“Rango” marks ILM’s first foray into full-cg animated films, and utilized a lot of their in-house expertise with Pixologic’s Zbrush. Over at ZBrushCentral, they have an excellent writeup on how they built it all.
The general flow was to sculpt and texture a three-day ZBrush maquette for each character and after approval, start in on the asset. A first pass model was sent to rigging while the model asset continued to be refined, hair and fur splines added, scales added, UV’s laid out etc. Once the finished model had gone to paint, the modeler would start on the facial library. We had a few weeks for each character model including wardrobe and two weeks on average for making our facial libraries.
Autodesk has posted a pair of videos in The Area detailing the new capabilities of the integrated Real-Time Color Grading in Flame Premium. Showing the effects of volumetric light, 3d cast shadows, lens flares, and the multi-layer timelines, it’s a great way to get a glimpse of what’s available.
In Flame Premium, Total Control in Finishing means Flame Artists now have Real-Time Color Grading as part of their toolset. For Colorists, it’s all about having control over Light in 3D Space. And for Smoke Editors, you get all of the creative tools of Flame you’ve always wanted but with the Timeline workflow you know and love.
Virtual Reality is fairly commonplace in the automotive industry, but Citroen wanted to revamp their existing facilities with something more modern and powerful. Nvidia and Scalable Graphics managed to merge up some Holobench displays, Quadro workstations, and some graphics magic to create a new cutting-edge solution detailed on NVidia’s blog.
A cluster of 20 workstations using NVIDIA Quadro FX5800 GPUs drives the PSA VR system. Previously, compute resources would be assigned to one of the three projection systems. But with resource pooling, those workstations can be switched to feed another display, increasing performance and improving the immersive experience. For instance, if the Holobench projection system isn’t in use, its workstations can be assigned to the Cave, rather than sitting idle.
If you’ve ever wanted to learn the visualization language “Processing”, now’s your chance. Every day during the month of May, the Vormplus blog has entries for “Processing Month”, covering everything from the mundane (creating points, drawing lines) to the advanced (Data queries and interactivity). Looks like something to bookmark!
Last week, the terrible nuclear accident in Chernobyl completed 25 years, and Live Science, as well as Ria Novosti, remembered the date with some infographics. A quarter of a century later, it’s the Fukujima situation that poses a nuclear threat, causing a lot of Social Media buzz, as we can see in Wallblog‘s interactive feature. Also interactive, the Nuclear Anxiety Project, and the Voice of America‘s look at nuclear reactors around the globe, close our selection for today.
This year’s tornado season has been particularly devastating, both in material and human losses. A couple of interactive features to follow the ongoing situation come from the The Washington Post, The New York Times and Tableau. To learn a bit more about tornadoes, Our Amazing Planet‘s Tornado Formation, Science, & Records provides some interesting information, as well as the look at the record breaking tornadoes, brought by America Infra.
“Rango” marks ILM’s first foray into full-cg animated films, and utilized a lot of their in-house expertise with Pixologic’s Zbrush. Over at ZBrushCentral, they have an excellent writeup on how they built it all.
Autodesk has posted a pair of videos in The Area detailing the new capabilities of the integrated Real-Time Color Grading in Flame Premium. Showing the effects of volumetric light, 3d cast shadows, lens flares, and the multi-layer timelines, it’s a great way to get a glimpse of what’s available.
If you’ve ever wanted to learn the visualization language “Processing”, now’s your chance. Every day during the month of May, the Vormplus blog has entries for “Processing Month”, covering everything from the mundane (creating points, drawing lines) to the advanced (Data queries and interactivity). Looks like something to bookmark!
Last week, the terrible nuclear accident in Chernobyl completed 25 years, and 
This year’s tornado season has been particularly devastating, both in material and human losses. A couple of interactive features to follow the ongoing situation come from the 
VizWorld.com 
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