E-Frontier have announced their latest creation Poser Pro. It's a kind of a Poser 7.5 with few existing components bundled togther with 64bit rendering and QUIDAM for Poser. E-Frontier are aiming this release at top end animation professionals. Poser Pro has support for 3D Studio Max, Maya, Lightwave and Cinema 4D along with 3D export to Photoshop CS3 . For more details visit the website:
http://www.e-frontier.com/go/poserpro
http://www.e-frontier.com/article/articleview/2309/1/270/
As motion capture tools get better with films and games managing to record the facial expressions of actors are we going to end up with animators becoming just computer operators rather than skilled artists in their own right?
Films such as the Lord of the Rings and Polar Express put motion capture in the public eye and the upcoming Beowulf uses the same technology. Even films such as Happy Feet used motion capture to record dancing. But some experts think that motion capture is not working well enough. I have to agree but I wonder if it's just a case of the technology being quite new? At this years Siggraph there were over 20 different suppliers of Motion Capture Equipment so it's definitely big business.
Also at Siggraph 2007, Massive Software announced this week another tool to "help" the animator, it's Massive 3.0 software claims:
"Massive allows artists to create and direct anything from CG humanoids to birds, animals, cars and more to deliver realistic and emotive virtual performances. Massive 'agents' are 3D characters that use sight, sound and touch enabling them to interpret and react autonomously to the world around them. Massive incorporates procedural animation and AI, and is used by animation and effects artists."
But again is this simply turning our "artists" into mathematicians and programmers?
Glenn Entis from Electronic Arts told the BBC this week that he wanted more realism in how games react to the user not just how they look. His reply seems to imply that EA will also be using technology rather than artistry to get the desired effects.
Previous articles: Making Faces
Daz 3D are looking for beasts.
Their new 3D game needs assets created by you. The game looks to be anime style with players breeding and riding beasts of various forms. With the range of models, Hexagon, Carrara, DazStudio and Bryce they should have everything needed to achieve such a project and with a large number of people regularly visiting the site I'm sure the standards will be high. The project is also backed with a website, forums, mentors, design guides and some industry experts.
Read more in an interview with David Perry who is directing the project.
I was just reading about Microsoft's Compute Cluster and how it used the Message Passing Interface (MPI) protocol to share the work across the nodes. This caused me to wonder what kind of protocols the various distributed rendering solutions used. As far as I can tell the network rendering in Carrara uses a proprietory solution that uses broadcasts TCP packets over a Lan. Piovra one of the Blender network projects uses TCP sockets and custom commands. For software such as Maya there also seems to be no standardisation.
The advantage of introducing some form of standardisation is that there will be more tools for debugging, analysing and possiblities of performance increases by swapping in newer libraries. The developers can concentrate on writing code for dealing with the graphics and UIs rather than on writing low level code for networking and distributing processes.
Given that Blender, DazStudio, Vue and Poser all use Python as an internal scripting language, they could use the Python version of MPI although I am slightly puzzled by some of the comments in their manual that implies that the messages passed from here would not be compatible with the C versions. There would also need to be a standardise language for describing the rendering processes.
2/8/2007 Update
Mac OS X supports MPI in it's XGrid and a demo of using this with POVRay was done a few years back.
There are several other python MPI implementations at SourceForge and another example of Povray.
I've kind of been stockpiling Aardman news so here's a whole bunch of announcements together.
Aardman's been making a few changes internally, new writers Matthew Graham, Peter Baynham and Ashley Pharoah have joined and Sarah Smith in the Aardman Features. Sarah has been promoted to Creative Director.
The Creature Comforts US series has been cancelled before CBS has had chance to show all of the episodes. You can join the petition to get it back on air. CBS claim that it was looking for higher ratings. However some lucky people got to see an unaired episode at Platform International Animation Festival in Portland.
Shaun the Sheep however goes from strength to strength by winning the Cristal for Best Television at this Annecy International Animation Festival. 'The Pearce Sisters' by Luis Cook won the Special Jury Award. You can watch a couple of clips of the harsh life by the sea that these sisters endure on the Aardman website.
