Tidy Vfx

Tuesday, February 23, 2021

Facial enchancement in Blender

I've just run into this article in Blenderstation. Pretty awsome.

Tuesday, September 22, 2020

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.

Thursday, August 20, 2020

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.

Wednesday, February 5, 2020

Character Animation On A Higher Level

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

Saturday, December 7, 2019

SideFX Procedural Dependency Graph

I think it is huge!
I try to imagine how it will affect on the VFX intustry. I have to look closer, but I think it is a step toward a procedural pipeline and task management which is basically project-asset management from a bird's eye view.

All the details are here:
Side FX PDG

(updated on 2023-06-20 the link was broken so it turned out that PDG is now under Houdini which soft of a admission of that PDG is not software agnostic solution sadly)

Sunday, November 24, 2019

Not to forget about Blender 1.

So here is some stuff about / under / in connection with Blender.

First of all Blender 2.81 is here. So cool!

Second. Animation Nodes is available for Blender 2.8x.
https://animation-nodes.com/

Third. It seems Blender is part of the motion graphics market.
https://www.skywayvisuals.com/
https://freemembership.blenderinmotion.org/

Fourth. Couple of useful sites.
https://elfnor.com/
https://cgboost.com
https://www.blenderdiplom.com

Thursday, October 24, 2019

Universal Scene Description - Moving to the Next Level

It is reminiscent to this music:

ILS - Next Level

So USD (Universal Scene Description) has been announced long long time ago. I wrote about it 2016. Major studios pleased to Pixar that they open-sourced their technology.

I thought during that time it could standardize pipelines some level. Because the main pipeline issue is always that how to transfer/share data from one process/software to another.

Now (4 years later) it seems the topic starting to be HOT. Software development companies like Autodesk and Side Effects Software step further to make available USD for users / companies which can't afford a big investment into pipeline development.

Side Effects Software