Alice in wonderland

saw it today. Very good, really nice design, funny... great looking cg creatures (courtesy of Imageworks) This is Tim Burton`s best looking movie. I believe this is exactly how he wanted it to look like.

man falling down from statue in Prague

http://zpravy.idnes.cz/opily-cizinec-se-vazne-zranil-pri-padu-z-kone-svateho-vaclava-pt1-/krimi.asp?c=A100414_111139_krimi_hv

this is showing a drunk foreign guy trying to get down from 7m high statue which resulted in serious injuries.

An advice - don`t drink & climb on St.Vaclav horse statue.

pymel 2011

As a pymel user I`m very happy that Autodesk has added pymel as a part of new 2011 release. This will save considerable amount of development of class libraries in case a production is switching to python. Including Maya API was very clever step. Basically classes and functions from OpenMaya were integrated into pymel classes. Pymel in a way resembles the API class structure and combines it with maya.cmds, maya.mel and other added functionality.

Here are couple of links about new Script Editor, showing auto-completion, syntax highlighting and even object name completion (so you type "jacket" and get the choice of all "jacket*" objects in your scene - not so useful as this is hardcoded names, but still could get handy for quick scripting).

New Script Editor

Qt user interface

visually great video in pixel-game-style

this is very cool!! great idea (invasion of classic old games Tetris, Pacman etc.) and technically really well done:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qASf5DEN_c4

Bats and more!

Accidentaly I stumbled into this czech website that contains very nice shots of flying bats. Hey, you never know when you will rig one... or some fantasy sexy hellish creature and you will need the wings for reference:

http://www.naturephoto-cz.com/indian-flying-fox:pteropus-giganteus-photo-3787.html

and there`s more - birds, insects, even mushrooms, landscapes and flowers... - a website about Earth`s beings and their habitats. The lowest resolution is free of use (has watermark) and higher size is paid.

Zemeckis to establish new studios in Czech Republic

After the announcement of planned closing of ImagemoversDigital, there are big news about radical change of Robert Zemeckis new plans for his future bussiness. It was found by czech State Scientific Institute DNA Division that Zemeckis is family relative to famous czech animator Hermina Tyrlova.

More surprisingly, after he found out, he started aquiring properties in the industrial zone near Prague. Today he made it clear he wants to connect upon traditions of Tyrlova stop motion animation style in a grand scale and establish a new TyrloZemeckMovers studios that should produce 3D sequels to her film Ferda Mravenec, Micek Flicek and others. The size of studio should be around 1200 employees and 2 full feature length movies per year are planned. The rights are being aquired from Ondrej Sekora`s (Ferda Mravenec children book author) family today as well.