Creature Designer Neville Page worked with J.J.Abrams on the new Star Trek film and sat down with Bell Desowitz to talk about some of his creations.
BD: What toolset do you use these days?
NP: I prefer to start everything out with pencil and paper. I feel like I’ve got greater controls. But I’ll move fairly quickly into digital when the idea needs to be sold. And I find that ZBrush as a sculpting piece of software makes sense to use earlier and earlier. It’s all contingent on what the subject matter is… but in terms of the alien design for this film, since they were all human, it made sense to just go into ZBrush, grab a basic head and start tweaking it around. And I was able to generate a lot of ideas very quickly. So ZBrush is definitely a big part of my process; Photoshop, of course, for illustration and developing graphics… all the tattoos were done traditionally by hand — maybe hundreds. And then I took them into Photoshop and cleaned them up a bit and did the symmetry and the manipulation so they’d fit specific actors. And then modo, which is a new software for me. I love it. In fact, I have a demo opened in front of me, which is more architectural. Just trying to get my ability for doing environments a little higher. But it’s the software that makes sense for me. Maya is incredible, of course, but I don’t aspire to be that kind of artist as a digital designer.
The Province has an interview with Mark Breakspear of CIS about the visual effects done for “Angels and Demons”, including some interesting images of a shot in various stages of development.
Visual effects supervisor Mark Breakspear headed a team of as many as 50 digital artists at CIS Vancouver, who recreated the interiors of three Rome churches, including St. Peter’s Basilica. Tom Hanks and the rest of the cast were filmed against green screens on Los Angeles soundstages, and Breakspear’s team added the ornate backgrounds digitally.
The Vancouver firm, one of four visual effects companies that worked on the huge project, also added digital effects to exterior scenes filmed in a replica of St. Peter’s square built on an L.A. backlot.
Elitegroup Computer Systems (ECS) plans to announce a new line of Video Cards at the Computex Taipei 2009 Conference. Starting with new AMD & Intel chipset motherboards, they are also announcing 3 lines of video cards using both ATI & Nvidia Chipsets:
Russian company Unigine Corp has created a new commercial graphics engine targeted towards video games and visualization applications, that runs on Windows and Linux and supports almost all modern hardware.
Supports Intel 32 and 64-bit or 64-bit PowerPC, uses the capabilities of multicore processors and is compatible with at least 3 families of compilers: Microsoft Visual C + + 2005/2008, Intel Compiler 10.1 and GNU Comppiler Collection (GCC) versions 3.4 and 4.xx
A demo is available on their site, and the visuals are pretty impressive. It requires at least an nVidia 6xxx chip or an ATI Radeon R5xx or better, and supports both SLI and CrossFire.
DisplayLink’s USB Display adapters are pretty popular for situations where you need an extra display or two, but heavy horsepower isn’t a factor. Cheap, small, and almost limitless in application, one of the bit sticking points has been driver support. Entirely lacking on Linux systems, DisplayLink has just released a GPL library called “libdlo” capable of communicating with their chips.
This library is an open-source implementation of DisplayLink USB graphics software, and is licensed under the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL) v2.1. This library will discover and connect to DisplayLink USB graphics chips and allow for developers to support DisplayLink devices on Linux and other platforms. libdlo itself doesn’t include any drivers or applications intended for end-users. libdlo currently supports the DisplayLink DL-120 and DL-160 chips (“Alex” family).
The Scottish Medical Visualization Network is demonstrating a new tool that combines stereo visualizations, table displays, pinch-gloves, and high-resolution 3D anatomical models to build a workable training solution for new doctors in training.
Advancing this kind of technology could help alleviate two looming problems a decline in bodies donated for medical science for students to dissect and the pressures on training time posed by the European Time Directive which will see junior doctors hours limited to 48 per week from August 1. “This project is about making sure that by the time trainees are at the point where they have to use a particular technique or procedure they will actually have the opportunity to try it out virtually so that by the time they get from the simulated into the real environment they ve actually done it quite a few times ” says Dr Jim Miller chief executive of the RCPSG. “Whether or not that dramatically reduces the training time is yet to be seen.”
Follow the link to see a Video of the system in action.
Angels and Demons opened this weekend, and of course one of the major components of the movie is the plethora of classical roman cathedrals and churches. However, the Vatican would not permit film crews inside for shooting, so the folks at CIS had to virtually create the environments for greenscreen work later. However, they wouldn’t even allow them inside for proper shooting, so they entered as tourists and gathered as many photos as possible, with other tourists included.
To get around that, CIS created a giant virtual jigsaw puzzle in their studios, pulling together fragments from the images they shot. In order for the computer to be able to render a reasonable facsimile, they used multiple frames of every object taken from as many angles as possible. Then the special-effects artists at CIS worked on enhancing the images, which would ultimately be used with green-screen technology to create the interior of the churches.
A new video from Philips shows the making of the “Carousel” video advertising their 21:9 cinema displays.
After a huge amount of attention for the interactive film Carousel, Tribal DDB Amsterdam and Stink Digital have created the definitive making of. Find out how they captured one frozen time tracking shot lasting exactly 2 minutes 19 seconds.
If you prepare alot of visualizations & graphics for inclusion in posters or magazines, then you’ve undoubtedly had to deal with printing issues. Adobe has a great PDF available on their website on how to use some of the more advanced print preparation features of their CS4 tools on their website.
Among other topics, this guide introduces you to forensic tools, such as the Overprint Preview option in Adobe Illustrator®, Adobe InDesign®, and Adobe Acrobat® 9 Professional, as well as the Output Preview function in Acrobat, all of which are invaluable in highlighting potential problems. The earlier you can pinpoint problems in a job, the less expensive and complicated they are to rectify.
The document is a ~140page PDF available in both a Low Res(4.6M) and Hi-Res (17.7M) version. They also have one for CS3.
Creature Designer Neville Page worked with J.J.Abrams on the new Star Trek film and sat down with Bell Desowitz to talk about some of his creations.
The Province has an interview with Mark Breakspear of CIS about the visual effects done for “Angels and Demons”, including some interesting images of a shot in various stages of development.
DisplayLink’s USB Display adapters are pretty popular for situations where you need an extra display or two, but heavy horsepower isn’t a factor. Cheap, small, and almost limitless in application, one of the bit sticking points has been driver support. Entirely lacking on Linux systems, DisplayLink has just released a GPL library called “libdlo” capable of communicating with their chips.
The Scottish Medical Visualization Network is demonstrating a new tool that combines stereo visualizations, table displays, pinch-gloves, and high-resolution 3D anatomical models to build a workable training solution for new doctors in training.
Angels and Demons opened this weekend, and of course one of the major components of the movie is the plethora of classical roman cathedrals and churches. However, the Vatican would not permit film crews inside for shooting, so the folks at CIS had to virtually create the environments for greenscreen work later. However, they wouldn’t even allow them inside for proper shooting, so they entered as tourists and gathered as many photos as possible, with other tourists included.
VizWorld.com 
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