A good read. Its in 2 parts
Kon-Tiki: water sims & digital sharks →
By Ian Failes:
Kon-Tiki tells the true story of explorer Thor Heyerdahl and his crew who crossed the Pacific Ocean on a balsa wood raft in 1947. Directed by Joachim Rønning and Espen Sandberg, the film was a Norwegian production with water sim and creature effects crafted by five Scandinavian VFX studios: Fido, Gimpville, Important Looking Pirates, Storm Studios and Blink Studios.
Pixar Animator Dreams Up a New Superhero — For Each Day of the Year | Wired Design | Wired.com
The origin story is a critical part of any hero's development. Downing is no different. "I got into a rut, I wasn't drawing enough and a friend told me I was over-thinking things," says Downing. "I just needed to do something I was really into that wouldn't require too much thinking. I started thinking about designing superheroes and the more I thought about it, the more I wanted to do it. I threw the gauntlet down and decided to draw a super every day."
An Introduction to Aspect Ratios and Compositional Theory →
Ming Thein
Here’s a primer for beginning photographers on the concepts of aspect ratios and compositional theories.
Just saying.
Effects Corner: Visual Effects Tax Incentives →
Scott Squires;
I'm no expert on tax incentives but here's the information I've gathered.
An oldie but a goodie.
Die Hard 2… the last frame is an old, old school matte painti... on Twitpic →
johnfoster:
Die Hard 2… the last frame is an old, old school matte painting. and oddly animated even. relic from the time…
Tony Scott remembered by Keira Knightley →
Keira Knightley:
They say he held the record for the fastest speeding ticket in Los Angeles – 170mph on a motorbike along Pacific Coast highway. They say he totalled two Porsches along Sunset Strip. I don't know if any of that's true and I don't care. He was a man people liked to tell stories about.
Best nature pictures of 2012 - The Big Picture - Boston.com →
www.boston.com:
This is a compilation of images in which photographers have captured the beauty of our world, along with great moments among the living things we share this planet with. Most are from the reoccurring photo gallery The Natural World, in which photos of animals and our environment are selected from the many wire service photos moved throughout the year from all over the world. Many great photos of animals are taken in zoos, but this entry mostly shows creatures in their own habitat. -Leanne Burden Seidel(53 photos total)
Upgrade
We upgraded our workstations the best we could.Yeah, sure Tim Cook promised that we would love what they have for us in 2013. We can't wait for that, or take a chance that it might not be what we are looking for. What are we looking for. I'd like that Linux box we have for Mari to run OS X.
Each compositor has 48 gigs of RAM. We also upgraded to a Quadro 4000. The GPU support in Nuke is a great addition. The more RAM you have the more you can cache. It's nice having a huge amount if RAM. If nice to have GPU acceleration. It's a great experience.
The Foundry also needs to step up. When this so called "Love" that apple has for us comes out its going to run Mountain lion. Last time I checked Nuke doesn't supported Mountain Lion.
Sure we can move to Linux. If we were going to do this instead we would have done it already.
Depth of field →
Marc Levoy:
When you move the sensor in a digital camera relative to the lens, the plane in object space that is sharply focused moves as well. How far can you move the sensor before a sharply focused feature goes out of focus? To answer this question, we must first define what we mean by "out of focus". The standard definition is that the width of the blurred image of the feature has become larger on the sensor than some maximum allowable circle of confusion. This size of this circle is arbitrary, but a reasonable choice is to make it equal in diameter to the width of a pixel. The thick black vertical bar at the right side of the applet above represents one circle of confusion.