Aardman Nathan Love brings new life to Crayola

Looks like Aardman Nathan Love has been busy creating new personalities for Red, Blue, Yellow, and Green. 

 Looking forward to more videos of these guys.. as long as they make it past the auditions... 






( and it seems like just last month they were kicking it with Kool Keith and MF Doom )    Kool Keith X MF DOOM - "SuperHero"


http://aardman.nathanlove.com/

Leica & Autodesk BLK 360 "reality capture" device

• Leica BLK 360 : 
• 360,,0000  points per second
• 60 meter range
• millimeter precision
• 360 pano device
• 15 .1 mega
• full HDR
• paralax free 150 MPX final image
• plus a thermal camera 
• 2.2 pounds
•  indoors/ outdoors
• wireless     ( to an ipad ? ) 
• one button  ( what did apple design this? ) 

available "spring 2017" 

suggested price :  ( with 1 year subscription of recap pro )  $15,999

http://blk360.autodesk.com/

Mental Ray now "faster , Easier, and Free"

Ok so don't get too excited just yet.. Mental Ray will be free for single, in Maya rendering, similar to Arnold, but you will have to still pay for  a "production render license" to batch.  However,, that license cost $65/machine/year.   So not too shabby. 

  
Floating licenses are $295 or $995 for a 5-pack, while systems containing a professional NVIDIA GPU qualify for special pricing of $95 or $325 for a 5-pack. Customers who purchased mental ray standalone from Autodesk will have their subscriptions matched with NVIDIA licenses at no cost.


 Also, the mental ray production render will be free for  colleges and universities. 
  

According to the blog, this will all go into affect November 30th 



MRBLOG about Free MR  

Nvidia Mental ray 

XPAND 3dmax event : December 5th

http://www.xpandevent.com/max/

Maya 2017 Bonus Tools

Steven Roselle releases a nice overview of all the bonus tool additions and updates for 2017


  For those you unfamiliar with Bonus tools, they are a lot of small production tools packaged up to a menu set for Maya. Sometimes these tools will find there way into the next version , but more often than not I treat them as "possibilities" and jumping off points for scripts that you could update and add yourself.   But they do include a lot of tools that make your life easier. 

 Bonus tools does have in installer so it will hijack some of  your personal setup, like hotkeys and some menus. So be sure to save a copy of your prefs before installing , just to make sure you don't over write some of your own custom setups. 
  For me, I generally install bonus tools to a fresh preferences, and then pick out the tools I want and copy them over to my Maya preferences.  ( case in point there are several hotkeys like ctrl + 2 that will activate the HUD for bonus tools Display ,, I've already got that mapped, and would like to keep my own settings) 


blog: http://area.autodesk.com/blogs/author/my-oh-maya
bonus tools available here:  http://area.autodesk.com/blogs/the-maya-blog/bonustools



of note:

•  weight editor window ( windows only) 
• rigging performance tracking
• Display Control   ( hud display controls)
• navigate graph marking menu