Alois Nebel - new czech animated film

A new czech animated feature film Alois Nebel had a world premiere on festivals and is coming to czech cinemas. The technique used is very similar to Waltz with Bashir (movie about Israel war conflict in 80`s), where hand drawn look and different 2d techniques are applied on top of real footage and mixed with 2d environments or cel shaded 3d objects. As well as the israel film, Alois Nebel is connected with war history and includes some imaginations of the main hero.
Check it out here:
http://www.aloisnebel.cz/index.php?lang=en

New Skinny Puppy album out soon

Nivek Ohgre and his allies (Cevin Key, Mark Walk etc.) seem to be very productive recently with Ohgr`s "Undevelopped" and now with new Skinny Puppy album "Handover" to be available on 28th october as mp3 at amazon.co.uk.

Together with id software`s Rage game release on 7th, october looks to be very exciting month!

Previsualization Society Presents - Postvisualization on Vimeo

Previsualization Society Presents - Postvisualization on Vimeo

Very good document about postviz, which became a standard today in visual effects postproduction.

Animation mentor - free webinar

Register for a free webinar about
Anatomy of a Fight
NOW!

;)


Registration – Animation Mentor

Tim Willits on Rage at nvidia UK

Here`s pretty recent (friday 23rd September) Tim Willits interview by GeForceUK moderator. I found this on nvidia.com as I`m buying new card for Rage and I`m going for geforce GTX 550 or spend a little more and get 560.
Btw. Tim mentions that average playing time on Rage would be 15 hours and if you do all side missions and just do it "properly", then 20 hours. That`s non-stop of course, I estimate to play that for few months on and off :)) Plus maybe multiplayer if it`s fun.


Btw. I fixed the Rage Character Animation post, now video is embedded

Jim Henson puppets in 3d as google logo

It`s really cool how Google has celebrated Jim Henson`s 75`th birthday today. They made an effort to make 6 pre-animated characters in 3d (using Maya) each  forming a shape of one of the "Google" letters. The creatures react on mouse movement, can open mouth and there is a one special action.
Here`s some youtube making of and comments from Henson company and Google:

Maya 2011 to 2009

I found interesting tip how to open Maya 2011 files in 2009 (and generally pre-2011). I have removed the header lines with "requires 2011" etc. but my skinned mesh still wasn`t displayed. Then I found from this webpage that you also need to remove or comment out lines with calls to command "relationship" which causes older Maya versions to stop there (I guess). The scene opened with skinCluster working. Big thanks for this tip go to author of that page.

More Pixar Brave stuff!

Pixar-Planet : LES ARTWORK DE REBELLE:
- unfortunately removed after Disney asked them


At least here are 2 images! Also, here is link to my first post on Pixar`s next movie Brave.

  

Tippet pipeline link

I accidentally found new link to an article about old Tippet Studio pipeline. Until some point it was available and then acm.org moved it under paid articles. So here is my old post edited with new link where you can see how they did it. It`s quite rare material, bit older today as it was used on Spiderwick Chronicles (2008) but it can be an inspiration for some pipeline TDs who yet didn`t have a chance to work for a bigger facility.


http://syntetik.blogspot.com/2008/04/i-thought-i-would-add-this-link-to-some.html

caricature

nice Brad Pitt caricature taken from this website which is some kind of compilation of various caricature artists work.

Rigging class/workshop

I will be at Maxcon 3d conference in Prague on 18. and 19. september having talk about Rigging in film on saturday and making workshop on Deformation setup and simple deformer development in Maya on sunday. All talks are in czech/slovak language only.
For more details and registration go to Maxcon website:
http://maxcon.maxarea.com/registrace.html


Link to workshop information:
http://maxcon.maxarea.com/workshopy.html

demo skinToolsEdit - YouTube

This looks like a nice set of tools for dealing with skinCluster weighting. For tools like this I would say, the more the better!

This tool is licensed, so it needs to be bought. But there are few free scripts

http://docs.osipaentertainment.com/Tools/Free/oeRay

...including simple python wrap deformer plugin (good if you search for some reference on Maya plugin dev).

http://www.creativecrash.com/maya/downloads/scripts-plugins/polygon/c/oeray-py

More Jason Osipa tools are here (from Stop Staring book):

http://www.sybex.com/go/stopstaring3

R.U.R., Prague

Prague post production field has new member. R.U.R. (named after czech writer Karel Čapek`s novel) is a post production studio assembled from experienced czech artists, some being ex-members of U.P.P.
As with another fresh Prague facility Cubone, let`s hope they will survive on the market (knock on wood! :)