Avengers VFX

Pretty good coverage of Avengers visual effects on fxguide.com. There is talk about Hulk as well, which ILM did for second time after Ang Lee`s Hulk with Eric Bana (Incredible Hulk done by Rhythm+Hues played by Edward Norton). But only this time Hulk looks like his human version. I personally think this helped a lot to keep connection with original actor and audience as well. There are also more shots with this creature in-between fights. He gets enough screen time to show off properly.

JOB - Maya fluid simulations

Eallin Animation (Prague, Czech Republic) is looking for:

Maya 3d artist who knows particles and fluids
The job is in studio only, so you need come to Prague, if you don`t already live there. The studio could give assistance with looking for accommodation if needed. The position status is ASAP.
If interested, send email to: murphy@eallin.com

Maya 2013 rigging features

In this video, Autodesk is showing nice new features for Maya 2013 release usefull when rigging creatures: Node Editor and Heat Map skinCluster binding method.

Node Editor is something that should have been done years ago. It`s pretty much like Houdini network. Well it`s there now, so thumbs up!

Heat Map can save you some time skinning limbs of characters or as I personally recall, skinning tree roots (Narnia 2, Battling Oaks). Vertices which get close to each other would get their influences mixed, now it seems like surface based algorithm, similar to Soft Mod tool.

I wonder if you can use Heat Map when using Copy Skin Weights, because that would be really usefull for transfering edited weights (not just default) from body to layers of costume.

Btw. I wonder if Autodesk have fixed the non-uniform scale issue in SkinCluster DualQuaternion method.

Digital Domain interview about lighting/shading in Real Steel

skinningTools update

I have updated old MEL script SkinningTools (by David Walden, 2005), which is still useful for basic editing of skinCluster weights and works well under Maya 2011 (and probably higher versions). You can download it from here:
http://www.jakubkrompolc.net/sublink/download.html