The LA Times sits down with Phil McNally, “Captain 3-D”, about lessons learned from working with 3D Film, and various classic camera tricks that don’t work in 3D.
2-D techniques such as the rack focus — in which the focus is shifted between the background and foreground to direct the audience s attention — are not as effective in 3-D filmmaking. “In 3-D if you just do a rack focus without anything else changing half the audience will be left looking at someone who just went blurry because there s a strong desire to look at what s closest and there s less desire to look at what s farther away ” McNally says
T2 Has posted some in-development work of their Children’s Hospital of Illinois animated promo. They’ve got the Videos, and the storyboards, all online for viewing.
The collaboration between Muller Bressler Brown and T2 started with a conversation about possibilities. The challenges of a limited budget did not deter the creative team of Amy Young and Tommy Donoho from an idea that would deliver great production value for their client.
Aximion has released a new beta version that implements some interesting user interface restrictions to prevent user disorientation.
The Aximion is the project developed to provide a 3D interface for Windows-like operation systems.
It replaces ordinary 2D GUI Windows interface with a true 3D virtual interactive environment.
All two-dimensional windows and forms are transformed into three-dimensional and user can freely move them in 3D space, aquire and interact as with a common 2d windows.
Lots of these tools exist for Linux & Unix, but not too many for Windows (due to the problems with Windows Development in this area).
While not official, rumors of what’s in the new GeForce GTX275 are floating around with a bit of credibility.
Fudzilla, claims that it scored a few details regarding the upcoming GeForce GTX 275. The site reports that the GTX 275 actually looks like a GTX 295 with a higher clock. By comparison, the GTX 275, featuring a 55nm GT200 GPU, clocks in at 633 MHz with a 1164 MHz memory clock; the GTX 295 has a core clock speed of 576 MHz and a memory clock of 999 MHz. However, both cards provide a 448-bit memory interface and uses GDDR3 memory. Additionally, the GTX 275 will share a trait with the GeForce GTX 285 as well, both offering 240 shaders.
VFXWorld has an interview with the guys behind the VFX of the new movie “Knowing”.
“This shot was definitely a challenge ” Jackson recalls. “There were 3 196 frames… When we got the plates we first had to paint out the huge rain towers that were on location. Then we rebuilt the scenery in the computer. Alex wanted to be able to modify the movement of the plane in post. To this purpose we had shot a very slow pan that followed the path of the CG plane. We could then reconstruct the location digitally by using different techniques. The background was a matte painting the major part of the scene was a combination of separate tiles that were shot on location. The 3D card technique allowed us to pan through them with the 3D camera. When the scene was recreated we could precisely adjust the camera to the motion of the plane that was finally approved. “
They also talk to the guys at Animal Logic about some of the scenes they worked in, specifically a train/subway crash.
CGArena is carrying a set of 11 tutorials for using Normal Maps in ZBrush, Maya, and 3DS Max.
In these 11 video tutorials you will understand about the normal mapping workflow. We will apply normal maps in 3ds max and Maya and offsetting the UV coordinates and not only this we will do much more in ZBrush. These tutorials created by the Pixologic (makers of ZBrush) for the 3D community, so everyone can easily go at advanced level in ZBrush and extract the full potential of the ZBrush. As always you can also download the files for later viewing.
TechCrunch is talking about a new flash-based visualization tool called iFree3D that can take data from various sources (Google Search results, MySQL tables, Amazon SimpleDB’s, etc) and visualize them interactively.
Currently you can perform Google searches for websites, images and videos, and results will be presented to you in boxes against a black background. You can manipulate the frames, drag and drop them or hit the ALT-key to move objects around in 3D mode using mouse gestures. This also works for MySQL and Amazon SimpleDB database, mapping out tables and relations between objects. Basically, the more objects there are in the source, the more useful the 3D view and manipulation mode becomes.
The product is still in Beta, but it looks like they’ve already got a pretty functional tool and a desktop version (in Adobe AIR) in development.
Over at Deep-Sea News, they’re talking about the recent earthquake in the Tonga Kingdom and comparing it to the 2006 earthquake in the same region, and they’ve got a nice visualization of the earlier event.
Next is the cross section of the velocity waves (P-waves) that show crustal density. The arc of blue is the seafloor of the Pacific Plate subducting beneath the Australian Plate. The yellow and red color is the less dense rock (due to heating by friction at the plate boundary), which is directly under the Tongan Ridge (and probably portion of the Kermedec Ridge to the south).
The last layer is the points where past seismic activity has occurred. Each cube represents an earthquake, with the large diamond the big one on May 6th, 2006. Note also how deep these earthquakes occur and how they follow the subduction trench.
Josh Quittner at Time Magazine was treated to a viewing of John Cameron’s “Avatar”, a new 3D movie several years in the making. After that, he declares 3D “The Future of Movies” in this new article.
I couldn’t tell what was real and what was animated–even knowing that the 9-ft.-tall blue, dappled dude couldn’t possibly be real. The scenes were so startling and absorbing that the following morning, I had the peculiar sensation of wanting to return there, as if Pandora were real.
Cameron wasn’t surprised. One theory, he says, is that 3-D viewing “is so close to a real experience that it actually triggers memory creation in a way that 2-D viewing doesn’t.” His own theory is that stereoscopic viewing uses more neurons. That’s possible. After watching all that 3-D, I was a bit wiped out. I was also totally entertained.
From reading the article, it’s a bit difficult to tell if it’s 3D is the Future, or simply improved CG and compositing is the future.
Aqsis has been selected as part of the Google “Summer of Code” project. Aqsis is an open-source implementation of Pixar’s Renderman, currently under active development.
Applicants can sign up to develop further features of the code and get cavalcades of publicity and a nice fat $4500 for their effort. They’re currently looking for applicants to help develop their raytracing prototype, level set geometry code, enhance Piqsl, and add Brickman, Point Cloud, and Renderman Interface Filters. Applications must be received by April 3rd.
VizWorld.com 
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