I totally happened upon seam carving by total accident, which of course means that it has to be cool; I mean we hardly find the coolest stuff when we mean to… or is it just my luck?

Anyways, seam carving is a process that alters the dimensions of an image by intelligently removing pixels, or adding pixels to the image by way of an algorithm that determines which pixels carry little importance. There is a full whitepaper to read and a video demo. Acknowledgment goes to Shai Avidan and Ariel Shamir whom developed the alogrithm and presented at SIGGRAPH 2007.

In a quest for realism, we often put too much emphasis in the rendering engine. While a good render engine is good to have, let’s face facts that it is still expensive to go the distance in the render engine alone. So, let’s say hello to the post process and my first in a series of battling sterility in our rendered images.

First up, film grain. If what we are trying to do is be photo realistic then we should consider the medium of film. (more…)

Long a defacto standard text for those learning animation is now available in a 16 DVD set. Filmed at Blue Sky Studios, Richard Williams brings you his master class of the Animator’s Survival Kit with 350 animated examples.

Oh, I almost forgot to mention it isn’t cheap… around $1000 dollars if you pre-order and about $1200 afterwards. The set is due 17th November.