Free Webinar: Creating Custom Facial Rigs in Anime Studio Pro 9 Join Vern in this 1-hour webinar as he shows you how to create your own facial control rigs to animate the faces of your characters in Anime Studio Pro. Learn how to build simple controls for opening and closing the eyes, and for animating the eyebrows. These control rigs will allow you to animate features such as these both separately and/or together. ...Read More »

Bread & Butter 3D By Ko Maruyama Here's why Zax Dow created Zaxwerks and why his software is so valuable even if you already have another 3D program. 3D work can be divided into two main categories: Bread and Butter work, and Custom work. Everyone would like to get custom work but it's the bread and butter work that keeps food on your table. The big mystery here is why most people use custom software on bread and butter jobs? Do they even realize there is a difference? Doing that is like drawing animation by hand; the result can be completely custom but boy does it take a lot of time and skill to do. ...Read More »

The Art of the Trailer: Two Years in 30 Seconds The trailer plays a major role in the marketing and ultimate success of a feature motion picture. This on-screen advertisement is so engrained in popular culture that most of the time it is taken for granted by movie goers. But industry marketing veterans know the trailer is the first and last chance to create a lasting impression on an audience. Most trailers range in length between 30 seconds and two minutes. It's within that short time span that the viewer will pick up on hundreds of cues about the movie. In the blink of an eye he will determine the genre, the gist of the story, the aesthetic and level of production. By the end of the trailer the viewer might well determine the fate of the movie. Is it a must-see or to-be-avoided? ...Read More »

Coca-Cola's 2012 Euro Cup "Spirit of the Euro" Commercial Rockets to Life with DaVinci Resolve Coca-Cola's 2012 Euro Cup "Spirit of the Euro" commercial is an animated wild ride that captures the excitement, fun and craziness of the soccer tournament and its fans. In the spot, a very passionate fan zooms through the sky in a Coca-Cola powered soccer boot, releasing soccer ball bubbles in its wake that turn all they touch into deliriously enthusiastic soccer fans. Produced by Portland, Oregon based BENT IMAGE LAB and directed by Carlos Lascano, "Spirit of the Euro" is a highly creative and exciting commercial that required equally intense and vibrant color to bring it to life, which was achieved thanks to Jalal Jemison, BENT's lead colorist, and Blackmagic Design's DaVinci Resolve color correction software. ...Read More »

Q&A with Creative Supervisor of Replacement Animation & Engineering Brian McLean With ParaNorman, we have made the first stop-motion movie that uses a 3D Color Printer. The technique is similar, but what the 3D Color Printer affords you to do is to build color into the model. ParaNorman is not only a wonderful story but it is the most advanced stop motion film of all time. I think the audience members will ultimately get so involved in the story that the will forget that they are actually watching a hand crafted stop motion movie. Only after the movie is over do they have time to think "whoa how in the world did they do that?" ...Read More »

Q&A with Animation Supervisor Brad Schiff I have many proud moments from this film. Most of them revolve around the success of the animation team. While it seems like it's all fun and games, what we do is incredibly difficult and taxing...mentally and physically. It takes great skill, concentration and confidence to animate at this level. Witnessing the animators on this film shoot the greatest shots of their careers on ParaNorman has proven to be most rewarding to me. ...Read More »

Q&A with Visual Effects Supervisor Brian Van't Hul In Part 2 of our PARANORMAN interview series we talk with Brian Van't Hul who works at animation studio LAIKA, and was also the visual effects supervisor on the company's Oscar-nominated 2009 feature "Coraline." His previous stop-motion credits include Tim Burton's "The Nightmare Before Christmas" and "James & the Giant Peach." ...Read More »

Q&A with Director of Photography Tristan Oliver A cinematographer for over 20 years, Tristan Oliver's stop-motion animation credits as cinematographer include the Academy Award-winning short films "The Wrong Trousers" and "A Close Shave," as well as the features "Chicken Run", Wes Anderson's Academy Award-nominated "Fantastic Mr. Fox," and the Academy Award-winning "Wallace & Gromit in The Curse of the Were-Rabbit." ...Read More »

IdeaRocket Helps Launch Eighth Season of the SHOWTIME Comedy Series "Weeds" with New Show Open The hit SHOWTIME series "Weeds" is back for its eighth and final season, which called for a new show open to deftly provide the backstory of the entire seven seasons. The show's producers were fascinated by an animation technique they came across called whiteboard and asked IdeaRocket to run with the format. ...Read More »

iPiSoft Motion Capture By Ko Maruyama Many of you at E3 have already started to fill out your shopping list with the newest titles for your gaming time, but there is more software that will let you take advantage of your gaming hardware. Make your own movies with your Microsoft Kinect or multiple Sony PS Eye cameras. iPiSoft makes motion capture software that allows you to translate your acting into a 3D character. ...Read More »

Adobe CS6 Release Delivers Major Innovations for Design, Web and Video Pros Powerful new releases of 14 CS6 applications and four Creative Suites - Adobe Creative Suite 6 Design & Web Premium, Adobe Creative Suite 6 Design Standard, Adobe Creative Suite 6 Production Premium, and Adobe Creative Suite 6 Master Collection - drive home Adobe's continued innovation across creative markets. A new subscription-based offering, Adobe Creative Cloud, will provide users with the ability to download and install every Adobe CS6 application* announced. ...Read More »

CINEVERSITY V2 By Ko Maruyama MAXON has retooled its online learning site, CINEVERSITY. The site was been offering tutorials, project files, and C4D discussion for a few years, but the newest version features better ways to learn and engage with the MAXON CINEMA 4D community. ...Read More »

Adobe Photoshop Touch By Ko Maruyama Adobe recently released a set of tablet applications dubbed their Touch Apps. The applications allow you to design on the go, taking your tablet and your creativity anywhere you want. The workflow presented is actually two-fold. The first is on the mobile device, allowing you to rough out concepts on your tablet, then refine and finish your work on a desktop machine. ...Read More »

Imagineer Systems / Siggraph Hong Kong By Ko Maruyama Imagineer Systems is Hollywood's favorite planar tracker.  At this year's SIGGRAPH convention in Hong Kong, Imagineer Systems brought their Mocha Pro workflow to demo for the strong visual effect communities that attend the asian conference. ...Read More »

Exclusive Q&A: A Conversation With Director/Animator Ian Chisholm What began six years ago as simply a "creative outlet" for filmmaker/animator Ian Chisholm, Clear Skies III, the third film in his machinima series about the space adventures of the crew aboard the battleship Clear Skies, has steadily built a huge online audience thanks to its memorable storyline and characters, and innovative use of the iPi Soft's Desktop Motion Capture system, which played an integral role in bringing Chisholm's vision to life. ...Read More »

Tools and Technologies for Working with 3D on the Set By Tim Dashwood The nature of how we shoot 3D and monitor it on set has changed as we have learned from our mistakes. Today, I would say 75% of stereographers out there prefer DPs to shoot in parallel. Not necessarily parallel rigs, with cameras side-by-side, since beam-splitter rigs are more flexible and therefore much more common -- but instead, pointing both cameras straight ahead, literally shooting parallel to each other. ...Read More »

Advanced Technology Succeeds with Tighter Budgets on Real Steel By Glenn Derry My team created something that we call Simulcam, which provides a sort of augmented reality. We pre-record CG characters and backgrounds, and feed them into a camera playback system on set. The director can then see CG elements, motion-captured characters and live actors composited together in the viewfinder or the monitor, using a real time chroma key. ...Read More »

MLAA: Efficiently Moving Antialiasing from the GPU to the CPU By Alexandre De Pereyra, Graphics Software Engineer, Intel Visual Computing Efficient antialiasing techniques are an important tool of high-quality, real-time rendering. MSAA (Multisample Antialiasing) is the standard technique in use today, but comes with some serious disadvantages. new technique developed by Intel Labs called Morphological Antialiasing (MLAA) [Reshetov 2009] addresses these limitations. MLAA is an image-based, post-process filtering technique which identifies discontinuity patterns and blends colors in the neighborhood of these patterns to perform effective antialiasing. It is the precursor of a new generation of real-time antialiasing techniques that rival MSAA [Jimenez et al., 2011] [SIGGRAPH 2011]. ...Read More »

Dynamic Resolution Rendering By Doug Binks, Senior Application Engineer, Intel Visual Computing The resolution selection screen has been one of the defining aspects of PC gaming since the birth of 3D games. In this whitepaper and the accompanying sample code, we argue that this no longer needs to be the case; developers can dynamically vary the resolution of their rendering instead of having a static resolution selection. ...Read More »

Bonfire Labs expands its creative tool kit with Autodesk Smoke 2012 for Mac In 2002, we decided to expand our design and effects business by splitting off Bonfire Labs. Our vision was to create something between what we were doing at Phoenix for commercials and what I did at the CKS Group, my first employer out of school. Bonfire Labs now expands its creative tool kit with Autodesk Smoke 2012 for Mac ...Read More »