In an article appearing in Studio Monthly by Philip Dobree of Jellyfish Pictures you’ll find 10 good hints at making animations more cinematic. Albeit generalized in nature, the steps are worth sharing and keeping at the forefront of the thinking process.

To paraphrase, high quality content be it models or textures and don’t reinvent the wheel when it comes to these. If you can afford it, buy the assets.

Use real world references and if you can build them into your renders.

Passes. Lots of them. In fact, rendering to passes can really help you in the end because you gain such an ability to tweak in post that it can save you a pile of work from doing it in your render application. Philip talks about the ‘wet’ look and that how one can duplicate specular or reflection passes can go along way to making things appear, well, wet.

Gamma and tone mapping introduce the issue of colour calibrating, tone control and lighting exposure. This post is a quick overview of what Gamma and Tone mapping can offer.

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You can now download Crosswalk 2.6 from Softimage. Crosswalk is a Softimage initiative to help transfer XSI content in and out of 3ds Max® and Maya® pipelines using the latest dotXSI, COLLADA, and FBX standards.

The Crosswalk components in XSI 6 have now been packaged as a standalone setup, complete with an installer that can automatically detect existing installations of 3ds Max®, Maya®, Face Robot and XSI, and install the appropriate plugins. The Crosswalk downloads contain updated Crosswalk software, featuring several bug fixes, as well as updated documentation in the Crosswalk guide, and updated Crosswalk examples.

Happy with the bumpiness on your objects? If you look carefully I bet they’ll be a bit bland and when you compare the quality versus a normal map… well you’ll see. But wait, what is a normal map? Why would I want to use one, but isn’t a normal map just like a bump map?

Let’s start with the last statement, yes. Still scratching your head? Well, simply put normal maps and bump maps are cheats to cheaply (render time reference) mimic bumps in the surface without geometry. To gain the utmost realism, displacement maps are the way to go but we’ll save that for another discussion.

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