Every web-nerd’s favorite comic strip xkcd just wrapped up a 5 part series called “The Race” featuring stick figure likenesses of Nathan Fillion, Summer Glau and chock full’o inside VFX/Sci-Fi geek humor. It’s laugh out loud funny. if your into that sort of thing.
(LINK) to Part 1
Smashing Magazine has posted a list of Best Tutorials For Cinematic Visual Effects. The post links to 62 techniques ranging from the 007 Intro to Meteor Crashes. So this one post contains all the knowledge you would need to make a tent-pole VFX feature or start your own effects boutique. Right? Seriously, if all this information was available to me when I got started, it would have been much harder to impress people by showing them a chrome sphere on a checkerboard.
(LINK) to the full post
Nowadays aspiring your visual effects artists have a lot a resources that weren’t available in the old days (like 1990-2000) Fancy modeling,animation and rendering tools had yet to hit the market in large affordable numbers not to mention the lack of decent CG training on-line or otherwise. One side effect of all this is that the bar is set so high that something that was once a staple of the industry is near extinction.
I’m talking about truly awful imagery created on a computer.
There was once a digital shrine created to hold those works that had transcended from just bad to sublime. It was called The Gallerie Abominate an offshoot of Richard Morris’ Maya resource site.
It was a place you could always count on for a laugh and to gain small comfort in the fact that there was always something out there worse than what you you were doing. The archive hasn’t been updated since 2001 but it’s still worth more than a few chuckles.
LINK to The Gallerie Abominate Archive
Ever get sick of being referred to as a “3d Guy”? Well if you have you may enjoy an open letter rant posted on cgpov.com. It’s got some gems including.
Please do not ever again refer to us as “3D guys, THE 3D guy” or the particularly nauseating “3D Guru”. It’s dismissive, degrading, and just sounds f**king dumb.
The fun continues from there.
LINK to the whole rant
(via Eric Alba)
The folks over at Sci Fi Scoop were nice enough to interview me about the effects work I’ve had the pleasure of working of for J.J. Abrams’ series Fringe. Not only did they write up a nice little piece, but also posted a recording of parts of our conversation along with a nifty slide show. Check it out, and try not to get too mesmerized by my droning vfx blather.
LINK to the full Fringe article
’nuff Said
(via io9)
You know that Visual Effects has truly come into it’s own as a cultural phenom when there’s a story about it in The Onion. It’s like being a musician and having your song cover by “Weird” Al Yancovic. I have to hand it to The Onion writing staff for doing there homework though. The article talks about Vicon, a real life mo-cap company. and it features this quote.
“Our 78-person team is committed to capturing each and every nuance of the Obama administration,” Vicon CEO Douglas Reinke said. “Years from now, historians will be able to access high-quality images of what the former president might have looked like while he was, say, meeting with the Joint Chiefs of Staff on April 3, 2009, or tying his shoelaces on the afternoon of June 3, 2011.”
Get this, Douglas Reinke really is the CEO of Vicon. You gotta love well researched fake news.
LINK to the full Onion article
That “guy” is Bruce Branit, one of the creators of 405:The Movie and film he made is called World Builder. It was shot fully on greenscreen in 1 day and then spent about two years in post most of the work being done by Branit himself. The results are pretty impressive even if the ending is a bit maudlin. Sit back and relax with some popcorn the clip is a bit long.
(VIA Gizmodo)
Seems that the Golden State has finally wised up and started offering some of the same tax credits other states and countries have given up to movies and tv shows for years. The deal is that Cali will give back 20% of below the line costs capped at a $500 million dollar payout over the next five years. The tax credit also does not extend to films with a budget over $75 million (you heard me Stretch Armstrong:The Movie).
That sounds like a lot until you look at all the other tax credit schemes out there. According to the L.A. Times…
New Mexico offers a 25% rebate on production costs and does not have a cap. Neither does Michigan, where filmmakers get up to 42 cents back for each dollar they spend on filming.
So the question will be, which of the Hollywood glitterati is going to volunteer to spend 4 months of their lives eating Chile Con Carne in Albuquerque over the Pan-Roasted Organic Chicken With Oregon Morel Mushrooms at Spago to save the studios a measly 5%. I guess time will tell
LINK to the full article about the tax rebate in the L.A. Times
The most common question I’ve been getting around the VFX world lately is “How the hell do I shot and HDR?”. For those of you still doing visual effects on a Commodore 64, that stands for High Dynamic Range, the process of combining multiple camera exposures into a single image. Well, harass me no more VFX brethren! Professor Kirt Witte from SCAD (pictured above) has a great site called HDRI Tips and Tricks FAQ. Here’s a taste…
4 Rules of shooting HDRs
LINK to the HDRLabs FAQ
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