The Pixar filmmakers who attended Comic-Con this year had to shut down questions about the further plot of Toy Story 3, and understandably so.
That’s why some of the recent interviews with Lee Unkrich, as interesting and well spoken as he is, aren’t all that informational to long time fans. The folks at Collider took that into mind when interviewing Lee Unkrich about his highly anticipated upcoming movie… and beyond! Enjoy the video below featuring the long time Pixarian talking about what he collects, Pixar’s Blu-rays and the status of his Pixarian colleagues among other great topics:
Stay tuned, we’ll bring you more great interviews like this once they’re made available.
Saturday, August 1, 2009
Imageworks Open Source
http://opensource.imageworks.com/
Open Source: It's always been a part of what makes Imageworks tick. However, up until now we haven't had a chance to contribute back to the open source community. We're beginning to change that now.
We've chosen 5 projects to release as open source. This software can be freely used by large and small studios around the world. We've intentionally chosen popular non-restrictive licensing models to help ensure you have lots of options.
Each of these projects have passionate people behind them who are interested in seeing the code widely used. We're into the idea of building small development communities around this code. If you're interested in contributing, join the respective mailing lists and introduce yourself.
Take a moment to familiarize yourself with Imageworks' open source offerings. I hope you find something useful.
Rob Bredow
CTO
Sony Pictures Imageworks
Open Source: It's always been a part of what makes Imageworks tick. However, up until now we haven't had a chance to contribute back to the open source community. We're beginning to change that now.
We've chosen 5 projects to release as open source. This software can be freely used by large and small studios around the world. We've intentionally chosen popular non-restrictive licensing models to help ensure you have lots of options.
Each of these projects have passionate people behind them who are interested in seeing the code widely used. We're into the idea of building small development communities around this code. If you're interested in contributing, join the respective mailing lists and introduce yourself.
Take a moment to familiarize yourself with Imageworks' open source offerings. I hope you find something useful.
Rob Bredow
CTO
Sony Pictures Imageworks
Brand New RenderMan Site is Now Live
It is an event when Pixar’s website is updated, and an even bigger one when a major portion is redesigned!The RenderMan portal of Pixar.com has just launched with a brand new design. The industry standard in rendering has been the leader for over 20 years and this website celebrates how truly epic that is! Included in the page is information for professionals and curious fans alike.
In the "What’s RenderMan?" section you’ll find information about the product itself such as awards it’s won/movies it’s been used for, specific technical specifications, FAQs and more. As you delve further into the site you’ll notice a selection of RenderMan products and links with information for purchasing titled: "The Tools." There’s also a "News" area featuring press releases, testimonials and the such. Finally you’ll see the "Support" section which is meant for those in the industry who have purchased the software.
There’s lots to look at but remember, much of the facilities on this branch of Pixar.com are meant for professionals only, so I’d advise you to please respect that.
Related: Speaking of websites, Jim Hill Media is reporting that Disney has just registered the domain MONSTERS2.COM, clearly another clue pointing towards the rumored sequel.
CG Proshop - 3D.sk Reference DVDs
Finally we have released Absolute, this new range of 3D.sk reference DVDs contains hundreds of photos.
Please follow the links -
3D.sk - Absolute 01 - RUGGED SKIN - Photo Textures
3D.sk - Absolute 02 - MONSTERS - Insect Photo Reference
As always if you have any questions please email me sue@ballisticmedia.net
Ta
Sue
Autodesk Assistance Programme for unemployed
Recognising the impact of today’s economic challenges and the need for unemployed architects, designers and engineers to maintain and develop their skills to stay competitive, Autodesk is launching the Autodesk Assistance Programme.
The programme will provide design software tools, education and resources to help redundant professionals enhance and progress their 3D design technology abilities. It offers free* student software term licences enabling participants to experience the latest product releases, free online training plus reduced cost formal training and certification.
““The economic downturn has affected almost everyone, including large parts of design, engineering and construction industries,” says Pete Baxter, senior director, Autodesk Northern Europe. “Autodesk has a tradition of supporting the needs of its customers and the Assistance Programme is a fast-track route for industry professionals to keep up with new developments, use their time constructively to prepare for when the economy improves and significantly increase their chances of re-employment in the short term”.
Autodesk Assistance Programme tools and resources will be made available through an online portal (www.autodesk.co.uk/assistance), where users can access:
Free software licence: Any 13-month term student licence of selected Autodesk solutions including AutoCAD, Autodesk Revit Architecture, Autodesk Inventor Professional, AutoCAD Civil 3D, 3DS Max and more. Available as an online download only.
- Free online training: On-demand training available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week provided online.
- Reduced-cost classroom training: Many Autodesk Authorised Training Centre (ATC) partners are offering classroom training at their training facilities either free or at a significantly reduced fee. Classes and fees are subject to scheduling and availability.
- Certification: Certification preparation and exams are available at discounted rates through Autodesk Authorised Certification Centres.
- Free access to Autodesk University Online, a web portal with more than 1,000 recorded sessions.
The Autodesk Assistance Programme is available until 31 March 2010 and is open to anyone who has worked in the architecture, engineering, design or manufacturing industry but is currently unemployed. Those eligible should visit www.autodesk.co.uk/assistance to register and click on the ‘Training’ tab to locate their nearest Authorised Training Centre and Certification Centre.
Autodesk currently also provides training and online resources to end users through Autodesk University Online (AU Online), Autodesk User Group International (AUGI), various online industry communities and the Autodesk YouTube Channel.
*Free products are subject to the terms and conditions of the end-user licence agreement that accompanies download of the software.
Teesside’s Animex Awards - call for entries
PRESS RELEASE
Organisers of the Animex Awards at Teesside University are welcoming work from animation students across the globe.
The awards are held as part of the annual Animex Festival of Animation & Computer Games, which this year celebrated its tenth anniversary.
In the six years that the competition has been running alongside the festival entries have flooded in from students across North America, Asia and across Europe.
Justin Greetham, Head of the Animex Awards, said: “Whichever way we look at it, it’s always great to see new work being submitted to Animex Awards from educational establishments which are new to this field.
“For those students and educators working with stop motion animation, Animex is one of the few competitive events which recognises and rewards stop motion animation techniques.
“Animex supports 2D and 3D animation, stop motion, motion graphics, visual effects and experimental animation techniques.”
For more information about entering the Animex Awards visit the Animex website at www.animex.net/awards. Closing date for entries is October 1.
Organisers of the Animex Awards at Teesside University are welcoming work from animation students across the globe.
The awards are held as part of the annual Animex Festival of Animation & Computer Games, which this year celebrated its tenth anniversary.
In the six years that the competition has been running alongside the festival entries have flooded in from students across North America, Asia and across Europe.
Justin Greetham, Head of the Animex Awards, said: “Whichever way we look at it, it’s always great to see new work being submitted to Animex Awards from educational establishments which are new to this field.
“For those students and educators working with stop motion animation, Animex is one of the few competitive events which recognises and rewards stop motion animation techniques.
“Animex supports 2D and 3D animation, stop motion, motion graphics, visual effects and experimental animation techniques.”
For more information about entering the Animex Awards visit the Animex website at www.animex.net/awards. Closing date for entries is October 1.
Review: Professional MEL Solutions for Production
Let‘s not beat about the bush here, MEL scripting is hard. Any book that hopes to give the middle level animator or artist a leg up into understanding the realms of what being a TD really means has, therefore, got to be accessible. Being somewhere between intermediate and advanced, I‘ll happily admit to not knowing everything about my weapon of choice, I sometimes find that books on areas of CGI, specifically those in relation to scripting, are either too condescending or too high handed. Thankfully for everyone, Professional MEL Solutions for Production is neither.
The book begins by discussing scripting editors, the Maya Script Editor being woefully inadequate as most people who use it will know. It then pulls you into the process of understanding the usage of MEL‘s commands, then pushes you quite quickly into the creation of GUI‘s or windows containing these commands. It carries on by going through the process of scripting an improved Bookmark Manager whilst impressing upon the reader the importance of clean, annotated scripts. At this point the reader will know that this book has been written to improve upon a busy pipeline. It is after this point that the weaker of the wannabe technical directors may find their vision blurring and thoughts turning to putting the kettle on. From this point, the GUI creation is predominantly procedure driven and we begin to get into some very in-depth programming. The book tells us in line-by-line detail how to make an extensive Layer Manager and then covers Recursion, or the process of calling a procedure within itself. The last section of the book is the most intense scripting I have ever had to digest, without a doubt, and although I understood much of it, some parts took quite a while to truly sink in – in fact, some of them are still trying to.
Not for the faint hearted, the book covers topics in an informative and extensive manner. Thankfully Kevin Mannens and Ed Caspersen bring a colloquial style into play which helps the reader to get through the really heavy bits. For example, much later on the scripting goes up a serious notch, not surprising given that it has been created by a C++ programmer. After a second or two of concern over my ability to take it all in, the moment of worry was dispelled as I laughed out loud on reading that the concept for the script, anno.mel, designed for annotating the timeline with frame locked text strings, came when the programmer, “saw the need for this tool…in a caffeine induced hallucination after 52 hours of consecutive lipsynching.” The breaking of the hefty lumps of MEL scripting with this humour really takes the edge of the brain dump you know you are going to get. Anyone who names a chapter heading as ‘First Blood’ is well aware of how hard this subject can be and wants to make it as painless as possible.
To really get into this subject matter, you need to throw in an awful lot of your time, but at least with Professional Mel for Production you have a book which, although chock-a-block full of info, is actually a really good read.
VERDICT
A good book covering difficult topics with gentle hand holding and good humour.
SCORE: 9/10
DETAILS
ISBN-13: 978–1-59822–066-7
ISBN-10: 1–59822-066–7
Pages: 549
PRICE
$44.95 / £27.25* / €31.63*
*Currency conversion
CONTENTS
1. Under The Hood (pg. 1)
2. Conditional Statements, Iterations, and Procedures (pg. 33)
3. First Blood (pg. 59)
4. Hands-On MEL Coding: km_bookmarkManager(pg. 83)
5. Hands-On MEL Coding: km_debrisCreator. (pg. 115)
6. Scene Management with ewc_extendedLayerManager (pg. 159)
7. Recursion (pg. 363)
8. MEL and Expressions (pg. 425)
9. Annotating the Timeline: anno.mel (pg. 465)
10. Index (pg. 541–547)
PUBLISHER
Wordware Publishing Incorporated
www.wordware.com
AUTHOR
Kevin Mannens: www.td-college.com
Project Durian Pre-Sales started
Hot on the tail of Big Buck Bunny, the next open movie project has started pre-orders to fund the project itself. If you pre-order before Sept. 15th, you can get your name in the credits too.
These movies are completely open content, so all you 3d artists can pull them apart and see exactly how it was built. I personally can't wait.
http://digg.com/software/Durian_pre..._in_the_credits
These movies are completely open content, so all you 3d artists can pull them apart and see exactly how it was built. I personally can't wait.
http://digg.com/software/Durian_pre..._in_the_credits
Apple Discontinues Shake
Alongside today's introduction of updated Time Capsule models, Apple appears to have finally discontinued Shake, its long-standing high-end digital compositing and visual effects software package. While Shake's product pages remain available on Apple's site, it is no longer listed in the online Apple Store and MacRumors has received word that Apple sales representatives have been informed of the product's discontinuation. Shake had been priced at $499.
Shake was originally launched in 1997 as a product of Nothing Real, which was acquired by Apple in early 2002. Apple continued to update Shake over the next several years, but the release of Shake 4.1 in mid-2006 was accompanied by the announcement that no further software updates were planned. A minor update to version 4.1.1 was issued in late 2008.
At the time of Shake 4.1's release, rumors claimed that Apple's replacement for the software package, code-named "Phenomenon", would be based on Apple's Motion software and released in 2008. While such a standalone product has not surfaced, it is possible that Apple finally views Motion 4 and other components of the updated Final Cut Studio released last week as a sufficient replacement for Shake's features.
Update: Apple's Shake product pages now redirect to the Final Cut Studio main product page.
I'm sad... I was looking forward to see what "Phenomenon" would be.
Macrumors clearly knows nothing of the subject if they would even hint that anyone could think the new Motion is any kind of replacement....
Shake was originally launched in 1997 as a product of Nothing Real, which was acquired by Apple in early 2002. Apple continued to update Shake over the next several years, but the release of Shake 4.1 in mid-2006 was accompanied by the announcement that no further software updates were planned. A minor update to version 4.1.1 was issued in late 2008.
At the time of Shake 4.1's release, rumors claimed that Apple's replacement for the software package, code-named "Phenomenon", would be based on Apple's Motion software and released in 2008. While such a standalone product has not surfaced, it is possible that Apple finally views Motion 4 and other components of the updated Final Cut Studio released last week as a sufficient replacement for Shake's features.
Update: Apple's Shake product pages now redirect to the Final Cut Studio main product page.
I'm sad... I was looking forward to see what "Phenomenon" would be.
Macrumors clearly knows nothing of the subject if they would even hint that anyone could think the new Motion is any kind of replacement....
Eat 3D announces The Fountain Part 2 - Low Res Modeling, UVing, and Baking
May I introduce to you an exciting new training video brought to you by Eat 3D (http://eat3d.com ).
Learn how to create professional low res meshes for next-gen games. After the low res mesh is created the instructor creates the UVs for all the modular pieces of the fountain and then goes into great detail about the baking options to create your normal and ao maps.
The techniques used in this video have been proven effective in production to quickly create professional next-gen game meshes.
To watch a sample of the video please visit this link:
http://eat3d.com/fountain2_lowres
Regards,
Riki Babington - Eat3D Admin
Learn how to create professional low res meshes for next-gen games. After the low res mesh is created the instructor creates the UVs for all the modular pieces of the fountain and then goes into great detail about the baking options to create your normal and ao maps.
The techniques used in this video have been proven effective in production to quickly create professional next-gen game meshes.
To watch a sample of the video please visit this link:
http://eat3d.com/fountain2_lowres
Regards,
Riki Babington - Eat3D Admin
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