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Monday 27 October 2008

Adolfdesk aquires XSI!! Blitz buy!!

very funny, MUST SEE!
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=kR7UWImpG54

Friday 24 October 2008

XSI becomes Autodesk asset

well, even though I`m Maya user I always liked XSI being Maya`s competitor but also inspiration. As XSI would be under Maya selling company, I`m not sure how this competition would work in future: http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/item?id=12022457&siteID=123112

Autodesk states, they want to preserve XSI product line:

Petit commented: “As we have demonstrated since the acquisition of Alias in 2006, we’re committed to giving our customers choice when it comes to their 3D tools. We plan to maintain and grow the Softimage product line, and through Autodesk FBX provide better interoperability between Softimage products, 3ds Max and Autodesk Maya.


Definitely technologies will merge once again and data exchange between the two packages could be better with new versions of FBX. Welcome to the club XSI users! :-P
I have to admit that before Alias was aquired by Autodesk, Maya was missing proper modeling tools and major updates of animation tools. Waiting for this was endless, but under Autodesk these tools got much improved.

Friday 17 October 2008

travel to U.S. without visa soon for Czech Republic

Czech Republic might soon become part of Visa Waiver Program.The estimate date speculations are on historic day 17.11., which reminds the end of communistic regime in former Czechoslovakia (now Czech Republic and Slovakia) in 1989. Read more in this article in czech or this one in english.
Other countries to be accepted are Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Slovakia and Hungary, as well as South Korea.

Animation Mentor Industry Report

Animation Mentor has recently released Animation Industry Report, which covers
  • job satfisfaction
  • carreer outlook
  • and salaries

I`ve quickly checked it and it seem that the industry is getting bigger, which sounds good in recent worldwide financial crisis and that people generaly like what they do, which is great. What`s interesting it shows only 3% of participants were Technical Directors. I think too few TDs were involved in survey or they signed as Other (21%) otherwise there would be lack of TDs. I think they should have broken down types of jobs more and add lighters, fx, riggers etc. Animator is equal to lighter, but I think Animation Mentor was a bit biased as it`s focused on animators, not lighters or other jobs.

Petra Štefánková


Petra, artist/animator, originally from Slovakia, has been awarded EXPOSÉ 6 Master Award for Abstract & Design. Congratulations! :)
I like advances in abstract art in 3D and Petra`s work is one of my favorites. Here is interview with her on Cg Society.

Tuesday 7 October 2008

Kozí Příběh


First czech cg feature "Kozí Příběh" hits cinemas 16.10. Obviously it doesn`t reach the quality of current movies like Kung-Fu Panda or Wall.E, but made by 10 people and for the first time in czech environment it`s an achievement that such project made it into a cinema. Hopefully it will not be long until a work on next movie starts again and this time with more experienced team.
This is a link to trailer of Kozí Příběh.

Sunday 5 October 2008

2 riggers of the week ;)

there are lots of talented people in the industry, I thought I would point out two of them here, as my friend sent me this demo of bi-directional constraining from Andrea Maiolo, who with Tim Nailor also released 2 DVDs about this topic (partI, partII):
html with quicktime video (sound goes off few times)

Then I found Maiolo was nominated Maya Master 2008 and here`s some info that surprised me, it says he built new skinning paradigm in Maya after ILM converted to new software (I guess Zeno) and that he also programmed simple 3d spinning visualisation of a car before going to college. Well done! :) More about ILM skinning in links below...

Tim Nailor`s perspective of rigger in ILM (2003)
It looks like, meawhile he moved with few other ex-ILMs over to head Character Development in new Lightstream Animation Studios, siggraph link.

If you want to see both guys under bright Californian sun talking about their excitement for their work and some interesting thoughts, download this quicktime from 3december 2005 archive.

And this is really nice portion of links on Maiolo`s website, some candy for riggers, check it out... plus Siggraph 2005 class about Starwars EpIII character pipeline pdf...