If you live in the UK and watch television from time to time, you might find yourself familiar with the BBC… well to be honest, unless you live in a cave and aren’t aware of the technological progression of the western world over the last 100 years, you will definitely have heard of the BBC.
David Joos
david@escapestudios.com
In the beginning there was 'Display'
pho·to·shop, transitive verb, often capitalized \ˈfō-(ˌ)tō-ˌshäp\
to alter (a digital image) with Photoshop software or other image-editing software especially in a way that distorts reality (as for deliberately deceptive purposes)
- Merriam-Webster online dictionary, 2012
This Is How We Roll...
Historically we've had a quite basic server architecture. The list of applications we run kept on growing and more and more users started to make use of these applications, so we've recently had to take a step back and take some time to reflect on our architecture as rolling out an additional server and/or release applications doesn't need to be a huge task.
Under the hood
As a follow-up to my post on learning resources for coding, I'd like to share our recent efforts to open source some of our in-house code.
Trimble Invests in Google SketchUp
Back in 2006 Google acquired SketchUp, the 3D modeling program commonly used by architectural, civil and mechanical engineers. Google SketchUp was released as a free downloadable version that excluded some of the functionality of SketchUp Pro, but included tools for uploading content to Google Earth. Since that time Google SketchUp has been deemed very popular worldwide and can boast 30 million activations over 2011 alone.
Learning Resources for Coding
There are a lot of people in the CG industry who have an interest in the "wizardry" of coding: from automating repetitive tasks via scripts, to pushing the boundaries of the software packages through the API layer, to smoothing out company pipelines by hooking up software that did not originally understand the other software's lingo.
Escape Studios Launches New Search Function in its eLearning Platform
Over the past couple of weeks we've been busy working on our online learning system. "Really? I haven't noticed any difference", I hear you say... Well, it is true that most of the work carried out has been "under the bonnet", so you might not have noticed anything. The reason for sharing this with you today though, is that this work is enabling us to bring to you a number of new features and enhancements.
Massive 4.0
Massive Software, developer of the Academy Award®-winning 3D animation software for AI-driven characters, has released Massive 4.0.
"Project Twitch": Maya in a web browser
Autodesk Labs recently added Maya to the company's "Project Twitch". If you feel like saying "so what?!", please keep on reading...
Avatar and the art of motion capture
I came across the following Avatar making of-video and I thought I would spread the word and share it here for you to check out. It provides a good overview of the basics of motion capture and how this technology was used to create Avatar. Enjoy!
Disney releases Ptex as open source
Ptex is a technique for per-face, multi-resolution texture mapping without the need to setup your UV's manually. While the paper by Brent Burley (Walt Disney Animation Studios) and Dylan Lacewell (Walt Disney Animation Studios & University of Utah) has been around for a while, last Friday, Disney released the project as open source.
Sony Pictures Imageworks releases open source shading language
Yesterday, Sony Pictures Imageworks -the award-winning visual effects and digital character animation unit of Sony Pictures Digital Productions- released the Alpha version of its source code for OSL (Open Shading Language).