Level 256 Completes New Sci-Fi Short →

Mr. Kleinberg:

"Leveraging the power of open source applications like Processing, Python, and bash scripting, we were able to take the point cloud data from the Kinect, manipulate it, and get it into Nuke for integration with the live action plates for texture re-projection,” explains Kleinberg. “The process evolved and grew over time, and when we finally saw the fruits of our labor on the screen, we were excited to see Karl Brant fully realized, taking on an expressive life of his own."

 

My favorite shot is when the the machine turns on. As Scott said you hit it out of the park.

Mammal Studios Opens in Hollywood →

Jennifer Wolfe: 

Prior to forming Mammal, they have collectively contributed their artistic and technical talents to award-winning work at such companies as ILM, Sony Imageworks, Digital Domain, CIS Hollywood, and Rhythm & Hues Studios.

 

Another set of artists doing the small and nible thing.

Way of the future?

The Pixel Painter: A 97-Year-Old Man Who Draws Using Microsoft Paint from Windows 95 →

thisiscolossal: 

Meet Hal Lasko, mostly known as Grandpa, a 97-year-old man who uses Microsoft Paint from Windows 95 to create artwork that has been described as “a collision of pointillism and 8-Bit art.” Lasko, who is legally blind, served in WWII drafting directional and weather maps for bombing raids and later worked as a typographer (back when everything is done by hand) for clients such as General Tire, Goodyear and The Cleveland Browns before retiring in the 1970s.

 

Have a good evening

An Open Letter to the Directors Guild of America →

At lunch I sat down and read this. Very well written Dave. Thanks for continuing to push for more dialog. I also feel the directors are a really great place to start. Our job has always been about making wonderful images to help directors tell their stories.

Hot pixel remover →

David Yu: 

Hi. Anyone know a script or expression to remove hot pixel noise from images or 3d renders?

 

A great discussion. Many great expression examples.

My two cents on Portfolio Reviews →

Pascal Campion: 

1. If you are images tell a story, you are more than halfway there.
2. if your story is crystal clear, you are ninety nine percent of the way there.
3. if your stories are clear and personal, you just broke the house.

You’ll notice that neither in 1 or 2 is there any mention of technique… and, oddly enough, there is still no mention of it in number 3 either. You know why? BECAUSE IT DOESN’T MATTER!!!

Let me make this clear. When you are showing your portfolios to people, you are selling ideas and personalities. Not how you handle Photoshop, or perspective. Not how you mix your colors, or how many different variations on a tree you can create. These are exercises you do in school to develop your skills that are used to create stories..which is what I look for.

 

Nailed it.

I have heard that artsts that come out of places like India or China have work that looks and feels similar. It is not a good sign that artists in the USA are having the same problem. Most of my job is problem solving. Only after I have thought about the problem and solved it can I push the right buttons.

I cannot blame the schools thou, most employers that are looking for insert application here want to make sure you know where the buttons are and when to use them. They are not looking for problem solvers. As a side effect they get non-starters that just give up when they run out of buttons to push. This kind of artisty also drives down rates as the thought is we are not knowledge workers anymore, we are just button pushers.

That is bad for all of us, incuding the owners of comapnies that make great art.

NVIDIA’s new Quadro K6000 →

John Montgomery:
The company says the new card was designed based on what its clients in several different industries have been asking for from a GPU. “Our customers are trying to do one core thing: look at more data at one time and be able to interact with larger datasets,” NVIDIA Industry Executive, Media and Entertainment, Greg Estes told fxguide. “You could be an artist working in Maya, or a guy at Nissan trying to design a car, or a geophysicist looking at an oil field.”

 

From Sim to Render: exclusive 60+ page iBook by fxguide | fxguide →

Ian Failes: 

Many recent films, TV shows and commercials owe their incredible fluid simulations and photoreal rendering to two visual effects tools – RealFlow and Maxwell Render from Next Limit Technologies. These VFX tools are the subject of fxguide’s latest interactive iBook, From Sim to Render: The Next Limit Story - now available free to download.

 

If you have a iPad have a read.