Home » Archives for August 2009
FrameForge Previz, popular pre-visualization, storyboarding and animation package for Mac and Windows, has just upgraded to a new version named “FrameForge Previz Studio3″ with a few new features. Big feature in this release: stereoscopic rendering.
With real-time Stereographic display, optically accurate cameras, fully customizable stereo rigs, automatic out-of-range positive parallax warnings and more, this stereographic 3D edition of FrameForge Previz Studio will allow you to prepare and control the stereographic depth of your shots in your pre-production as easily as it can your framing.
If you’re interested and in Burbank this Thursday (Aug 27th), then you might want to stop by and check it out as they’ll be doing a day-long demonstration. Find the full details after the break.
Read more…
Graphics frameforge, previs, software, stereoscopic
A new press release has quotes and information from the six VFX studios that made the magic behind G.I.Joe. The studios include Digital Domain, CIS, MPC, Prime Focus (formerly Frantic Films), CafeFX, and Framestore. Not only is each studios contribution impressive, but the whole project is a testament to Autodesk’s new focus on interoperability between tools:
“Enabling creative collaboration is central to our software development strategy,” said Stig Gruman vice president of digital entertainment, Autodesk Media & Entertainment. “‘G.I. Joe’ is a perfect illustration of the success of our strategy. The movie showcases the work of six extremely talented visual effects studios which used a range of Autodesk tools to bring this massive project together and deliver an astounding visual result.”
Autodesk – Press Room – Press Releases.
Graphics autodesk, cafefx, cis, digitaldomain, framestore, movie, mpc, prime focus, vfx
Jeff Thorp, creator of the “Just Landed” twitter visualization, has returned to Twitter for the “Good Morning” visualization. Visualizing 11,000 tweets during August 20th and 21st, it color codes them by time:
And this is just a simple sample of Twitter activity around the globe. All tweets are color-coded: green blocks are early tweets, orange ones are around 9am, and red tweets are later in the morning. Black blocks are ‘out of time’ tweets which said “good morning” (or a non-english equivalent) at a strange time in the day.
Follow the link to see the videos.
via GoodMorning: Visualizing Wake Up Tweets around the World – information aesthetics.
Science movie, thorp, twitter
Twelve lucky participants will have the opportunity to take the Escape Studios Skillset Visual Effects course, an 18 week course at the London Studios, for free thanks to the Skillset Film Skills Fund, and even receive minimum wage throughout their attendance.
The Skillset Visual Effects course will offer a rich mix of intensive practical training and industry work experience, providing participants with the skills and confidence for career success. Participants will receive comprehensive training in the use of Maya and Nuke and learn all of the camera tracking, lighting and compositing skills needed to create fully integrated visual effects shots to a professional standard.
This is a fantastic opportunity for the 12 lucky people, full details and applications are available on their website.
via Escape Studios Skillset Visual Effects Course.
Graphics course, education, escape studios, training, vfx
PhotoModeler is a piece of software capable of taking multiple images of an object and then reconstructing it in 3D. They’ve released a free whitepaper describing the technlology:
Do you need to create dense 3D point clouds and detailed surfacemodels of physical objects, and do you want to do it in a cost-effective and efficient manner? A new class of 3D scanning technologies, called photo-based scanning, may be the solution you are looking for.
This new technology uses a standard off-the-shelf digital camera in combination with specialized software that analyzes the digital images – there is no additional hardware required. The new technology is called photo-based scanning, or photogrammetric scanning.
In this white paper we define 3D scanning, review the current methods for 3D scanning, introduce photo-based scanning, plus examine strengths and weaknesses of the various technologies.
via PhotoModeler – Free White Paper Download.
Science 3d, model, photography
Kathleen Maher, senior analyst at Jon Peddie Research and editor in chief of JPR’s “TechWatch”, has a great writeup on the sudden surge of stereoscopic 3D movies in theaters and how it could either save or doom the industry.
Instead, the industry has found its lullaby: stereographic 3D. Big-screen movies drawing more people into the theaters and sucking more money out of pockets is a beautiful vision for the moguls, and it’s enough to bring stereo 3D back from exile after several disastrous attempts to go mainstream. Suddenly, studio execs are talking as if they invented stereoscopic 3D movies.
via Computer Graphics World – At the Crossroads.
Graphics, Hardware 3d, movie, stereoscopic
Gilad Lotan has scoured twitter and collected data during the period of the Iranian Presidential Election & following uprisings, and compiled them into an interactive exploration tool called ‘ReTweet Revolution’.
The ReTweet Revolution applet displays 372 of the most popular threads extracted from a pool of over 230,000 messages posted on Twitter between June 14th and June 24th. It is important to remember that this is only a sampling of the Twitter data polled from the public timeline at regular intervals. Nevertheless, the content is substantial enough to identify trends and get a sense for people’s practices.
ReTweet Revolution / by Gilad Lotan.
Science interactive, iran, twitter
There’s an upcoming conference in Leiden, the Netherlands for users of Quest3D products and realtime 3D.
Meet the community, and speak with other companies that are active inreal-time 3D visualization Have a chat with the Quest3D Development Team, hear the latest news and enjoy presentations and workshops. This is the absolute number one opportunity to watch the latest how-to presentations and discuss questions and answers regarding Quest3D and real-time 3D!
You can gain access to the conference with a simple €49 ticket, or a two-day training class for just over €1050.
via General information.
Graphics conference, quest3d, realtime
Another VFX studio that worked on District 9, The Embassy, talks to CGSociety about the weaponry they created for the film and their use of modo.
As they worked on a buried alien ship, an alien pet, a missile launcher and an alien exo-suit for the film, visual effects artists Simon van de Lagemaat, Paul Copeland and the rest of the team relied quite heavily on modo’s advanced UV mapping tools, 3D painting and texturing capabilities. Some of their work involved models already created by WETA Digital, while other tasks involved ground-up modeling.
via CGSociety – Embassy on ‘District 9′.
Graphics embassy, modo, movie, vfx
Here’s the roundup for today:
VizWorld.com 
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