This week, my round up of CG news features software and hardware announcements, interviews with VFX professionals, and some cool new VFX breakdowns. Hope you enjoy it!
IKinema Introduce WebAnimate; Animation on the Go!
The guys at IKinema have an awesome idea in development that is making their award winning animation technology more available to the masses. For those of you who don’t know IKinema, it is a plug-in for Maya that lets you create full-body animations quickly and easily with brilliant realistic results. It is a time saving tool that eliminates the need for characterisation or special rigs as it does the hard work for you, letting you work directly onto a rig. You can combine multiple models into a single animation, retarget from any source to any target, customise or tweak motion capture and animation as well as retarget data inside Maya in real-time.
News Round-Up: Monday 23rd Jan 2012
My, what a busy week! There are announcements from the likes of Pixar about their RenderMan software, interviews with London studios such as Pixomondo and the much more education controversy. Here's my pick of last week's more interesting stories.
The Foundry Open Beta for HIERO
This is possibly the moment many of you have been waiting for… HIERO, The Foundry's latest software project, has gone to beta. A closed beta ran over a short period of time for few individuals who got their name on a waiting list nice and early, and from what I’ve heard, they really enjoyed putting it to the test.
News Round-Up: Monday 16th Jan 2012
After an interesting last week in our Los Angeles studios, I have come back to what seems to have been a week dominated with announcements about the state of our education system. But my round up of news is not just about education news, and this week, there is news about what the London Olympic stadium is going to look like, details of Cinecite's internship program and lots more...
News Round-Up: Monday 9th Jan 2012
First week back at work and it's as if Xmas was months ago. The news certainly kept on coming this week, and here is a quick summary of what I picked up on this week.
Pixel Palace Artist in Residence: Kelly Richardson
Digital artist Kelly Richardson recently completed an artist’s residency at the Pixel Palace, a new digital media arts programme of the Tyneside Cinema in Newcastle upon Tyne. During her time there, she began initial research and production into an ambitious new three projection video installation entitled ‘Mariner 9’. During her residency, the Pixel Palace commissioned a short film about the work being developed where she explains some of her processes and ideas behind the new installation.
iNuked - Part Deux (Read & Write Nodes)
After an incredibly busy couple of months dealing with students' end of courses projects, as well as completing the first shot for my own showreel, I've found the time to work on the next episode of iNuked: my personal project to explore the possibilities of using The Foundry's professional compositing software NUKE, on my MacBook Air.
V-Ray Renders in 3 Seconds on a New BOXX Workstation
We came across this video and just had to share it with you all. Check it out!
News Round-Up: Tuesday 3rd Jan 2012
It's been a while since my last News Round-Up... Hopefully, you will all be rested after this holiday season and rearing to go. So, to get you going, I have selected a whole bunch of news items which have been published over the last couple of weeks.
A Great iPhone App From MPC
For anyone with an iPhone or an iPad here is a great app from our friends at MPC. If you are interested in entering the VFX industry, this is something which I would highly recommend. MPC's app shows the jobs they have available as soon as they are published, and is a great way of finding out about those entry level positions that aspiring artists are after.
Phoenix FD 2.0 Release
Chaos Group recently released Phoenix FD 2.0, the latest version for their grid based simulator. This latest version now comes with liquids, foam & splashes simulation capabilities, a particle shader and GPU preview improvements.
News Round-Up: Monday 19th Dec 2011
This will be my last Weekly Round-Up of News for this year..., hope you enjoy it. If you have suggestions for stories I missed, just drop me a line or post a comment. I'll be sure to look at your suggestion during the Xmas break.
WAKOMPENSKI - The Road to London 2012
I thought I would let you guys into something special... A look at the truly fantastic Christmas video from The Mill's 2D department. In between working on some of the world's best VFX for commercial spots, The Mill still finds time to make a departmental Christmas video to compete at their Christmas party.
Amazing Realistic Paintings of Children’s Drawings
An old colleague of mine (thanks Miles!) recently posted this link on his Google+ profile and I was instantly mesmerised. Illustrator Dave DeVries has had the amazing idea of taking children’s drawings and representing them as ‘realistic’ paintings in a project called “The Monster Engine”. The results are absolutely amazing. The artist describes his initiative as “a book, a demonstration, lecture and a gallery exhibition. The premise for all three came from one single question: What would a child’s drawing look like if it were painted realistically?”
News Round-Up: Monday 12th Dec 2011
Here is my usual Weekly Round-Up of News, with stories that I have picked up over the past week. If you have suggestions for stories I missed, just drop me a line or post a comment.
The Votes Have Been Cast And The Results Are In…
The judging is done, and the votes are in – the winners for CG Whiz 2011 have been decided upon, but you’ll have to wait until the 14th December to find out who the winner are. I know, it's a bit cruel, but we like to make a big deal of our Reveal Event. It's only fair considering how much work all our entrants have put in to their reels.
A New Pricing Structure for Photoshop...
I have just seen an article entitled "Adobe Will Only Offer Photoshop CS6 Upgrade Price to CS5 Owners" in CGTalk (CG Society) about a dramatic change in pricing policy from Adobe regarding CS6.
News Round-Up: Monday 5th Dec 2011
Here is my usual Weekly Round-Up of News, with stories that I have picked up over the past week. If you have suggestions for stories I missed, just drop me a line or post a comment.
MARI 1.4 Has Launched!
MARI has already gained a reputation for being a powerful compositing tool, but the team at The Foundry continue developing this software to make MARI an even faster, more flexible tool.