Cloudy with a chance of meatballs 2

Just saw Cloudy with a chance of meatballs 2 - amazing animation movie! I loved the animation, the gags and the artistic style. The daddy character got more importance in the story then in the first movie which was cool.
I did quite well in the boxoffice. Made so far $273 million worldwide against budget $78 million, boxofficemojo.com. First one made $243 million with budget $100 million - so financally did better as well.
What else to say, similar nice surprise like Lego the Movie I saw recently. Great use of 3d animation! Btw. some of the gags/sounds reminded me Despicable Me (strawberry).

Trailer:

Autodesk Maya on per-month rental

Maya for 281 Euro, not bad. Autodesk has introduced their software rental plans and affordable software license deals.

LINK

AirMech links youtube learning videos in-game

For players of AirMech or those interested in real time strategies, this is great addition to Airmech learning tutorials - links to youtube videos made by AirMech players themselfs.

cartoon mouth setup in MoDo

Really cool demonstration of a cartoon mouth setup in MoDo by Richard Hurrey from Pixar. Very easy to change order of deformations and turn On and Off various deformation groups.


modo 601 - BallMan Rig Overview from Richard Hurrey on Vimeo.

Nicolas Ferrand - Thief game art

Impressive body of work for Thief game by Nicolas Ferrand
http://www.nicolas-ferrand.com/Thief

MoDo in 3d animation pipeline - case study

Heh, great evolution of a studio pipeline :)

Courtesy of 3d packages Lightwave, Modo and Maya from presentation by belgian studio Creative Conspiracy.
I personally got more interested in the rigging abilities of MoDo after looking at some tutorials from Brian Tindall. Watch the full video to see interesting case study 3d animation pipeline of a commercials/TV animation studio.


Creative Conspiracy's use of MODO on Uki & De Lijn ‘Ants’ from The Foundry on Vimeo.

Brian Tindall moving to Laika for Boxtrolls

Nice article about Pixar rigger Brian Tindall having moved to animation studio Laika.
http://www.mlive.com/entertainment/kalamazoo/index.ssf/2013/02/post-pixar_award-winning_brave.html

Also mentioning his current project Boxtrolls and interest in 3D printing technology, which is used in Laika for their stop-motion style animation projects.

Ftrack introducing Locations

Asset Management and Production Tracking system Ftrack is introducing Locations:

http://support.ftrack.com/customer/portal/articles/1460648-2-4

Locations features allows out of the box to work basically on cloud* and allowing to have your team on different locations, therefore the name. It also allows storing locally or synchronizing via cloud when needed. So files don`t have to be always uploaded or downloaded.
Very useful for production which needs to be organized but need to work with external resources. I think best for asset building like Modelling and Rigging and Animation in shot production because of its lower data requirements.

* using chosen provider, which is by default Amazon S3

Face cartoon rigging website

I always keep losing the link to this website, altough it is out there for quite a while. So I am making a post for this here.
Anyway, very useful as a guide for face and body cartoon topology and recently some free videos on face rig setup with link full iTunes version:

http://hippydrome.com/