If you’ve seen Live Free or Die Hard — or even if you’ve just seen the trailers, which emphasize the film’s trademark outlandish action sequences — you may think of the various stunts, including the “money shot” involving a car tumbling through the air and smashing into the hoods of two more cars traveling on the ground, as a veritable CG-fest. But you’d be wrong.... »
With footage shot on location, and stock footage, used essentially just for background plates, it was up to Asylum to show the evolution of the earth in CG. ... »
Michael Buday, founder of SyncVue, stopped by the AlphaDogs Editors' Lounge to demo his company's remote collaboration tool. Watch the video to see how you could leverage SyncVue. ... »
Mid-way through the animated mockumentary Surf’s Up, one of the penguins faces the camera and asks an invisible camera crew if they’re hungry. We hear a voice answer, “Uh, yeah.” ... »
Peter Parker picked a peck of trouble this time. It could have meant trouble, too, for the team at Sony Pictures Imageworks, which handled the bulk of the effects. ... »
When the boards for the Finnish coffeemaker, Paulig Presidentti, came to Stardust Studios in New York, they were instantly attracted to creating animation with the brand’s signature green and gold color scheme. ... »
Ask animators and VFX artists what was the most challenging part of their work and the answer is invariably: cloth and liquid, and don’t even try to create hair that looks and reacts properly. But the introduction of Maya Nucleus unified simulation framework takes the first step in easing many of these challenges... »
While new Sci-Fi series Sanctuary premiered earlier this month, it wasn’t on any TV network. Rather, the show, which stars several familiar faces from Sci-Fi Channel’s popular series Stargate SG-1 (including Amanda Tapping and Christopher Heyerdahl), made its debut on May 14—as an online-only webisodic series.... »
By combining imageSynth with a modeling program, Adobe Photoshop and a video editor, you can create a scene, such as the one here in this tutorial, using a simple animation technique.... »
With each season of Smallville, the visual effects get more elaborate while the production schedule remains fixed. Entity FX, which recently celebrated the completion of its 100th episode, keeps pushing the limits as seen in their work creating CG phantoms that attack Superman in the Phantom Zone. ... »
Rainmaker’s Visual Effects Supervisor Mark Breakspear led the 150-person team that filled 3D stadiums with digital crowds and gave the four main actors Olympic-class skating moves — or rather, convinced the audience these skaters, not their stunt doubles, could perform an Olympian’s triple salchows, double axels, spins, lifts, and spirals.... »
