Archive of the Animation Category

Duiker Research Corp., creator of the Color Symmetry plug-in suite, has announced Color Symmetry Version 1.5 with Universal Look Authoring. Color Symmetry is a complete solution for emulating film looks and handling color consistently within industry-standard animation, graphics, effects and post-production packages. Version 1.5 supports a growing number of post workflows and formats as well as today’s increasingly creative look development demands. Read on at The Briefing Room

More 2008 NAB Show news from The Briefing Room

Today’s schedule at the Central Hall Content Theater concentrates on VFX, Animation and New Digital Workflows. Hear about animation and ambition on the Indian subcontinent at 9:15; Barry Sonnefeld and team talk about the look on Pushing Daisies at 10:45. At noon my dear colleague Carolyn Giardina of The Hollywood Reporter moderates a VES session with an eclectric group of 3D and traditional animators on the blending of techniques. Horton Hears a Who! filmmakers will take the stage at 3:30.

On the workflow front it’s the F23 and the Red Camera. The F23 session (1:15) focuses on onset workflow; at 2pm there’s a case study about Red/FCP workflow.

To find the Content Theater, look for the teal-ish tube tent in front of Central Hall with eight or so flatscreens playing a come-on loop, pass through the double doors into the building and start walking straight ahead about 100 feet, maybe less. Content Theater is off a little to your right.

I’m not an animator so my favorite part of my MyToons.com sample profile was getting to skin it with a pink hearts template that won me points with the four-year-old. One of the main things that seemed so clear in the demo I had was that My Toons was a fun and friendly place. If that sounds condescending, I’m not telling it right. The site–which allows members to build profiles and post their moving and still animations has a real ambience and personality and that seems important as more of these types of sites come online. There are some clever Web 2.0 style features, some smart implementation of groups and other things that will allow members to self impose the organization of the site, as well as building profiles that had some whimsy and personal style. It felt like a place that could catch on. Check it out and best of luck to the My Toons team.

Big, rich facilities have workflow problems too; they have to remodel workflow while midstream on projects…like Shrek. I don’t know why it surprised me to hear that over lunch in the HP booth. I already knew quite a bit about the ongoing build out of Dreamworks infrastructure; I’d just been to the facility a few months ago to see the extraordinary Halo conferencing system and listen to the power management guy tell adventure stories about heat management for billion-processor render farms. (it’s not really a billion–6000 I think). I knew they had to do the integration between the PDI facility in Redwood City and the Glendale facility while in production. So I never thought they had it easy over there; money can’t buy everything. more

If you own Autodesk Flame, chances are you already have version 3 of GenArts’s Sapphire Plug-ins and are eagerly awaiting version 4. From what I saw on the show floor at NAB, you won’t be disappointed.

The new version, which will cost $10,000 and is scheduled to ship by the end of Q2, 2007, includes 46 new effects and many functional enhancements. As before, the program offers an extensive array of presets with extreme configurability. With the film damage effect, for example, you can modify stains, dust, flicker, speed, scratches, dust, hairs, shake and defocusing, as well as color controls and motion blur. During the demo, the pristine HD footage morphed into old, damaged celluloid, with good responsiveness and preview frame rate on an HP quad-core Linux box running Flame 2007.

I also looked at the toon tool, which delivered Charles Schwab commercial-like effects with extreme configurability and performance. Check the GenArt’s web site for a complete list of features.

Director Steve Anderson and his colleagues made a detailed presentation about the making of the 3D version of Disney’s Meet the Robinsons during Sunday’s Digital Cinema Summit at NAB. Before that presentation, I sat down with Anderson, a first-time director, to discuss the making of 3D movies, managing the production process, and the future of CG animation and 3D. Click here to listen to our conversation.

–Michael Goldman

Folks from the U.K.’s The Foundry were very pleased to be touting this afternoon the new release of their Nuke compositing software–Nuke 4.7. It’s the first new version of the product since Foundry took over development, marketing, and sales of Nuke from Digital Domain, and Bill Collins, PhD., Foundry’s CEO, made it quite clear that Nuke represents the company’s compositing future, even though Shake (latest version 4.10) continues to spread in popularity throughout the industry.

The idea, Collins says, is to put some Nuke capabilities into new versions of Shake, and many Shake capabilities into Nuke, and then, eventually phase out Shake in favor of Nuke. He expects that transition to take approximately two years, since the company will continue to support existing Shake customers until their natural upgrade cycle comes up again. The movement to Nuke, he insists, will be “easy” for Shake users because of the increased power of the Nuke platform. The new version, for instance, includes, among other things, optical flow node, support for HDRI, RAW and Quicktime, FrameCycler Professional 2006, Truelight, universal binary for Mac OS X and lots of other funky stuff.

–Michael Goldman

Let‘s face it; there are a lot of multiple processor, multiple core computers out there. To a degree, they‘re reasonably generic, using the same processors, motherboard chipsets and memory. When I sat down with Boxx Technologies Director of Marketing Francois Wolf, my basic question was “how do you tell them apart?”

By way of background, Boxx Technologies sells high performance workstations into the digital content production market, and was showing their latest product, the 3DBOXX RTX, designed for high definition editors and animators, at the show. Here are the questions he recommended potential buyers consider. more

Las Vegas, Nevada — NAB — April 16, 2007 — NewTek, Inc., manufacturer of industry-leading 3D animation and video products, today announced launch plans for their latest development, LightWave Rendition for Adobe® Photoshop®. The product created by NewTek‘s 3D division provides photorealistic 3D render output, such as recently used in the feature film “300®, for Adobe‘s just revealed Photoshop CS3 Extended. Based upon the Emmy® Award-winning render engine native to LightWave 3D®, Rendition™ for Adobe Photoshop gives creative artists the ability to render models imported through Photoshop CS3 and deliver the richness of detail, textures and lighting attributes found in the original 3D object format, all within the Photoshop environment. Read on at The Briefing Room: 2007 NAB Newslink

Today’s Digital Cinema Summit (put on by the Entertainment Technology Center at USC) was heavy on the 3D theme and its impact on both the creation of content and the distribution and exhibition of that content. The topic was apropos coming on the heels of Disney’s Meet the Robinsons–the subject of an afternoon session at the conference. During that session, panel members cited statistics indicating that the 3D version of “Meet the Robinsons” opened on 892 screens simultaneously worldwide, making it, according to them, “the biggest D-cinema release to date.” more