Anomalia - open seats for Technical Director lessons

according to a word from Anomalia management, there are still open seats in Technical Director lessons. If you want more information about how to enroll, follow this link.

Technical Director course is tought by Sunit Parekh-Gaihede from Hydralab. Animation class mentors are also tought by 2 Pixar animators.

how Pymel started...

here it seems is first forum thread from 2007 where Chad from Luma introduces pymel. There`s even a word about Autodesk picking it up under Maya as a standard part of the release, which recently happened.

Introducing Pixar Canada

Nice video, with some funny comps of Pixar character in live-action shots of canadian environment. With some new faces and insights into the new offices.

I think it`s a good decision with current economic situation and it will give the growing canadian industry another place with lots of new exciting jobs. It`s also not like those productions where big studios send simple work for prop modeling, comp-cleaning and matchmoving. They will have a chance to make the whole new Pixar movies. Although first starting with sequels for Toy Story and Cars, I think still it can be lot of fun and great opportunity.

IRON BABY

a must post, very funny and well done:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SyoA4LXQco4&feature=player_embedded

czech singer Petr Muk died

at age 45, probably after medicine drug overdose. Here are few songs he made with the early 90`s band OCEAN:

http://bandzone.cz/ocean

I think that was his best act. The band was actually preparing for a comeback this year.

And here are few pictures from recent years after 2000:

http://aktualne.centrum.cz/domaci/spolecnost/fotogalerie/2010/05/24/zemrel-petr-muk-tak-jste-jej-znali/

Ed Catmull and Pixar team management

this interview with Ed Catmull is very interesting. It`s about a difficult problem: leadership and team management in a succesfull creative company. In the end it comes even more obvious how much it`s about people, well assembled team, and that sometimes those leaders don`t immediatelly see who or what was behind the success their movie.

Great Anatomy book

this book I recently bought looks like it was made for body-builders or their trainers, but actually it`s great for artists too. I haven`t seen a book more packed with muscle anatomy illustrations like this one. Also, the quality is excellent. The illustrations are clean and feel 3d. The muscles and bones are often uncovered layer by layer showing exactly where is their origin and insertion or how their heads divide. And as we see all possible training poses, it`s great reference for riggers when checking the range of motion for a character and how the muscles or skin behave.

The third edition has 192 pages, and unlike others it also has female anatomy reference. At the very end is full muscle body in seen from side, front and back and skeleton front and back.

Highly recommended!

nVidia GPU raytrace render

my friend just installed new gfx card GeForce GTX 480. Apart from usual realtime 3d acceleration, this one can use third party raytrace render engines like Octane to use his scenes from XSI (or Maya) and get it done much faster then using his Intel CPU:

interview

grafika.cz asked me few questions about rigging work on Clash of Titans, czech language only (sorry ;)

http://www.grafika.cz/art/dv/krompolc-titani-1.html

part 2 is about more general rigging work:
http://www.grafika.cz/art/vse/krompolc-2.html