On Wednesday we were at the Apollo cinema in Picadilly, for our CG Workflows event with Framestore, looking at some of the extremely difficult shots they were asked to tackle on Avatar.
As well as the guys from Framestore, we had presentations from Al Mooney of Adobe, Lawrence Windley and Deepraj Sandhar from Avid, The Foundry’s Simon Robinson, Stuart Pitcher of Fugitive, Gary Meyer at Iridas, and our very own Dan Young.
It was a fascinating session, scratching the surface on all things stereoscopic and how apps like NUKE are finding ways to address the issues faced. Many questions were fired out including the ‘big debate’ of shooting in parallel versus convergence.
The highlight for many, though, was Framestore’s case study of Avatar. Tim Keene, Executive Producer – VFX and Christian Kaestner, Compositioning Supervisor, took us through working both on and off-set on this century’s biggest film, breaking down key scenes and showing how many of the elements were put together. As you can see from the images of Christian below, there were some incredible shots.
From our feedback, it’s clear we need to dive in deeper into the whole stereoscopy debate as it’s obvious this is one piece of next gen tech that’s not going to go away in a hurry!
Many thanks to all our presenters, sponsors HP, and also to everyone who attended.
Escape this Spring!
Want to know what it’s like to work in a thriving, dynamic industry? Escape Studios is offering a taster into the world of computer graphics with its new three-day short courses that highlight the exciting career opportunities on offer to students and provide valuable insight into the industry.
Escape Studios is offering four new taster courses: Introduction to 3D using Maya (the leading 3D imaging software), Introduction to Computer Animation, Introduction to Visual Effects and Introduction to Games, which all contain abbreviated content from Escape Studio’s full-time courses. Over three days, students will learn the basics of 3D effects creation and gain a better understanding of what’s involved in visual effects, character animation and games art with guidance from world-class tutors. The courses are aimed at giving people a chance to get a feel for what a computer graphics job is like and understand what discipline they might want to pursue in the industry.
All four short courses cost £399, which is refunded should the student decide to sign up to an Escape Studio classroom course. Full courses are typically 12 weeks long and have been designed to cover all the basics and provide someone new to the industry with the required skills to begin their career. Escape Studios offer a range of courses including visual effects, animation, games and more. For more information please contact the training team.
Games tutor Simon Fenton has made his media debut for Escape Studios on the Guardian’s Career Talk podcast. You can hear Simon talk about getting into the industry, his role as a tutor at Escape, his background and much more, alongside Tom Baskaya of Framestore, an Escapee and most recently a compositor on Avatar. Tom also talks about his time at Escape, as well as what it was like working on James Cameron’s masterpiece.
You can have a listen on the Guardian’s site here. Simon and Tom are on from around 06 minutes 55 seconds into the podcast.
On the 25th of this month I’ll be hosting a free Games webinar on Next Generation Asset Creation. We’ll be looking at next gen techniques as well considering the part that low-poly still has to play in games art creation. High on the list of priorities for any Games Artist is knowing where to find their sources of inspiration – I’ll show you what gets me going and how it helps me approach my own work.
The webinar is free, but we’ve had lots of people register so you’ll need to secure your place right away.
Date for the webinar: February 25th, 2010
Webinar details:
5.20pm – 5.40pm GMT: Games art: Knowing the principles
5.40pm – 5.50pm GMT: Next generation assets creation
5.50pm – 6.00pm GMT: Live Q & A session; Have your questions ready
This 3D reconstruction of ancient Pompeii is quite neat. Generated with Procedural’s CityEngine, it shows how quickly a 3D city can be created using a plug-in, and eliminate the time-consuming tasks of manual modeling and design often required in games, post-production and architectural visualisation. It is also up to 10 times more efficient at creating urban environments than existing packages. It is completely brand new to Escape Studios – no need to say we are quite excited about it.
CityEngine is a versatile package, you can use it to create building interiors with floor layouts, staircases and interior asset objects as well as cities. This Pompeii design is based on real-world building footprint data and architectural information from archaeologists. For an even more impressive 3D scenario of a futuristic city, check out the 3D city example NYC 2259, the extrapolation of New York City 250 years into the future, inspired by Luc Besson’s great sci-fi movie The Fifth Element.
Check out more demos or ask for a personal live demo to get a quick overview and see how the CityEngine fits into your production pipeline. If you are a student, you can get discounted pricing as well. Check it out here.
Please find CityEngine on Facebook:
http://www.facebook.com/CityEngine
A few weeks ago we ran a customer satisfaction survey. As part of the survey, we had a prize draw, with the winners bagging a masterclass with our VFX tutor Lee Danskin and the runners up all receiving Amazon vouchers.
We’re pleased to announce that the following three respondents have been drawn as the winners of the masterclass: Ben Nuttall-Smith, Keiron Campbell and Mark Robin. Congratulations to you all!
We’ve also got 20 runners-up, who all receive an Amazon voucher worth £25 (or $40, if you’re into that sort of thing): Kevin Rittenhouse, Jaime Rivera, Dan Nastasa, Marcus Williams, Surapen Yosravikul, Curtis Cooper III, David Godefroy, Carla Gomes, James Pruszkowski, Hugo Guerra, Amanda Carrington, Joe Williamsen, Satoko Kojima, Jason Mullin, Mi Li, Artur Leao, Tom Crate, Luke Caulfield, Jeff Chen and Denise Ebanks.
Thanks to everyone who participated in the survey – we’ll be posting next week about the results and the insights we’ve drawn from them.
Here’s a selection of what our game course students have created. As I mentioned before, I’m really proud of what the guys have come up with, and I would love to show you every single students work, were it not for amount of space it would take up on the blog. So here, as a compromise, is a selection:
I think you’ll agree there’s some good work here. Hopefully I’ll be able to post some more images soon. It would be great to hear your feedback as well, so any comments much appreciated.
Our friends at Autodesk have released the first service pack for Mudbox 2010.
The release boasts a whole bunch of fixes, way too long to mention here! Check out the release note here.
If you are a current Mudbox user please go here to download the service pack.
If you are not a current user of this great animation tool from Autodesk then why not take a free 30 day trial.
Happy animating!
Mark
On one of my (out of work hours) trawls around the internet, I came across this little gem (if you can, watch fullscreen).
As you’ll see from the comments, it’s quite a stunner that’s caused a fair bit of debate. I’ll be honest, I thought it was a fake, or at least some quality compositing and grading, before I found this – the breakdown.
Conferring around the office, the first response was ‘what did he shoot it on?’ If it’s all CG, it’s a true work of art. All told, the visuals combined with the audio make for a fantastic short film from a true artist. My only concern is how on earth did he get it all rendered?
Regular readers of the blog will know that last week we had the awards ceremony of the CG Whiz competition. We managed to grab the three winners and some of the judges, including Steve Venning from The Mill, to film their views on the competition. We think everyone had a great time, and over the next few months we’re hoping to have blog posts from Adam Droy, the overall winner, and runners up Ronan McMeel and Marco Barrato, to see how the competition prizes have helped them break into the CG industry.
Well done to all who entered – we were astounded by the standard of the entries. For all those of you inspired by the entries keep an eye out for next year’s competition, and the chance to win another potentially career transforming prize.
