“An animator here at Disney will produce anywhere from 2 to 5 seconds of animation… per week(!)”

- Byron Howard, Walt Disney Animation Studios

It gives an interesting perspective of how much effort and energy is put into the making of one of these pieces of art

Just for fun… lets put some maths to this

If one week is 40 hours and the animator is animating 5 seconds and each second is 24 frames, then:

(24 fame per second * 5 seconds) / 40 hours = 3 frames per hour

In other words the animator is spending an average of 20 minutes on each frame to get it right!

Further more, if only one animator was working on a feature film with a duration of 70 minutes; working in this pace it would take her/him somewhere between 16 to 40 years to complete it

Check out the clip for yourself.

Cheers mates!

“The Battle of Alderaan. The Republic’s gravest hour. In the years before the signing of the Treaty of Coruscant, the Sith Empire sought to crush the Republic’s morale by destroying Alderaan. Check out one of the pivotal battles of this conflict in the second cinematic trailer created for E3 2010.”

- Blur Studio

May The Force be with you…

You can read more about it and see some renderings at Empire:Magazine.

“With CGI we can bring Hergé’s world to life, keep the stylised caricatured faces, keep everything looking like Hergé’s artwork, but make it photo-real.”

- Peter Jackson

I’m looking forward to this

Well, I loved it!
Cheers mates!

The Back Alley

I started this project over a year ago but ran out of time to finish it. However, I found myself with quite a lot of spare time recently – I guess that’s one upside of being unemployed

One extra fun aspect of this project was to figure out how to use the Cloth Modifier in 3ds Max to place the fabric on the wooden poles. I really like this modifier; very advance yet easy to get started with

I’m currently stuck with my laptop with only 2GB of RAM thus I wasn’t able to render the whole scene in one go, with all the displacement going on. Hence I had to break up the rendering into different passes with each building separated. I then composited it all together using Eyeon Fusion. Blimey, pre-multiplied alpha can be a real bitch! I had to delve deeper into this, and experiment with ways of getting around those ugly dark or white halos. So far I’ve made steps forward but I sense there is much more to discover on this, somewhat, confusing subject – but I’m always keen to learn

Cheers mates!

—————
Here are some WIP post:
WIP: The Back Alley – Part 1
WIP: The Back Alley – Part 2

Research Station 09 in deep space

Find out more and try it out yourself!

The Team

Kristoffer Helander – Technical Artist
Daniel Wallenius
Marie Dahlén
Love Hellström
Fredrik Svantesson
Timothy Myers – Cinematic Artist
Magnus Nygard – Sound Designer (External)

Since our education focuses on graphics, that’s what most of the team members was working on. I on the other hand was responsible for the technical aspect of the game. Since I have a keen interest in scripting and programming, and had a little experience of it from my previous internship at EON Development AB, I took responsibility for that part. This was a much longed for opportunity for me to explore the capabilities of Unity 3D.

Using JavaScript I wrote most of the code we needed for the game. That includes things like;

• interacting with the world
• picking up objects
• opening doors only if the right key card is available
• changing background music between different rooms
• the user’s HUD
• the main menu
• cropping and adjusting the cinematics to fit regardless of screen resolution and aspect ratio

Apart from that I also experimented with the particle system and created animated galaxies visible from the space station and a pipe/tube of running water. To enhance to look and feel of the game I also looked into shaders and found some pretty cool stuff on the internet that I was able to adopt and use for our project, showing that the Unity Community is a very resourceful place.

Story

You wake up in the cryobay onboard Research Station 09 but something is wrong… what is going on?

Screen shots

It's dark in here, use your flashlight

Plants in space...

The elevator's going down

Baccta Tanks in the laboratory

Credits

Download

Download and play the game for free, right now!

Silence at Zero-Nine (PC) [103MB, RAR-archive]

Silence at Zero-Nine (Mac) [106MB, RAR-archive]

Cheers and enjoy!

Shaderlight (ArtVPS)
http://www.artvps.com/content/shaderlight/what-is-shaderlight

V-Ray RT (Chaos Group)
http://www.chaosgroup.com/en/2/vrayrt.html
V-Ray has one solution that is already available I think. Check out this presentation from SIGGRAPH 2009; V-Ray RT GPU Rendering Demo

iray (mental images)
http://www.mentalimages.com/products/iray.html
mental images and nVidia joins forces to create a real-time renderer using the mental ray and CUDA (wiki) technology. It will be available in mental ray 3.8 and the current version (3ds max 2010) is 3.7 so perhaps the next release of 3ds max (sometime mid-2010, perhaps) will include the iray renderer, wouldn’t that be awesome!

RealityServer (mental images & nVidia)
http://www.nvidia.com/object/realityserver.html
This is cool, nVidia is developing a server-side real-time rendering solution for web 3d. It utilizes the iray technology from mental images and renders the scene on a server and the image is then sent to all the client computers, all within just seconds! Check out a video presentation here: http://blogs.nvidia.com/ntersect/2009/12/nvidia-realityserver-30-now-shipping.html

Now wasn’t this really good news!

Cheers mates!

My viewport struggled to display all the boxes but PhysX had no problem calculating the physics for me, which was very nice. And I finally figured out how to use motion blur with Particle Flow, that’s been bugging me for quite some time until now.

Next step will be to build some houses and pre-fracture them and then use those instead of boxes, add some particles for dust and debris and of course a huge mushroom cloud…

Cheers!

3ds Max with a dark UI colour, showing the ruins of Las Vegas in wireframe.

3ds Max on the left monitor.

3ds Max on the left monitor, with some fluid simulation it looks like(?)

3ds Max on the left monitor with black viewport colours.

Check out the video and read the article here: Special Review: 2012 Film. The Making of. HD Video

The company behind the VFX is Uncharted Territory, LLC.

A new plug-in for 3ds Max called volumeBreaker was used to smash buildings and roads to pieces.

volumeBreaker is a volumetric geometry fracturing tool that will instantly create sub-geometry within any mesh - geometry that perfectly fits together and fills any given volume. With volumeBreaker Cebas brings a Hollywood quality destruction tool to 3ds MAX. volumeBreaker was developed in consultation with, and to meet the very exacting demands of, VFX artists working on multi-million dollar movies – because of this, volumeBreaker truly is a production proven tool.

The tool is being developed by cebas VISUAL TECHNOLOGY Inc. and you can read more about it here: http://volumebreaker.com/index.php?pid=product&prd_id=77&feature=912

Now, ain’t that cool?
Cheers mates!

Its function is very straight forward; it allows you to quickly toggle between the standard grey and pitch black colour of all the viewports.

The black viewport makes it easier to see particles when working with Particle Flow and the standard grey is my preferred option when working with other stuff. So this is simply an easy way to toggle back and forth between workflow.

Installation

1. Put the file in your 3ds Max Startup Script folder (e.g. “…\3ds max 2010\Scripts\Startup\”
2. Start or restart 3ds Max
3. Go to Customize -> Customize User Interface…
4. In the Category drop-down list select Nanne’s Scripts
5. Assign the script to a hotkey, a toolbar, a quad menu or a menu; it’s up to you
6. Start toggling!

A special thanks goes to Marco “KIT” Brunetta over at Tech-Artists.org for helping me with some of the code

Anyway, feel free to try it out. You can download it here: ViewportColourSwitch 0.1

Edit:
I’ve just added the script on ScriptSpot.com, so soon I will become famous, hehe Check it out here: http://www.scriptspot.com/3ds-max/nannes-viewportcolourswitch

Cheers mates, and don’t forget to comment!