According to Variety we have been saved from yet more badly converted stereo films - check out the story here. Warner Brothers have canned the release of Harry Potter Deathly Hallows part 1 in 3D. This is due to quality issues, that were mainly due to time constraints, and Warner have come to the conclusion that the converted film was not high enough quality. I can only applaud them for not releasing yet another stereo nasty.
Pixar's RenderMan Studio 3 is out!
RenderMan Studio 3 has arrived and it packs some punch! Speed and lots of features and enhancements, including support for Maya 2011.
RenderMan Studio is Pixar's advanced suite of tools for shading and lighting TD's.
CVMP 2010 Amazing speaker line-up
CVMP is a unique opportunity to network with production and post-production specialists from the worlds of film, broadcast, games and imaging and graphics researchers. If you register on or before 17th October 2010 you can save yourself £100 on full registration!
Free Webinar: The Art of Creating Great Animated Characters
I will be holding a free live webinar on November 4th. Here's a quick outline of what I will be discussing.
CityEngine 2010.2 Available Now
There seems to be some momentum growing behind CityEngine and out of all of the new products in the market it certainly seems one to keep an eye on!
Great Animation by Plato Art Space
Here is another great piece of animation, created by Plato Art Space. It could almost have been created for Escape!
New Skillset Bursaries Available for Escape Studios Training
Skillset have recently announced a new funding scheme which will allow individuals working in the UK film industry to apply for a bursary towards various types of training. The scheme is aimed at increasing the high-end visual effects skills within the film industry so individuals who want to get additional training under this new funding can identify a course or a training provider that meets his or her needs and apply for bursary from Skillset.
CG Whiz 2010: The search is on…
Calling all aspiring artists and CG wannabes! Here’s your opportunity to build your dream career. Today we launched CG Whiz 2010 our annual search for the hottest amateur computer graphics talent. We’re offering over £15,000 or $24,000 worth of prizes for the winners, thanks to our co-sponsors, The Mill, CG Society and 3D Artist.
Escape Studios Awarded Pixar's RenderMan International Reseller of the Year 2010!
HDR Video the next stage...
It's been a few years since Paul Debevec produced his paper with Jitendra Malik, Recovering High Dynamic Range Radiance Maps from Photographs, at SIGGRAPH. Since then, people all the world have begun to generate high dynamic range still images and probes - essentially capturing all the light information from a scene in mulitple passes using digital cameras and then merging these into a single HDR image. A simple web search for HDR Images in google images will present you with an array of hyper-real looking images, or try here for some examples.
October Free Tutorials
I find it really annoying when I find freebies that are ‘for a limited time only’, and it’s something we’ve been guilty of with our free tutorials. We’ve had some great feedback about them, and with that in mind we've decided to revamp the way our freebies work.
Portrait of an escapee: How Nick Illingworth Became TD at MPC
When Nik Illingworth came to an Open Day last year, he was brimming with CG enthusiasm. He knew that he wanted a career in VFX but didn't really know how he was going to make it happen. After studying for 12 weeks with us, Nik was up and running. He finished his course, was offered his first job at Frametore and accepted it, then a short while later he decided to come back to us for 6 weeks of final professional training. He's now Effects Technical Director at MPC and still has the same love for the industry that he started off with. Nik's is one of many stories of CG enthusiasts who come to study with us and that's why we wanted to share his case study with you - getting a career in VFX off the ground really is easier than you think.
Balloons & Zeppelins: Fresh VFX escapee work
Here's my final post showing some work from the courses which have just finished. These clips are from escapees who were on the Visual Effects Production course taught by Dan Shutt. Again these are 'work in progress' and need a little more polishing but you can see they are both great ideas that have been really well executed.
Amazing Physics Engine
Check out this amazing physics engine created by Thiago Costa, he's 23 and never even got a high school diploma! Life's not fair!
Giant Sculpture Made of 420,000 Balls
A friend of mine sent me this link recently. It combines lots of things I love, the use of high end technology for the creation of art, the use of physics to produce an abstraction and an inherent understanding of making something that just looks really cool.
Autodesk Subscription Advantage Packs arrive
Autodesk have started something new for those on support: it's called Subscription Advantage Packs. This is a way for those that pay the price of subscription to get new features dropped in, fast... One of the most awaited 'drops' is Mudbox on Linux!
Tracey Chung: a budding character animation artist
Last week, I promised to share with you some more of the work that our students have presented to us at the end of their courses. This time, I have decided to show you the work of Tracey Chung, who recently completed our Character Animation course taught by Alex Williams.
Lundgren vs Unicorn and The Hoff!
Absolute genius on the part of the creatives at Leo Burnetts for Norton.
The Most Exciting RenderMan Toolset in Years!
The upcoming RenderMan for Maya 4 and RenderMan Studio 3 offers mouth watering upgrades & new features; we are busy working away on the RenderMan Certified courseware and will cover these cool new workflows in depth.
Nuke, Mari, Ocula now available at Escape Studios!
