Renderman
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Create your own 'Toy Story' sequel with free tools from Pixar
Renderman is the in-house software that Pixar uses to produce its amazing animated films, oh, and Cars. The studio charges a pretty penny to license it out to its rivals, but doesn't feel that hobbyists and students should cough up those same fees. That's why it's going to give the full version of Renderman v.19 away for free when it launches at SIGGRAPH in August. Unlike other trial versions of high-end software, the company isn't hobbling the tool, instead, it's just trusting you to use it for non-commercial purposes only. Who knows, maybe you'll spend the next year building up a showreel that'll swing you a job over at Emeryville -- wouldn't that be the dream, eh?
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.
