Here's a list of the best places to study 3D animation in the world. This ranking table is from 3D World's 98th issue.
1 Supinfocom 2 Filmakademie Baden-Wuertemmberg 3 Gobelins, L’école de l’image 4 Ringling College of Art and Design 5 Vancouver Film School 6 Ecole National Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs 7 Royal College of Art 8 Bournemouth University, NCCA 9 University of Southern California 10 Sheridan College Institute of Technology and Advanced Learning 11 CalArts School of Film/Video 12 National Film and Television School 13 Ecole Emile Cohl 14 Savannah College of Art and Design 15 School of Visual Arts 16 University of Wales 17 Ecole Supérieure des Métiers Artistiques 18 University of Teesside 19 RMIT Univeristy 20 Rhode Island School of Design
I've got friends studying in Supinfocom and Ringling and I'm so happy for them!
I have been to Gobelins before and hence I'm so happy and excited for them to be amongst the top three! Gobelins, L’école de l’image has a superb learning environment, teaching force, and technical assistance such that I could focus thouroughly on character animation!
I have also always been very impressed by student works from Ecole Emile Cohl (EEC). It goes to show that these 20 schools listed are really of superb quality!
I hope one day Nanyang Polytechnic's School of Interactive and Digital Media can be amongst these! Jiayou! (;
Click [here] to find out how they compiled this ranking ;)
I cannot help but introduce this new product to you! :D
I bought a Wacom Intuos3 about 3 years ago and I thought very highly of this technology then. During these couple of years, I enjoyed my user experience with Wacom Intuos3 very much. I liked it's highly customizable driver and functions, it actually allows users to customize different ExpressKeys for different applications! I had a separate set of ExpressKeys for Photoshop and Maya. A downside will probably be the fact that I'm actually left-handed, hence it was slightly tricky to customize. I kept telling myself that it was such a good product, such that it will take some time for its successor to be released. Indeed, I felt that it took quite awhile, now it's here - Wacom Intuos4
Here's the official trailer:
The Intuos4 can now turn 180 degrees to suit the user regardless of left or right handed users. And then, I was thinking - "Wouldn't the cord get in the way?" I read on an article that the USB cord at Wacom's end is actually detachable!! The scroll strip is ingeniously tranformed into a scroll wheel which allows infinite zooming in and out as far as the application can take you in a single stroke! (Just like the Ipod) The wheel allows intuitivity when rotating the painting canvas, which is newly introducted in Photoshop CS4. There's also an OLED display beside the ExpressKeys to remind the user what are the shortcuts assigned to them.
I have only written down the functions that I'm excited about and I feel are noteworthy. Please read this [article] to find out more!
Channelbox is embarking on the Coke Zero Video Competition organised by Eyeka Asia.
As far as visual development is concerned, we are looking forward to some inking effects. I achieved the following in Maya and After Effects. This technique can be applied on to any 3D model, however it takes some time. I'm currently trying to simplify the process by turning this into a script.
Trying to avoid a total lift from our reference, I worked towards a more Chinese calligraphic style, hope it works for this production. ;)
Vue 7 Digital Nature has been released not too long ago and it's amazing!
I strongly recommend this product to all matte painters. You can get a very good head start to getting the matte done for your film just with a simple setup and let Vue and your machine do the work!
Watch the trailer: http://www.vue7.com/
And if you're interested in learning the software, there's a Personal Learning Edition which you can download for free and try it out!
I've tried it out myself, it's very easy to pick up and it produced nice results considering that it was just a few clicks. Very interesting!
To matte painters, I think it's a must-have! To 3D artists or digital compositors like myself, I think it's a good-to-have. I can tackle the trickiest nature effects such as Oceans, Sky, Clouds, Volumetric Clouds, Vegetation.. plus dynamics and simulation! These are difficult to achieve it the usual 3D packages.
So, that's all for this post! I love software developers who are willing to provide learning editions of their packages.
Completed the majority of the modelling revamp of Digiron this morning! I'll be working on the uwrapping and texturing and hopefully rigging tmr!
This afternoon, I worked on the style for Steampunk using Digiron as the subject. The idea was to achieve the Street Fighter IV Game Trailer Style. It requires some maya fluids to make the mimic better! :D enjoy!
I am planning to get a degree after national service. Therefore, I started a little bit of research on a few potential institutions. Below are links to their wikipedias definition and websites.
I will be doing an in-depth research and comparison between all these colleges to find a suitable institution and course. In the meantime, I will concentrate on my studies and creative work :) It'll be great if any of you guys, probably from CGSociety or CGTalk, or probably from any art institution can give me some tips and advice on my choices. Drop me an email! Thanks in advance!
By the way, I'm now working on MTV + ME Competition which I embarked on a couple of days ago. The concept, design, boards and timing reel is out. Hope to update progress here but things are kind of tight here in school, so this weekend probably. :)
Well, I have plans to rig and animate the MINI Cooper S I'm working on now. Mr Frety kindly introduced me to the mental ray car paint phen shader for my MINI instead of the layered shader I'm using now. I will try that out tomorrow :)
Meanwhile, I looked up on some videos of the MINI C S in action to observe the movement.
Quickly modelled, rigged and animated this leg. The objective of this exercise was to research on how to rig a animator-friendly leg. I was inspired by the character setups Mr Kyle Balda used for some of his animation demonstration in class. :)
Came across something really interesting the other day. An ingenius player by Chaos Group. Many people are used to fcheck which comes with Maya, which plays image sequences. If I'm not wrong, it's something similar to fcheck just that it has a lot more features! Looking at the features list, this player can come in very handy
Key features • Layered sequence playback • Realtime interactions • External device output • Industry standard file format support including HDR, EXR, CIN, DPX, SGI, TGA and more • Variable framerate playback • Infinite workspace • Global and per-layer aspect ratio • Layer flip, scale, position and crop • Color controls including lift, gamma, gain, brightness, contrast, hue and saturation • Exposure and soft clip controls for high dynamic range images • Ability to save a composition • Export composition or single layer as sequence or AVI/Quicktime movie • Export composition as Adobe After Effects JSX script • Export composition as The Foundry Nuke script • Copy layer to clipboard as Nuke script • Layer-based cache • Full, half and quarter cache resolution • Brush Layer • Brush Sequence Layer • Adjustment Layer • Clipboard Layer • Framebuffer Layer • Layer blending modes • Alpha channel source • Depth channel • Productivity tools including copy/paste frame, email frame/screen, replace with, open with, locate in explorer and more . • Multi-core processor support • Built-in HTTP server for remote collaboration • 64-bit version • Extensive command line support
I had this idea in my mind about a month ago to get together a couple of my good friends and work on CG projects together where we are in total control of the whole process.
This urge became especially strong after I went to Gobelins, Paris and realise that there is a serious lack of creativity, adventure and boldness in the CG content created in Singapore.
Hoping to bring up this daring-arty-culture in Singapore....................
Yong Yi, Zi Chao and I came together to form Channel Box.
The main objective of Channel Box is to experiment CG content creation wildly in search for style.
Through this process, not only do we have a channel to put our skills to practice and showcase, we can also learn to work together efficiently and brainstorm te wildest ideas.
Ideally, we will be able to create and recognise our own style and have all these creative input evolve to an identity!
Hi, I just came across this interesting blog entry :) Renders of Pixar's upcoming feature film "Up" were revealed at San Diego Comic Convention International 2008.
Hi guys, I jumping around the CG Sites and ended up at Shawn Kelly's Animation Tips and Tricks blog. After reading a few recent entries, I found this entry to be very useful for an animator. I believe it will kind of help if us when we are animating so that we don't get lost during the process. Nice tip, I might have it printed out and pin it up at my work station. :)
