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Showing posts from June, 2012

Volunteering at Canterbury Anifest 2012

Just making anyone who's interested aware that Canterbury Anifest is looking for volunteers! You can find the page here: http://www.canterburyanifest.com/volunteer From the site: "Canterbury Anifest 2012 is approaching again, and this year jam packed with talks you don’t want to miss. We need people excited about being part of the South East’s only annual animation festival, and committed to making it a great day for all. You don’t need to be an animation student, or a film enthusiast to apply, you just need to be someone who ‘gets’ the magic that is animation, and can help provide a superb experience for festival attendees."   This years headliners include talks from a Double Negative Senior animator, a DreamWorks animator, and Pixar CG generalist; as well as some more to be revealed. It should be a fantastic opportunity!

Source Filmmaker announced

WHAT SORCERY IS THIS?! Animating films inside a video game engine, in real time. I swear there's some sort of magician working over at Valve. Check this video!

Blue Sky Studios' "Epic" Trailer.

I just watched it and thought that I HAD to share it: There's not much information on it other than it being based on a book called " The Leaf Men and the Brave Good Bugs " by William Joyce. Very exciting, and it just looks so lovely! :D

Pixar's Brave: Creating Merida's Hair

"For  Brave , the team at Pixar had to deal with a hero or rather heroine, who is on screen for almost every shot, but who needed wild, yet beautiful hair. The simulation department needed to develop a technique and approach not only viable on a hand crafted trailer shot, but something that could be used almost ‘out of box’ on most shots, or the film was simply never going to make its deadline..." Something for the tech-heads - an insight into the technical challenge of Merida's wild, unruly hair - courtesy of fxguide.com  

CGAA One-a-Day: The Act.

I just noticed this game pop up on both Flooby Nooby and Spungella and after watching the trailer I can see why! Here's a few snapshots to get you interested: The style is like Don Bluth's early work and the animation isn't far off either. Watch the trailer below and see what you think: The Act is the most intriguing iPhone game I've seen in a very long time, and the fact they've chosen to go for a really traditional 2D style is really refreshing.

Valve TF2 Gun Tutorial

It seems Valve are sharing a lot of tutorials at the moment. Here's another one. TF2 Gun Tutorial

New Designers - Export Settings

Hey Third Years, Firstly, congratulations to everyone on receiving your final mark yesterday. Job well done. I've been asked to put a quick post up about Premiere Pro export settings so that all will play well on the media server. The screenshot below shows the settings I used to export my Major project which apparently played well without any glitching. I just tried to keep things simple, make your sequences from your footage, that allows for the sequence to match all the settings of your renders or pre-comps. When I export, I pretty much let Premiere Pro do all the work unless you are exporting at a non-standard resolution. For this export I used H.264 video format and used the preset "HDTV 720p 25 High Quality." This always seems to work well and keeps everything pretty standard. It will export your video out as an .mp4 and if you are playing it at home I normally stick with QuickTime player or similar. VLC and Media Player Classic are great at watching v

CGAA One-A-Day: Slimtime

You may have seen this already, but it was new to me, and I loved Slimtime   - fabulous design, great colour control and a hearty garnishing of Stepford Wives menace.  I enjoyed too the rather languid, unhurried pace, which just heightens the strange, dreamlike mood of tranquilised consumerism and conformity.  Enjoy! 

Advice For Animation Graduates

The following advice for just-graduated animation students comes from animator  Elliot Cowan's blog .   It's great, down-to-earth and unflinchingly honest and echoes much of what we've been banging on about for months now, and happily, Elliot swears almost as much as I do.   I've pretty much lifted Elliot's 14 points from his original post; some of them are more Stateside-centric, but the points are universal, and everyone on CG Arts & Animation would do as well to take a moment to give this stuff the once-over and reflect on the principle message - which seems to be 'be amazing, don't be an idiot, blog/promote your work always, keep going, be ambitious, be realistic, keep going, don't be an idiot, be amazing!' Amen to that. Elliot is kind enough to suggest that, if you have any more questions for him, you should leave a comment at the original post and he'll do his best to offer up a reply. 1) Do not expect to walk

Character Design Guidelines from Valve

Courtesy of Spungella - a PDF Character Design Guide published by Valve here .

CGAA One-a-Day: Opening Sequence of 'Mirror Mirror'.

I haven't seen this film yet but I stumbled across the opening animation when I was browsing a blog called Animation Tidbits . It is a truly elegant and fluid way of portraying a narrative, and you can tell by its visual style that it's by Ben Hibon , director of ' The Tale of Three Brothers ' from the penultimate Harry Potter film.  It's just so fluid and aesthetically lovely that I thought I had to share it, and hopefully you'll all enjoy it too!

Monsters University Trailer

I couldn't resist not to share this with you. It's finally official and I am looking forward to it. :)

FAO CGAA Year 1: Commission 2011/12 - Your Marks - An Apology!

Hey guys - look, big apologies for the delay in getting your Unit 6 marks out to you.  We're an administrator down and there's a bit of a bottleneck across all years.  Rest assured your work is marked and I'm just waiting for the greenlight to email out your proformas once your percentages are on the system.  If you need to re-submit any aspect of your submission, an email would have been sent to your ucreative accounts last week and you'll also be receiving notification via the post.  Please be proactive around your resubmissions; the academic year is nearly up and I want everything done and dusted. Once again - if you haven't done so already, please send me your email addresses so I can send you your proformas.  Can you use your various social networks to send my apologies down the line and direct students to this post.  All going well, I'll be emailing out your marks on Monday morning! Apologies - and thanks for your patience :)

CGAA One-A-Day: Magnetic Movie

Magnetic Movie from Semiconductor     is part documentary, part fantasia.  Marvel as the invisible forces at work around us are rendered visible via cgi to beautiful effect.  This is really exciting, speculative work, and there's lots more inspirational stuff on their website .  Go there to be inspired to think differently, not just about what animation and cgi can be, but about the world around you. Magnetic Movie from Semiconductor on Vimeo .

CGAA One-a-Day: The Kraken Rum Illustrated Animations

  Chanced upon these and thought they were bloody brilliant. The Kraken Rum Illustrated Animations. "The Design firm, Dead As We Know It, along with illustrator, Steven Noble, and animator, Adam Gault Studio, combined their individual expertise to create these unique animations. All the illustrations were individually hand drawn in the old engraving woodcut style and supplied digitally to the animators. For example, the Kraken octopus was illustrated over a supplied wire frame with different Photoshop layers applied for the shadows." Behance Page

@ Alan - Rapid Prototyping Questions

Hi Alan, I was going to e-mail but I think students from the first and second years might benefit from more information about the 3D printing service that the University provides as well - Basically, I'm interested in the requirements that the 3D model has to have before it can be converted and successfully printed, for example, when multiple components are intersected like the first image below, will the conversion process only take into account the shape that the two cubes create and ignore that there is data underneath? Or will there be some sort of error, and it is necessary to create the shape similar to the second image in order for it to work? I'm asking this mainly because I'm currently modelling some things which I plan to get printed, but I don't know how much effort I'm wasting on making sure that every component is connected as one single mesh, rather than a base mesh with separate objects extruding from slightly under the surface of the main body

The Post With The Most 07/06/2012

Incredibly, that's it.  We're done, dusted.  The fat lady has sung.  After thirty weeks of briefings, lectures, interim crits, final crits, personal tutorials, seminars, film screenings, life-drawing, digital painting classes, character workshops, animation workshops, presentations, pitches, Maya tutorials, After Effects sessions, work placements, and group projects, the CGAA year is over.   A veritable confetti of 'Don't touch - Rendering!' notices now litter the carpets of the computer rooms and silence has settled eerily about the place as the whine of oven-hot hardware powers down.  The ambient temperature of the CGAA baseroom has dropped from 'sauna' to normal, and the colour is at last returning to the faces of our students and soon-to-be graduates who have slept at last, their systems purged of the twin toxins of taurine and  Pot Noodle ... The end is nigh - but not quite yet.  For some of our graduates, it's New Designers 2012

Trailer: Wreck It Ralph

Wreck It Ralph is the new up coming film by Disney. The story is about a badguy game character who does not want to be villain anymore and decide to jump into different game so he can change how everyone sees him.