As some of you may have seen, we’ve got a fantastic event coming up in March – a two day masterclass with the doyens of CG animation, Pixar.
On 18th and 19th March we’ve got Pixar Animation Studios’ senior animator Andrew Gordon and story artist Matthew Luhn going through what’s needed to become a great animator. With contributions to almost all of Pixar’s films over the last decade, from A Bug’s Life to Up, Andrew and Matthew are perfectly placed to take both professional and student animators through the principles and practices of CG animation.
Andrew will be leading the Animation Masterclass on Thursday, covering animation principles, staging and pose design, locomotion, acting for animation, scene planning, blocking and high level polishing techniques. Matthew will be leading the story masterclass on Friday, looking at the role of the story artist, preliminary storyboards, three act story structure, gags, storyboarding from scripts, composing storyboards and line and value. Both will have Q&A sessions to cover specific issues.
This is a fantastic opportunity to get up close with two of the world’s top animation talents. The two day course will cost £375, including VAT, and tickets are available from us. The masterclasses will be held at the Apollo Cinema in Picadilly, and we’re expecting a flood of interest, so make sure you book early to avoid missing out.
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.
It’s been used on Disney’s Bolt and Glago’s guest and it’s supported by Pixar’s RenderMan. No more tedious UV unwrapping as Ptex applies a separate texture to each face of a subdivision or polygon mesh…
Reasons enough to check out the workflow video, have a look at some production model turntables or just start reading on the project’s homepage!
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.
If you didn’t catch this week’s webinar don’t worry, we are running another two sessions before Christmas. You can sign up for them here:
Wednesday 18th November – Sign up now
Wednesday 2nd December – Sign up now
If you were in yesterday’s webinar, we’d love to know what you thought. Posts your comments here and do let us know what other topics you’d like us to cover in future webinars.
I’ve mentioned 3D movies before on the blog, but this week another article on the topic caught my eye. Pixar has said that it’s hoping 3D films will encourage people to watch movies at the cinema – rather than pirate copies or illegal downloads at home.
Something I didn’t talk about before was the advantage 3D films have of making illegal copies from cinema films virtually impossible. We all know that in the past, production companies have faced criticism from cinemas that are reluctant to install the equipment, such as new projectors, necessary to show 3D movies due to the expense. I can’t help but think they are failing to realise how these movies can help protect the cinema industry. 3D pictures will not only cut down on piracy, but cinemas will also be able to add a little more to the admission charges – increasing their ticket revenue – while offering customers a high quality viewing experience that can’t be replicated at home (for the time being at anyway).
I thought it was interesting to see Pixar relaxing its policy of revisiting past hits such as Toy Story and Cars – it obviously thinks that 3D movies will be able to attract larger audiences, providing the film is up to scratch.
