Hot in CG - fall of 2020

 I think the current trend is to more and more people gravitates to Blender, Unreal Engine and Houdini. Why? Because these softwares are awesome. It is hard to imagine that big VFX facilities like ILM, MPC, Weta Digital changes there platform softwares which are Maya and Nuke in the first place. But more and more people uses BUEH (stand for Blender, Unreal Engine and Houdini) means the industry will change slowly but surely. Speaking about myself: at home I only use Blender, Krita and Gimp (and Inkscape and Audacity (and 4K Video Downloader of course 😄))

And the platform for share information is youtube so there are couple of links I think worth to watch.

So many spectacular features in Blender 2.9. For me how is a part time animation filmmaker it is the ultimate best ever choice.

Because Virtual Production is also a very HOT topic Unreal Engine is now kind of a game changer in the VFX industry. Hard to summarize in couple of world so check this demo out:

And of course this:

So last but definitely not least Houdini I think is beyond...okay it is not the latest thing, but as I wrote before the PDG is new frontiers for a VFX studio. Because VFX generally speaking is about the mass production of shots, and we tend to automatize thing if it is possible. 

And Solaris is and another milestone, because basically it is the implementation of the USD into Houdini. So it is a formalized way to build up light and render complex scenes.

AI and CGI

We have to talk about Artificial Intelligence (AI) in connection with CGI. I think usage of AI can affect a lot of things we can't imagine right now. What we are talking about here? For eg. there is subset of AI the so called Machine Learning (ML). It allows us to solve problems much quicker because the computers basically have steeper learning curve. Of course we have to provide large data sets to learn from. It seems more and more things can be optimized with AI or ML.

Character Animation On A Higher Level

Impressive presentation at Siggraph 2019 about an animation system called “ephemeral” rigging.