Here’s a quick look behind the scenes of an indie HD music filming project using a variety of gear like a RED One, Panasonic HVX… and hell through in an RC Helicopter too.

NurbsAndPolys.com has republished the original subdivision modeling primer originated by Glen Southern and is open for viewing at NaP wiki. As a wiki resource, this publication should flourish and be maintained with current techniques.

http://wiki.nurbsandpolys.com

Milo is a technology preview of Natal, presented by Lionhead Studios. The implications of the technology are astounding, and the interactivity between person and machine becomes almost second nature.

Go ahead, meet Milo.

In the previous segment I outlined the issues that we are faced with moving geometry from a CAD application to a rendering application. In this segment, I am going to cover the topics related to preparing your CAD models to be export ready for a rendering application.

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There’s no question, talent is like getting a kickstart ahead of the rest you are competing with. However, I feel that talent is only one small ingredient to your prowess as a graphic artist.

In fact, talent has a diminishing return to the length one practices their craft, and I do believe that eventually, we all hit a limit that can only be overcome by hard work, experimentation and patience.

And yet, for those that believe they have no talent take heart because even those people with talent end up falling into a working method paradigm that anyone can follow and use to gain experience. While one might think the following post is obvious, it is often the situation that the answers or points of interest are staring us straight in the face.
Thus, I present the 7 habits of high effect junior designers. No, talent isn’t everything.

Human creativity is amazing, there is so much that can come from so little. Educated, not educated, genius, deranged whatever the case creativity comes from everywhere.

Here’s a couple of TED talks, relating to creativity that I found amusing and interesting.

Thanks to Lucas Martell for pointing these out.

I find it amazing the creativity people have, especially when being frugal. According to SPRANQ creative communications (Utrecht, The Netherlands) your ink cartridges (or ink toner) could last longer and therefore they developed the ecofont. Spranq claims possibly 20% longevity gain in your toner cartridges.

At print size, for your typical documents, it’s quite a decent font and legible. It won’t save the world, but it just goes to show that the smallest, most inconceivable thing CAN make a difference!!

For all you modelers out there, Nurbs And Polys recently opened a modeling forum that plans to be an open and informative modeling community. Based on the idea of community driven support, it would be a great place to start posting suggestions for topics to support it’s resource forum and soon to be built wiki. With the demise of a couple of popular modeling forums it definitely would be a good place to move to.

Rendering is pretty straight forward, you pick a resolution and make your textures and render. Voila it looks great on the screen. Heck you may even take your masterpiece and print it on your inkjet on some photo paper and it still looks great. For the most part, rendering is done for the screen and in a lot of cases printing looks after itself by the inherent nature that rendering to 2K (2000 pixel, or 2K x 2K) is pretty typical, but what do you do when you actually have a client that needs your artwork printed big… I mean big like 10 feet big (or bigger)?

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I was going to write a big article and have some fancy images to describe the difference between a straight RGBA (rgb+alpha) (unmultiplied) and a premultiplied RGBA image. As it turns out I found a good video over on tv.adobe.com that explains it quite well from the point of view of using a compositor package like After Effects. What this video won’t tell is how to configure your rendering application, but suffice to say there is usually an option that will indicate if the alpha is premultiplied or not.

Generally for many of you, if you’re rendering on black, blue or green and you’ve been using a premultiplied RGBA image, you haven’t really noticed much an issue especially if you’ve been using AE. However, if you are doing full backdrop integration, then an unmulitplied RGBA image is the way to go.

I may still provide an example of using a package like Cinema 4D and rendering out alpha at later date but I hope this video clears it up. If not, leave a comment and I’ll help you out.