Singer Says Quicksilver...
Just in time for the Memorial weekend, fanboy favorite Bryan Singer announced...
Archive
Hairtrix
Hairtrix is the offspring of two other plugins, HairFX and Ornatrix. Both reasonable hair styling and rendering tools, but both lacking something that the other had. So the obvious choice was to get these kids together and have a child. HairFX holds its strength in the generation of fur. You [...]
Wacom Cintiq 21UX
Wacom recently released the latest installation of is high-end production tablet, the Cintiq 21UX, with its built-in LCD display. A staple at design, photography and animation houses, the 21UX offers the most interactive experience of any tablets in the line. Sure, the other tablets are great, and I love my [...]
Zookeeper
When working in 3D files for production, it isn’t unheard of to get scenes that have hundreds or even thousands of objects in them. It’s also not unheard of for thoughtful artists to hand you files that have very descriptive names like ‘object768′ and ‘sphere8458.’ These hurdles are one reason [...]
Unwrella
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: I really hate setting up UVs. I’d rather have bamboo shoved under my fingernails and undergo Chinese Water Torture. There have been a number of techniques and tools that have come up in recent years to alleviate this animosity. “Pelting” has [...]
ZBrush Digital Sculpting Human Anatomy By Scott Spencer (Sybex Books, 416 pages)
To celebrate the arrival of my newly found friend, ZBrush 3.5, I picked up the new book: ZBrush Digital Sculpting Human Anatomy by the ZBrush Guy, Scott Spencer. Spencer, who also wrote ZBrush Character Creation: Advanced Digital Sculpting in 2008, has already saved me on numerous occasions. Predominantly, the saving [...]
Pixologic’s ZBrush 3.5
I have to admit that I only became familiar with ZBrush last year despite its excellent initial reputation as a hobbyist’s tool. The well-designed 3.5 version was introduced around the time of last year’s SIGGRAPH confab. In very nutshell terms, one could say that ZBrush is a modeling tool. But [...]
Craft Director Studio
Years ago, I took a look at Craft Animations’ rigs when it was exclusive to 3ds Max, and found it to be indispensable not only for pipelines with vehicles, but also for camera animation work. The whole tool set is based on prefab rigs that are wired up to respond [...]
StudioGPU’s MachStudio Pro
As many have pointed out in recent months, expectations for speed in the 3D community have reached a breaking point. However, some companies are stepping up and pushing the envelope even further. One such outfit is StudioGPU and its real-time 3D compositing and rendering system MachStudio Pro. I have to [...]
Unity 3D’s Unity iPhone
You know the iPhone app. phenom has reached its tipping point when even the Louvre Museum has jumped on the bandwagon. Meanwhile, I think the number of iPhone users has reach a gazillion now. That’s right, there are more iPhone users than the population of the Earth, which means only [...]
Autodesk Maya 2010
Back around SIGGRAPH this year, which in CG time is a LONG time ago, Autodesk released Maya 2010 with a plethora of other Autodesk acquisitions. Within that release were some internal advances’animation constraints could be used in layers, Python was updated, and a couple of other little tidbits. A whole [...]
A Real-Life Replica of...
Cowabunga, dude! A real-life replica of Simpsons’ hometown of Springfield is...
Blue Sky’s...
Epic, the new animated adventure from director Chris Wedge and his gifted team...
