3d animation
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Studio Ghibli's first fully CG movie will be 'Aya and the Witch'
Studio Ghibli is shifting to 3D CGI animation for its next movie, Aya and the Witch. The movie will premiere on Japan's NHK this winter.
NVIDIA's latest RTX Studio drivers make Blender four times faster
NVIDIA's latest Studio RTX driver isn't just speeding up commercial production renderers like V-Ray. If you use the free, open-source Blender 3D animation software, you'll also get a boost, NVIDIA announced. With the new driver, the Blender Cycles renderer will provide real-time rendering and boost performance by four times compared to using a CPU alone.
Watch these artists 3D print animation into reality
Why 3D print a computer animation? 'Art' is a good enough reason for us, and that's exactly what drove Dutch artists to put a hundred frames into a single mind-bending installation. Using an Ultimaker 2 3D printer and liberal amounts of glue and string, artists Job, Joris and Marieke squeezed all the cells from a short animation (below) into a single mise-en-scene. At a glance, you can see the fate of the teal-hued hero as he vaults off a cup and into a vase, with each detail (including a bouncing ball and shattered cup) faithfully reproduced in PVC. If you want to feel like you're inside a computer where time has lost all meaning, it'll be exhibited at Amersfoort's Kunsthal museum on March 29th.
How I turned my Xbox's Kinect into a wondrous motion-capture device
When Microsoft started selling a basic Xbox One package without a Kinect V2 for $100 less, the result was unequivocal: Sales took off. Most gamers can take or leave the ubiquitous depth camera, because it just isn't as useful for gaming as, say, the Wii controller. It is indispensable for certain titles, like Just Dance 2014, Xbox Fitness and Fighter Within. Others, such as Madden NFL 25 and Battlefield 4, can make use of the Kinect 2, but absolutely don't need it. In other words, it's a big bag of meh for gamers and casual users. But recently, my ears perked up when Microsoft released a $50 cable that lets you use the Xbox One's Kinect on a PC.
Trippy Kinect-powered art disintegrates a man
Though many folks are meh on Microsoft's Kinect 2 for gaming, in the hands of a 3D animator it can do wondrous things. Case in point is the Momentum art project from a group called Schnellebuntebilder. Using custom software, they captured a live action actor with a Kinect 2, and convert him into a series of swirling cube particles and light rays, all in real time (see below). The team doesn't explain how it works, but it looks like they modeled the actor beforehand and then mapped his particle-effect avatar onto the live action video. On top of making us trip balls, doing all that in real time is quite the technical achievement.
Skydrift challenges you to avoid collisions and stay alive while you fall
Games are often free or good. This game is free and good. Skydrift is simple to learn, but hard to play. You are falling from a high altitude toward the Earth's core. To stay alive, you must collect some glowing orbs and avoid hitting obstacles. Movement uses the gyros in your iOS device. I started with an "I can do this" attitude, but I was soon humbled. At the start, I wasn't even sure what I was supposed to be doing. But soon the fog lifted and I got aggressive with my moves and was picking up the orbs and avoiding collisions. The graphics are other-worldly and smooth on my third-generation iPad. After a few minutes, I was hooked, trying to go deeper and deeper. Tyson Kubota, author of the game, leads digital development for Criterion, the great little company that provides wonderful special editions of classic movies. The game is the result of Tyson's interest in immersive environments. I like the game a lot. I haven't gotten to the third of four levels yet, but I am motivated. If you're looking for some fun and a challenge, Skydrift is worth the 50 MB download. Skydrift needs iOS 5.0 or above, and it is optimized for the iPhone 5 and universal.
Live2D drawing technology from Cybernoids adds a little 3D spice to your hand drawn images
While 3D graphics have been filling our eyes in cinemas and video games way before Nemo ever got lost, we've typically had to settle for computer generated artwork. Live2D from Cybernoids is a drawing technology that hopes to change that. The software lets animators and game creators give hand drawn 2D images rudimentary 3D qualities. In the video above you can see the character turn her head, and the image -- based solely on the 2D version -- twists and adapts in real-time. There are two versions of the software, one based on polygons, and the other vectors, and there is support for consoles and smartphones -- but no details on specifics at this time. The developers admit it's only suitable for limited movement, such as in dialog-based games, for now, but hope to have the tools to handle full 360 degree motions over the next two years. At least, for now, its way way further down on the creep-o-meter scale.
Organic Motion's OpenStage motion capture system grabs 200FPS, no backdrop required (video)
At just under $40,000 for an eight camera setup, we're hardly in hobbyist territory here, but Organic Motion's new OpenStage 2.0 motion capture system could certainly make do in the average basement. Unlike a few competing solutions shown here at SIGGRAPH, this one actually has no backdrop mandate, and better still, doesn't require you to latch a single sensor onto your subject. The magic lies within the cameras hung above -- kits are sold that contain between eight and 24 cameras, and even the latter can be handled with a single workstation. Multi-person tracking ain't no thang, and while you aren't capturing HD footage here, the high-speed VGA capability enables up to 200 frames per second to be logged. Not surprisingly, the company's aiming this squarely at the animation and medical realms, and should start shipping bundles as early as next month. Looking to take down Pixar? You'll need a lot more than 40 large, but perhaps the video after the break will give you a bit of inspiration. %Gallery-130288%
VideoMocap creates 3D animation from any 2D clip (video)
If you've ever used a video editing program, you might be familiar with the concept of "keyframes," which define the beginning and end of a particular segment. Seeing where you came from and where you're going, the computer literally guesses what's in between, and creates smooth animation as a result -- the very same technique that students at Texas A&M University use to create motion capture that doesn't require arrays of cameras or ping-pong balls. Dropping the laws of Newtonian physics into their algorithms, Xiaolin Wei and Jinxiang Chai claim to have whipped up a computer program that can turn most any 2D video into simple 3D animation in real time, with just a few keyframes to start out. For instance, in a complex weightlifting segment 310 frames long where the camera panned, tilted and zoomed, animators had only to position eleven joints in thirteen keyframes (and make seven minute adjustments) to get the entire animation to turn out. See it in action after the break, or read their entire SIGGRAPH paper at our more coverage link.
Blizzard's CG team talks about making those epic cinematics
Blizzplanet's got the tip on a great interview over at CG Channel with the Blizzard CGI team, responsible for, among many other great cinematics, putting together the Wrath intro trailer. We heard from this team back at BlizzCon, and here they give a little more insight into the thinking behind their process, rather than the process itself.One of the first questions that comes up is one that everyone would like to ask: Why haven't we seen a longer feature from these guys? But they say that, as always, their first priority is making great games, not great features, and as much as people would want to see a 60 or 90 minute cinematic from this team, they work for a game company. They also talk about something they've been working more on lately: in-game cinematics. I saw this at work in Starcraft II back at BlizzCon -- while most of Blizzard's cinematics so far have been completely separate from the in-game art, Starcraft II introduces models that are high-quality enough to be rendered cinematically, so much of the actual cutscenes are in-game rather than in separately rendered CGI. But as the team points out, their goal is to make them no less awesome.Finally, they do get into the nitty-gritty of designing their cinematics, and 3D animators will enjoy the ins and outs of how Blizzard made Arthas summon that Frostwyrm. We're just in awe of how much great work this team does -- hopefully we'll be seeing lots more of it in the future.
