-in for Autodesk Maya software enable faster iteration on a game's creative intent, and more realistic in-game lighting. Terms of the transaction were not disclosed.

The Gnomon School of Visual Effects, has revealed that it is partnering with the family of the late character creator and effects visionary, Stan Winston, to establish the Stan Winston School of Character Arts.

Autodesk Showcase 3D Design Visualization Competition

Are You a 3D Star? Time to Showcase Your Talent

Here at Autodesk, we all love to see see great 3D design and visualization work produced by talented individuals on the web. In fact, we love it so much, that we wantYOU to help us share it with the world – right here on our blog.

Nuke Shading and Lighting FX

Mackevision announces release of Picture Shooter, an online, photo-real, virtual-product ''photography'' service.

https://ps.mackevision.de/picture_shooter_demo/

Shave and a Haircut 5.5

Now Available for Maya 2009 2010 2011/ 32/64 Bit Linux / 32/64 Bit Windows and OSX 32/64

We currently support Mentalray, RMS, and Vray for Maya (NEW)
we also support dozens of renderman workalikes

300, Barnyard, Charlie's Angels II, Charlottes Web, Dr. Who, Dream Keepers, Exorcist: The Beginning, Halflife 2, Hellboy, Harry Potter and the Order of the Pheonix, Into The West, The Exorcism of Emily Rose, King Kong, Moon Girl, Pirates of the Caribbean : World's End, Sin City, Space Chimps, Superman Returns, The Magic Roundabout, Ultraviolet, Underworld Evolutions, When Animals Attack, XMEN-2

"Overall, Shave and a Haircut 4 has been vastly improved and kicks Maya Fur in the metaphorical groin"

The official SIGGRAPH 2010 application provides a complete schedule of SIGGRAPH 2010 programs and events, plus all the detailed information you need to plan your week, day, or next hour at the conference: speakers, topics, locations, date, time, Computer Animation Festival screenings, exhibitor data, and more.

SIGGRAPH Parties

The Unofficial CGTalk Meetup

Sunday July 25th, 6:30pm

Westin Bonaventure.

Bona Vista Room

The most unofficial get-together of them all.

No freebies but lots of people.

The Foundry has entered into a unique relationship with Walt Disney Animation Studios to advance 3D texture painting techniques announced Bill Collis, CEO, The Foundry.

SuperMesher is a 3DSMax plugin that allows you to cache animated geometry regardless of its topology and number of objects including pFlow particles. The cache is baked out to a separate file which can be loaded into any version of MAX 2009 or higher. No reference is held to the original objects so they can be deleted or modified without consequence. Because the result is one single mesh, SuperMesher automatically generates appropriate material IDs and Multi-Sub materials.

The plugin is available in both 32bit and 64bit versions for MAX 2009, 2010 and 2011.

SeaWorld

Fusion CI Studios adopts Prime Focus Software's Krakatoa for SeaWorld TVC VFX.

In a new SeaWorld commercial, a young girl’s finger reaches toward the screen and, breaking the fourth wall, skims the liquid surface as beautiful ink-in-water effects ripple. The viewer is suddenly brought into a magical oceanic world where dolphins dance, elaborately costumed performers fly and birds sweep across the screen. Each of their motions are met with a flurry of colorful inky swirls, created by Los Angeles’ Fusion CI Studios using Prime Focus Software’s high-volume particle renderer, Krakatoa.

Win an Autodesk Entertainment Creation Suite with 3DWorld in their latest contest.

Win an Autodesk Entertainment Creation Suite

Send us an original piece of artwork, that hasn't previously won any competitions or awards, to win a copy of Autodesk’s Entertainment Creation Suite

This issue, 3D World and Autodesk are offering you the chance to win a copy of either the 3ds Max or Maya version of Autodesk’s Entertainment Creation Suite, worth $4,995 (£4,600). All you have to do is send us an original piece of work that’s worthy of being showcased at Autodesk’s 3December event in London at the end of the year, where the winner will be announced.

Video Interview with Bob Whitehill – Stereoscopic Supervisor on Toy Story 3

You may remember back in March, along with a group of other awesome bloggers and YouTubers from around the world, I got to visit Pixar, see a very early screening of Toy Story 3 and the short that sits before it, Day and Night and meet the creators of the phenomenal movie that is released in UK cinemas this Monday, 19th July. It’s been a long time coming but I can now finally show you the interviews that I collected while I was there. Over the next few days, I’ll be posting videos from the archives and interviews with Pixar Achivist, Christine Freeman, Stereoscopic Supervisor, Bob Whitehill, Supervising Animators, Bobby Podesta and Mike Venturini, Production Designer, Bob Pauley and the Director and Producer of Toy Story 3, Lee Unkrich and Darla K. Anderson.

SIGGRAPH 2010 Cheat Sheet

SIGGRAPH promises production sessions, best CG short films, technology, and, of course, product demos galore.

The exhibition floor opens Tuesday morning and runs through Thursday afternoon. Look for announcements from all the major vendors in the days leading up to the show, and get hands-on experience at the show.

As Masson says. You have to go to get the hands-on, face to face experience. If you are short on coins, you can buy a one-day basic pass for only US$45 or a one-day computer animation festival pass for $50. Check the cheat sheet to pick your day/s. Meanwhile, here’s the rest of the 'damage.'

Paramount Pictures' latest film, 'The Last Airbender,' features extraordinary battle visual effects created by Industrial Light & Magic, with the help of NVIDIA Quadro pro graphics technology.

'The Last Airbender', released on July 2, features dramatic sequences in which characters are empowered to harness the four ancient elements of fire, air, water and earth and manipulate them as weapons in battle. Giant fireballs, tendrils of water, walls of earth and overwhelming air blasts are a few of the digital simulations created by ILM as part of the film's 485 visual-effects shots resulting in over an hour of screen time.

Di-O-Matic uncovers next-generation 3D facial animation solution, Maskarad.

Automatic markerless facial performance capture software for Windows

Teaser

Intro to Maskarad

Whether you're creating games, or producing animation for TV or film, Maskarad lets you easily create expressive, realistic facial animations from video. In fact, Maskarad automatically converts the details and nuances of an actor’s video to animation data ready to be used in your favorite 3D package to easily animate your own character rig.

ZBrush 4 announced for Windows And Mac OSX

Z4 on 8-9-10

ZBrush 4
Windows and Mac
LAUNCH DATE 8-9-10

Also included:
Updated versions of all major plugins, and GoZBrush support
for Modo, Cinema 4D, 3DSMax and Maya for Windows and Mac systems.

Many film studios are trying to cash in on moviegoers' craving for 3D films. However, many studios are "faking it" by converting 2D films into 3D post-production. Worse, the studios are not being upfront in their advertising, with some people feeling ripped-off after paying extra fees for the "3D Experience."

SIGGRAPH Technical Papers

One of the best things about SIGGRAPH is the sense, rightfully so, that you can discover the next new things in computer graphics, the trend, the technology that will become part of our lives in a few short years. This is most evident in the prestigious Technical Papers sessions.

Southpaw Tech. works its DAM solution, Tactic alongside The Foundry's Nuke compositing app.

Southpaw Technology will bring its DAM solution, Tactic and The Foundry’s compositing application, Nuke closer together. The integration will improve the workflow for compositors working with Nuke by alleviating many of the mundane tasks associated with file management.

Screenwriter William Goldman once famously declared that the most important fact of life in Hollywood is that “nobody knows anything.”

Eat3D DVD

In this DVD instructor Adam Schuman walks you through the entire process of constructing a low resolution character worthy of any "next-generation" game. Follow him as he shows you his techniques in exporting the high-res model from ZBrush, reconstructing the low-res meshes, creating the UV's for all of the meshes, baking out all of the maps (3ds Max and xNormal), creating all of the textures, using real-time viewport shaders, and rendering out the final for your portfolio. This DVD is geared to improve your workflow by helping you understand what is expected of professionals in the field today.

Framestore CFC teamed up with Nokia for a Vfx competition.

VFX ARTISTS INVITED TO CREATE EFFECT FOR

FRAMESTORE AND NOKIA'S NEW APP

London-based VFX house Framestore and Nokia have launched a competition inviting amateur animators and VFX enthusiasts to contribute ideas for a new special effect for their new project, FX Studio.

FX Studio is a mobile and web-based application that allows people to add a range of Hollywood-quality special effects to their home movies. Using 3D marker technology and external rendering processes, the application is poised to deliver startling results. It follows Framestore's Pocket VFX app for the iPhone.

FX Studio will feature a number of effects from a range of film genres. Entrants to the competition have been asked to submit an idea for the final Sci-Fi special effect, which will feature on both the web and mobile versions of the FX Studio application.

SIGGRAPH Dailies!

The Studio

Also returning to SIGGRAPH this year, bigger and better than ever is The Studio, once known as the 'Gorilla Studio.' The Studio, the Art Gallery – which features haptics devices this year – and Emerging Technologies, are all in one large open space. “We got the chairs of these three hand-on areas together to create an integrated experience,” Masson says. “They are all doing fantastic things.”

ILM's Elements for The Last Airbender

or The Last Airbender, director M. Night Shyamalan turned to Industrial Light & Magic to create dynamic fighting scenes featuring elemental manipulation, as well as complex creatures and environments for the film. VFX supe Pablo Helman and associate VFX supervisor Craig Hammack take us through some of ILM's main technical challenges.

Creating 3D fire and other earthly elements

In the world of Airbender, each nation controls an element - Water, Air, Earth and Fire - under the supervision of the Avatar. When the Fire Nation seeks world domination, Young Avatar Aang, who can control all four elements, is charged with restoring the peace. Fire, in particular, was one of the elements ILM tackled early on, drawing on its previous work for Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. "What we found in that movie," noted visual effects supervisor Pablo Helman, "was that the fire looked great, but it was only projected onto 3D cards. ForAirbender we needed a real 3D volume fire. The fire events are coming towards camera and the camera was also moving around so much that we would need to be going through the volume itself."

COURSE OVERVIEW

This workshop is an updated version of Jon’s previous Modern Game Character Creation workshop. Updates include; full figure massing, hair sculpting, streamlined baking process, introduction and instruction with Topogun (students get a 20% discount per license), and an introduction to the Marmoset real-time viewing app. Jon will take you under the hood of the 'character art hot rod' and guide you through the 'ins & outs' of successfully creating video game characters within a studio mind-set. Through this intense eight-week class, students will learn by doing! Not only will you learn the successive phases of character creation based on a simulated game studio pipeline, you will also have your own unique creation to show off as part of your folio.

Optical Virtual Camera System brings live-action camera Work for CG filmmaking at a lower price, compatible with all Optical Motion Capture Systems.

James Cameron revolutionized digital cinematography with his innovative control of the virtual camera using motion capture. This 'Virtual Verite' technology is now being offered for a fraction of the cost, with OptiTrack's Insight VCS.

SIGGRAPH in LA

Now that SIGGRAPH is less than two weeks away, it’s time to pull out that slick little mobile digital calendar and get ready to meet, greet, learn, play, buy, sell and party at the biggest computer graphics conference in the world. This year, the legendary show lands in Los Angeles, home of Hollywood, digital multi-mega-media, games, aerospace engineering, and all things weird and wacky. And that means even more connections than usual for people involved in or interested in digital art, media and entertainment.

LOS ANGELES — The visual-effects category has gotten an upgrade at the next Academy Awards ceremony.

The board of governors for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences increased the number of nominees to five, up from three, at the 83rd awards show next Feb. 27.

The switch brings more awards attention to visual effects, which play a bigger role in Hollywood blockbusters as digital-animation technology continues to advance.

Since 1996, the visual-effects category has featured only three nominees, including last year's winner, the science-fiction blockbuster "Avatar."

Anyone who has ever told a story to a group of children knows it's the good, well-behaved ones who always sit up front and listen attentively, beatific smiles on their faces.

But at least one new animation company is telling tales for the spitball-throwing troublemakers in the back row.

Despicable Me, a comedy with a super-villain as the leading man, opens Friday and is the first film from Illumination Entertainment, a Universal Picturescompany founded by former Fox animation chief Chris Meledandri (Ice Age, Robots).

Shut Up Fool, This is the A-team!

Director Joe Carnahan's re-imagining of the popular 1980s TV series The A-Team sees the renegade soldiers taking on a more modern mission. Overall visual effects supervisor James E. Price looked to both practical and digital means to achieve the characteristically crazy and high action stunts made famous by the series. We drill down on some of the major FX sequences from the film.

Meet the A-Team

An early sequence shows Hannibal (Liam Neeson) and B.A. Baracus (Quinton Jackson) coming to the rescue of Face (Bradley Cooper) with the aid of the iconic GMC Vandura. Shots of the van launching were achieved by special effects supervisor Mike Vezina. "The director wanted the van to be quite iconic and come up almost like the rising sun and be backlit. So we dug in a 30 foot ramp that we could adjust in height and then used a very powerful 10 foot ratchet to get the speed of the van from 0 to 45 km/h. As it lands, the stunt guy took over and slid the van out."

After recruiting helicopter pilot Murdoch (Sharlto Copley), the A-Team is then pursued in a dramatic helicopter

Jellyfish Transitions for History Channel

America: The Story of Us is one of the History Channel's most popular series, telling the story of how the United States was invented. To help showcase many years of history in only a 12 part series, Jellyfish Pictures realised several sweeping 'transition' shots to link stories together. We talk to Jellyfish creative director Phil Dobree and visual effects supervisor Hasraf Dulull.

fxg: What was the overall philosophy behind the narrative device of these sweeping transition shots?

Phil Dobree: This show is quite different to anything we've been asked to do before. What the TV documentary guys are trying to do is find a new way of showcasing history. They're trying to get away from doing the doco-drama approach, which can sometimes have cheesy historical reconstructions with lots of commentary. In this series there was a mixture between talking heads with celebrities. They're trying to give some more mass appeal. Then they would take these very key moments in the history of the US and link them. The technique we had to come up with was to take the story and link it to the next story. You've got these global views that involve traveling across the country in time and space to the next story.

The reason they came to us, I think, was that we've got a good reputation for coming up with creative solutions to those tricky problems. We just don't take visual effects shots and deliver them - we've have quite a lot of say in the whole creative approach. They didn't really the budget to do these sequences entirely photoreal. It just wouldn't have been feasible to go from big close-ups to these wide travelling shots to global views and back up and down again. So we came up with some creative solutions and ways of doing those shots in a more stylised look.

fxg: Can you give me an example of one of the transition shots?

Isaac Kerlow is the SIGGRAPH 2010 Computer Animation Festival Director. He hails from The Earth Observatory of Singapore/NTU ADM.

"The 2010 Computer Animation Festival continues the tradition of showcasing the best in computer animation and visual effects," says Kerlow. "This year we have formalized the submission categories to bring the Computer Animation Festival more in line with other top international film festivals and to make the jury process a bit easier. We have a Student Projects category, for example, among the new submission categories, so that computer-animated works produced to satisfy a school, coursework, and/or graduation requirement are to be submitted under this category."

Image Metrics has acquired avatar technology company Character-FX, founded by 3D animation pioneer John Riggs.

Character-FX is an integrated facial rigging tool-set created by Riggs for Autodesk Maya and 3ds Max. The technology helps to create character facial rigs using a proprietary automated weighting transfer system that rapidly shifts a character's facial motion for incredibly life-like movements. It can be applied to any character, at any quality level, whether based on joints, blend-shapes, or a combination of the two. This technology has been used in a wide set of production environments and has proven its broad applicability to a variety of project needs.

Platige Image has just finished work on two live-action spots for the Grunwald battle anniversary campaign – “Grunwald - Battle of the Sescentenary”. They were created for 600th anniversary of one of the most important battles of Medieval Europe.

Exploiting the power of low cost GPU graphics cards with hundreds of cores, coupled with an expanded feature set, this release is much more productive. The need for network rendering becomes greatly reduced, keeping the studio's infrastructure manageable and cost effective.

3D scene importing via FBX has been greatly expanded, streamlining the process between 3D animation and rendering to directly have the same assets working in Fusion. Produce passes and layers on the fly directly on the GPU at breath-taking speed. Cutting reliance on other applications and departments simplifies the production process.

Bunkspeed has announced the release of Bunkspeed SHOT, a completely redesigned 'interactive photograph for 3D data' software application.

After Bunkspeed was first to bring interactive ray tracing to the market in 2007, they revolutionized rendering by empowering anyone to create photographic-quality images using only the CPU. The new Bunkspeed SHOT™ leverages the power of NVIDIA graphics processing units (GPUs) and is built on the massively parallel computing architecture of NVIDIA CUDA™ to dramatically accelerate the user’s workflow. Even the most complex scenes render interactively, and in real-time.

SIGGRAPH 2010 Announces Computer Animation Festival Winners

SIGGRAPH announces the Computer Animation Festival's Best in Show, Jury Award, and Best Student Project recipients for SIGGRAPH 2010 to be held in Los Angeles this July. Nominees were chosen from 750 submissions from around the globe, presented by both professional studios and students alike.

"It was difficult to narrow the pool of submissions because of the high level of quality and technical expertise," said Isaac Kerlow, Computer Animation Festival Director from The Earth Observatory of Singapore/NTU ADM. "Attendees will experience an endorphin rush as they watch the screenings of independent and commercial films, and will get a behind-the-scenes perspective from the planned Production Sessions featuring the visionaries behind some of this year's most successful Hollywood films. Whether you are an industry veteran or someone who just enjoys quality visual effects and animation, there is something for everyone this year."

3d News World is back

Friday, July 23, 2010

Are You a 3D Star? Time to Showcase Your Talent

Tuesday, July 20, 2010

Monday, July 19, 2010

Saturday, July 17, 2010

Thursday, July 15, 2010

Wednesday, July 14, 2010

Tuesday, July 13, 2010

Monday, July 12, 2010

Creating 3D fire and other earthly elements

COURSE OVERVIEW

Sunday, July 11, 2010

Meet the A-Team

Subscribe To

Blog Archive

Links

Advertise Here/About Me