Fstretch - maya plugin

fStretch is a new maya deformer that let one create astonishing stretch and squash setup very easily. All the resulted deformations are then sculptable and fast. The plug-in can also be used for creating believable wrinkles. The algorythm is fast and can be used on heavy meshes without major slowdown. The plugin will run realtime on a reasonable mesh. With fStretch, you can now setup awesome facials rigs easier than never before! A setup that can take you days to make will now be created much faster and have better deformations.
Try and see !

http://www.cgaddict.com/

Programmable Motion Effects

"Although animation is one of the most compelling aspects of computer graphics, the possibilities for depicting the movement that make dynamic scenes so exciting remain limited for both still images and animations. In our work, we experiment with motion depiction as a first-class entity within the rendering process. We extend the concept of a surface shader, which is evaluated on an infinitesimal portion of an object's surface at one instant in time, to that of a programmable motion effect, which is evaluated with global knowledge about all portions of an object's surface that pass in front of a pixel during an arbitrary long sequence of time.

With this added information, our programmable motion effects can decide to color pixels long after (or long before) an object has passed in front of them. In order to compute the input required by the motion effects, we propose a 4D data structure that aggregates an object's movement into a single geometric representation by sampling an object's position at different time instances and connecting corresponding edges in two adjacent samples with a bilinear patch.
We present example motion effects for various styles of speed lines, multiple stroboscopic images, temporal offsetting, and photorealistic and stylized blurring on both simple and production examples."

J. Schmid, R. Sumner, H. Bowles, M. Gross
Programmable Motion Effects
To appear: Proceedings of ACM SIGGRAPH (Los Angeles, USA, July 25-29, 2010), ACM Transactions on Graphics, vol. 29, no. 3

mocha tutorial: tracking text to a scene

In this new tutorial, Imagineer product specialist, Martin Brennand shows how to use mocha's planar tracker to match titles to camera movement. This is a good video to check out if you are a new user and includes a section on finishing in After Effects.

The Cup

After the five month regular course some students work in this animation piece during three months, all characters are based on psl-man rig vimeo.com/channels/psl#9032686 Made in Blender 2.50

Multipass rendering in Maya and Mental Ray

This tutorial shows a workflow for rendering 3D scenes in separate passes and compositing these renderings for finer control. The 3D rendering will be done in Maya, using Mental Ray and its “mia_x_Passes” materials, that allow the output of all information used by the shader at render-time. The compositing of these renderings will be done in Nuke using OpenEXRs in a linear workflow.

http://www.cgchannel.com/2010/07/tutorial-multipass-rendering-in-maya-and-mental-ray/

This is a new Multiphysics simulation by Lagoa Technologies Inc

The Goon - (2011) Teaser Trailer

The Goon. Blur Studios, the animation house also working on David Fincher's Heavy Metal, has been developing this animated feature for quite a while. But That wait is over as MTV has debuted a totally kick ass 30-second teaser for The Goon to tease the upcoming Comic-Con panel on Friday night (where even more footage will be shown). The voices are Clancy Brown as the Goon and Paul Giamatti as sidekick Franky.

3ds Max 2009 Tutorial - setting building planes

in this tutorial we'll go over how to setup building planes using orthographic images, the importance of scales and layers,how to assign textures and shaders, how to make sure the bitmaps are shown in the highest resolution, how to assign shortcut keys to important commands.
source files can be downloaded here (i'm not the owner of their copyrights):

lughertexture.com

Download free most big and beautiful hires texture for your 3d. Here you can download all type of texture map you need to use in your software Cinema 4D, LightWave, Maya, 3D Studio MAX, Rhino, Bryce, Poser, 3D Studio R4, and other. create titles or logos with lughertexture.com.

http://www.lughertexture.com/index.php

Philips Carousel

Philips Carousel




Making of




http://www.cinema.philips.com/gb_en/

Cool Skateboard ad

Jacksonkarinja of Rabbit morph an entire city into a living skate park in the 2-minute, live-action trailer “Transform” for Ubisoft’s new Shaun White Skateboarding video game.

Credits

http://motionographer.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/SWS_DIR_Edit_ALT_06171.mov

Pixar - A Human Story of Computer Animation

[Recorded May 16, 2005]
Brad Bird, Ed Catmull, Alvy Ray Smith, Andrew Stanton and Michael Rubin talking about what makes Pixar such a great storytellers.

Brilliant!!!

The Secret of Pixar Storytelling

Pixar directors, writers and artists shared their storytelling experience and expertise during a series of keynote talks and panel discussions as part of Screenwriting Expo 5, sponsored by Creative Screenwriting Magazine. In this brief overview of the all-day seminar, Greg Singer reports how Pixar manages to capture lightning in a bottle.

http://www.pwaltersdesign.com/cms/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=92:the-secret-of-pixar-storytelling&catid=36:directing&Itemid=89

Some old stuff - disney

here's a great post about the history of disney/pixar, real good reading/viewing post..
need to make more time for it...
http://hereitbegins.blogspot.com/2008/05/snow-white-at-70.html

Dynamic Curves 101

a tutorial by me about converting splines in to dynamic curves