Over the last few months we've spent a lot of time meeting various people from the CG world on Twitter, and have been discussing everything from the latest Autodesk upgrades or Softimage updates, to Nick's doodles and even elephant clocks (this conversation really did happen). After all of this interaction, we thought it was about time that we got to meet some of you face to face, so on Friday we invited three of the more vocal Twitterers to a beer and CG evening at Escape Studios.
VFX in the making of 2012
Check out this interview with Marc Weigert, the 2012 Co-producer and VFX Supervisor behind the blockbuster 2012. His team of over a 100 artists worked on this feature and formed the central VFX hub for the movie. To their credit they completed an astonishing number of shots within a very short timeframe using a traditional pipeline, including eyeon's Fusion and Generation. Here he chats to eyeon's CEO Steve Roberts about the Visual Effects in the film.
Nick's Doodles: The Judge
Nick Savy, our character tutor, has done us another fantastic sketch.
New feature - Nick's Doodles
Here at Escape Studios, we pride ourselves on our close links with the industry. One of the ways we maintain these links is by having tutors who have done the jobs they teach. This means that our tutors are some of the best CGers in the business, and they’re an incredibly creative bunch.
Top Down Animation - Work in Progress - Step 1
I am currently working on (amongst other things) a simple animation in order to demonstrate the Top Down Animation Technique. The animation I am going to do is of a character walking up and sitting down in a chair then tipping backwards. I thought it would be interesting to demonstrate the steps that I would go through in doing an animation this way, so I'll be posting my progress as I go.
ZBrush 3.5 R3 for Windows now released!
We have good news for all users of Zbrush: the new ZBrush 3.5 update for Windows has just been released. It's called R3, and it has loads of new features and enhancements as well as a better toolset. If you are a registered user of Zbrush, you can download it for free here.
Recommended Animation Books
I have been asked by a number of Webinar Attendees about what books I would recommend for animation. So I thought I would give you a list of all the ones I have.
20 animated submissions for upcoming Oscars
Not sure how many of you have been following this story, but a whopping 20 feature films have been submitted for the Animated Feature film category for the upcoming Oscars. This is great news for the industry as it means we’re well on track to getting five nominees qualifying for the category at the awards next February (we normally only have 3!).
How to Become a World-Class Animator
Thanks to everyone who attended my "Becoming a World-Class Animator" webinar last night - it was great to get a chance to speak to all of you! We're going to make the presentation available in the Escape Studios Free Resources section of our website soon - so make sure that you keep an eye out for it.
Upgrade to Maya, 3ds Max and SoftImage 2010 apps and save up to 59%!
Western Spaghetti
All the talk of stop motion animation last week got me thinking, so I went in search of some great examples of this type of work. This Western Spaghetti viral is awesome.
The Tate Movie Project – Tate teaming up with Aardman Animations
Now this is what we like to see – children getting involved in animation from a young age. This week we heard that Tate is teaming up with Aardman Animations, the team behind Wallace and Gromit, to create a new film. And, they want children to help them brainstorm. Check out the video on our YouTube channel.
Old-school animation: Fantastic Mr Fox
Towelling for grass, cotton balls for smoke and cling film for water – Wes Anderson has reverted to traditional forms of animation in his new film Fantastic Mr Fox.
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Free Animation Video Tutorial now available from Escape Studios
Our September Free video tutorial is now available! This month, we are giving away an hour long tutorial from our Online Animation Course.