HOTPOINT Land of heat by Platige Image

What a beautiful way of displaying this world of food. Its a landscape of edible delights designed to tease the taste buds into cooking.

This is an extremely well executed production with ALL elements actually CG. Be sure to watch the making of after the break to really see the detail in these assets which make this project truly "post" worthy!

Almost makes me wish they had not bothered with the "waves of heat" in the first place.

Siggraph 2012 Technical papers

I love watching these!

TUTORIAL - Image based forces using MASS FX

This is a really nice, simple tutorial from Sergio Muciño, showing the new potential of Mass FX in this year's 3D studio MAX 2013.

Click through for video gold //



Really useful! To read more from Sergio visit his new blog:

Sergio Muciño’s maxTD blog

RayFire - TD video

Made by mir-vadim himself! This is a Technical Demo video showing some of the best features of RayFire. I have followed this little plugin for years, and am completely amazed to see where is has develop to, and where it has been seen in industry.

I love the new fracture patterns!

Buy here >

This little video will go a long way to driving some new custom to your site, all the best!

3D Studio Max - Sneek Peeks

Well, there have been a number of these snippet, little, cheeky videos released over the pass few months, all from different people and with an odd variety subjects and video quality - so, with a marketing man's head on I'm not sure what is going on. Are these attempts at viral intrigue, or releases fro people within Autodesk HQ, or what....

But...With a 3D Artists' head on, wow! I think, at least I hope that some or all of these little 'sneek peeks' make it into the final build version (either 2013 or 2014), because some of these are fantastic!

videos after break//

Forger - Sculpture program for iPad 2

I have posted before regarding Sculpting tools for the iPad and IOS platform, I also spoke about these in an interview with Npower a couple of months back, it could be a good way of developing models or at the very least a nice tool for viewing and interacting with 3D content in an interactive and tactile environment. it looks like we have a new one created by an industry vet from Double Negative.

Called "Forger", click here for the link to download, it looks like it is gonna be about $2.99

Its a rival for Autodesk's 123Dsculpt but with an output .obj export and addition controlling tools.

MTV EMA 2011 - by Polynoid

Their 30 second, underwater wonderland looks pretty good and will work well with the ident and event cuts.

animation and more after break >

iDEV CAM for iOS

Just bought this for the iPad.

3D assets into legacy photography - quickly

This looks fantastic, A quick photographic matching tool for inputting 3D objects / animations directly into photographic scenes. This tech needs to be extremely easy to use, as you could see this being used as an API for consumers to use to use and postion 3D content within real world environments. This could be coupled with some AR API tech to develop better realtime model matching tools.

We have seen elements of this before a few times, however I do like the way Kevin has created the lighting matches and shadow cast algorithms. These additional levels of detail allow the final result to look far better and far more real than any other system has been able to generate.

Heres the video:

SHORT - The Goon by Blur Studios

Blur Studios have just completed their latest Short in "The Goon"

 This is an example of, a great collection of artists, writing and directing with with perfect intent, to produce a wonderfully original and well produced piece. I would never doubt that from the studio that brought us the amazing "Prey 2" cut scenes and intro animations, as well as the "Star Wars - force unleashed" collection of animations.

Animations are after the break >

3D humanoid Characters

I have done this before, but its always nice to keep collecting great inspiration!

Here are the other posts:

3D characters - from CG society

60 Crazy 3d Fun Characters

Vray Demoreel 2011

Chaosgroup have released their latest demoreel focusing on the classics of Archi Viz and the introduction of Vray 2.0 (released earlier this year).

IOS - bizango Blast

Designed and created by a CG Society member Olivier Archer
 
Created in Unreal. Worth a look, includes "making of" and "how too" videos.











Check it out - Bizango Blast

RayFire 1.56 Released

Mir Vadim has annouced today that his RayFire 1.56 Plugin for 3ds Max is now Available for Download:

Check out the new RayFire videos

Feature list:

• NVidia PhysX Rigid Body support via RayFire user interface.
• NVidia PhysX Force Influence Allows You to affect on objects in simulation by forces, space warps and mouse cursor. Animatable Time Scale property allows You to create Bullet Time effect in a seconds. Glue allows you to glue objects together and break connections between objects during simulation.
• Interactive Demolition System.for NVidia PhysX engine. Creates dynamic simulation and demolishes objects accordingly to their material and collision strength. Each fragment can be demolished further with proper amount of collision strength.
• Different Fragmentation types. Allows you to fragment geometry objects. RayFire Tool supports Irregular, Uniform, Voronoi, Wood splinters, Radial fragmentation types. Ability to draw cuts over your objects by mouse.
• Automatic update system.

New features in version 1.56:

• Support for 3ds Max 2012
• Support for Nvidia PhysX plugin 2.61
  

Autodesk - Photofly

I had seen this released a while back (July 2011 - photofly 2.1) and have been waiting for a little time to test it!

I have finally got around to downloading the installer and popping it on the system to test. I love the idea of this as well as the potential applications within an industrial design, and VFX pipeline structure. I know these two are not in any way connected, but both have been the staple diet of the 3d generalist for a while now. We are constantly asked to recreate existing product models for advertising purposes or other product placement shots, as well as creating environmental recreations in both Arch viz projects and small VFX for TV projects (I say small, as I have only ever been asked to handle individual shots on a contractual basis for larger community studios).

Autodesk 123_sculpt

  

This is a great start for this kind of app, We have seen a couple of these released before now, however most were practically unusable in their current state. This however, seems to be the start of the potentially workable solution; Ok, you cant export anything you do, and the options and import settings are non-existent, but I think this is just the start for this app - the sculpting works, and could be usable in the future, perhaps the app could be used as a texturing system only, or perhaps a refinement tool to existing models. Either way, I dont think we are looking at a viable production tool, but, it could be the start of something nice?

Oh and its free!

Siggraph 2011 - autodesk videos

More to come from Siggraph 2011

PSD manager 3 - 3D Studio Max

 Victoria, BC - August 5, 2011 Cebas visual technology previews psd-manger 3.0 - the next major release of the PSD file exporter for Autodesk 3ds Max at Siggraph 2011.

New Feature Highlights:

• 32-bit (HDR) layered PSD files:

• psd-manager 3 now offers the high dynamic range and color precision of 32-bit floating point Photoshop files for ultimate flexibility in post production. Los-less ZIP compression with prediction ensures a maximum of image quality at reduced file sizes. 

• Deep image matte extraction:
• psd-manager uses deep image data generated by the artist’s renderer of choice to generate PSD layers or channels from 3ds Max objects and materials. Artists worldwide value the effortless way to generate precise mattes aplenty from within 3ds Max.
• 3ds Max layer export:
• Scene layers can now be exported as PSD layers, offering a new way to produce masks that eliminates the tedious task of having to assign IDs to objects.
• Render Cut-outs:
• "Render Cut-outs" is a new PSD layers export mode that cuts the rendered image into pieces by object, object-Id, material-Id or by 3ds Max layer. The PSD layers provide artists with an excellent starting point for post-production.
• Autodesk 3ds Max 2012 support
• psd-manager 3 supports the complete Autodesk 3ds Max 2012 and 3ds Max Design 2012 product line.
• Render Elements the easy way:
• New built-in customizable presets for VRay 2.0, finalRender 3.5 make it simple to compose render elements. Layers are sorted and blending modes already setup as soon as PSD files are imported into Photoshop, as a composition into After Effects or any other application supporting PSD files.
• Optimized Adobe Photoshop and Adobe After Effects workflow:
• Layered PSD files - unlike OpenEXR files - are first class citizens in Adobe applications and work out of the box including support for multiple-layers, blending modes and color precision up to 32-bit (HDR).
• More Control:
• New built-in options to control image resolution (DPI) simplify the workflow of architectural and product visualization artists. The alpha channel of the rendered image can now be exported as layer transparency, layer mask, disabled layer mask or a separate PSD alpha channel. 

Availability
All purchases of psd-manager 2 that are made in August 2011 will be upgraded to psd-manager 3 for free when it becomes available. psd-manager 3 is expected to be released on 2011-08-31.

www.cebas.com