Pipe up

3D Artist magazine has a competition to win the entire iClone Pipeline.

Hollywood is bankrupting its biggest talent

There’s trouble in the big-budget VFX industry, it seems. To put it simply, the big Hollywood studios are not paying the visual FX houses what they’re worth, or what they need to survive.

Two new CTA packs from Kurzal

Two new quality Wild West toon character packs for CrazyTalk Animator, from Kurzal. They’re on the Reallusion Marketplace…

Through the Looking Glass…

A cool film with lots of animation, which imagines a world in which Google Glass is everywhere…

FBX export from MakeHuman

New free FBX exporter (with rigging) for the free MakeHuman body creation software. Also of note is that MakeHuman has switched to a CC0 licence.

Element 3D

There’s a new real-time plugin for Adobe After Effects (Adobe’s motion graphics and FX flagship software) that uses OpenGL and OBJs. The 3D World magazine review of version 1.0 found Element 3D workable but a bit rough around the edges, and it seems you have to retexture your all objects by hand once they are imported (ugh!). But Element 3D 1.5 now has a…

“Real-Time Glow engine that allows you to add glow directly to illuminated materials or even image highlights. It’s extremely fast and offers even more realistic results than just using the standard Glow Plug-in.”

Real-time OpenGL shadows are also promised for a future release…

“Creating OpenGL shadows is not a trivial thing but we are experimenting with several innovative & hybrid solutions.”

Million!

This blog just rolled over the 1 million post views mark! Currently “1,001,230 post views”.

Lumion in the woods

“Cathedral of the woods”, by Stefan Haberkorn of Germany. Made in real-time with Lumion…

MotionArtist

Smith Micro has announced its new motion comics production software is set for release very soon.

YouTube webseries

A nice short introduction to writing Web series from one of the pioneers, as a free podcast. YouTube may be a bit of a sprawling mess, but I’m not sure I like the idea of the rush to “TV-ize” it. When you think of it, the bulk of YouTube starts to make historical sense when you understand it simply as a revival of the old music hall “specialist acts” and the end-of-the-pier “variety” shows — the wild and whacky performing animals, clowns and comedians, slapstick, dancers, magicians, singers, jugglers and tumblers, puppetry (machinima), etc that we thought we’d lost. They’re all there, in a new digital form.

[ Hat-tip: Wolf & Dulci ]

DepicT! 2013

DepicT! 2013: the Super Short Film Competition. Create a 90 second masterwork. Deadline: 8th July 2013. £1,500 prize money, a national broadcast slot on the UK’s Channel 4, valuable industry exposure, and other exclusive prizes. All production techniques are welcome, including animation. Free to enter.

Faceshift

New markerless facial mocap software, Faceshift…

Note that it also captures and translates the subtle eye movements, which are so fiddly to animate by hand but which really bring the face alive. Sadly, it’s industry-aimed and thus currently too expensive for most people.

A visual history of real-time

A two-hour compilation of the Nvidia PC benchmarking test-runs over the years, providing a visual history of the capabilities of real-time game engines over the years…

iClone 4 Pro, free

iClone 4 Pro, free on the cover-disk of 3D Artist issue 51.

Chinese Riverside Town

Video demo of the new Chinese Riverside Town set for iClone…