Thursday, November 29, 2018

Wednesday, November 21, 2018

Epic Games announces over $800K in grants

What better way to spend all that fortnite money !
 Unreal doles out grants to creators and developers using unreal engine. While most recipients are game and tool developers, there are a few films and projects focused on creating film.  One name you may recognize , being Matt Workman, Who has been tirelessly developing Cine Tracer, a realistic cinematography simulator. 




Learn more about the grants and the recipients here:
https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/blog/epic-games-announces-over-800k-in-unreal-dev-grants?utm_source=launcher&utm_medium=chromium&utm_term=showcase&utm_content=DevGrants&utm_campaign=communitytab



Thursday, November 15, 2018

Allen McKays' Venom Crash Course Tutorial

Mostly known for creating award winning fx for feature films, and creating great podcasts and tutorials about it, Allan Mckay has put out a new crash course "Venom" for creating fx for an action shot with Venom . 
Exect flash bangs, saliva, atmospherics, tentacles,  and then lighting it all up with vray .  
  Allan is very in depth about how everything is done, and includes alembic caches  for the scenes. And although he shows everything in 3dSMax , and ideas and practices are great for any software. 




Tuesday, November 13, 2018

FUSE FX NY Open House

FUSE FX NY is having an OPEN HOUSE !





It looks like they are looking to fill a few positions and add people to their talent roster.  

They want you to also add your area of expertise and any openings you'd be interested in 


On their site they have the following openings listed:

  • FX Artist
  • General Inquiry
  • Nuke Compositors
  • Office Coordinator
  • VFX Coordinator
  • VFX Supervisor


RSVP here for the event :

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSe01l3i4MlxTWpT_N1DRv6HP2i2BLqTgmIgPkY136u1xbdWzw/viewform

Monday, November 12, 2018

Siggraph now: Bringing Coco's skeletons to life

This is a great look into the technical and artistic decisions made developing the looks and movements of the characters in Coco.  


Wednesday, November 7, 2018

Synthesizing human dressing Motion via deep reinforcement learning:

Good reference for the next time you are dealing with nCloth or Marvelous Designer for your character.. 




Thursday, November 1, 2018

Autodesk's intro to Render Setup

  I've yet to meet an artist who is thrilled with the new render setup. Which to me is a little strange. As they all seem to like the legacy render setup more, even with it's quirks and reference issues, and lost links, and all the things that everyone has complained about for the last ... well since Maya was created.

   I think it mostly comes from the devil you know. We've all had those late nights of trying to fix a broken layer , until we finally said, "screw it" ,  and just deleted all the layers and started over.. or decided that that pass wasn't all that important and just fixed it in comp. 

   It also comes from simplicity. The legacy render layers couldn't be simpler. Put things in a layer, add some lights, change some textures and shader settings, and 7 times out of 10, you get what you expected with no hassle. Also a lot of studios have developed simple tools to make most of the issues go away. 

   While autodesk was listening to everyone complain, they decided to roll out an entirely new render setup to replace render layers. And in doing so, came up with something super powerful and flexible, and generally easy to debug. But also, a lot more daunting than the three or maybe even four steps that are needed to work with legacy layers. 

I think Autodesk may have been listening again. As they've just release a 7 part series for "Intro to Render Setup for Autodesk Maya 2018 update 4" 
(by the way,, if you are not on update 4, please do so. there are some nasty bugs that appeared in update 3) 








And here are the links to the rest of the parts.
part 2
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gu_cd6U-zCw 
part 3
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mc7PnS9Fp-w
part 4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9j9kkZptEww
part 5
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UGW_RY_4nsg
part 6
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1FZJbjqqNRU
part 7 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MiGN4erCXNE



In all honesty , I haven't watched them yet. but I will.