After the phenomenal success of his first book, my friend Jamie Cardoso is about to release a second book about "Realistic Architectural Visualisation with 3dsmax and mental ray". If you are into visualisation this should be your next buy!
Keith just posted a behind the scene of his "Funkiest man alive" animation. It is so nice of him to share how he went about his latest experimentation. I am in the process of rigging my own characters so it was really cool to be able to get some tips about what techniques are out there. I did know about the rivet script and hair follicles to parent stuff to geometry but I didn't know about the DJ rivet script. Looks like this is gonna be really useful for parent local face controls to a blend shaped deformed geometry.
As usual Annecy 2009 was a blast and once again there wasn't enough time to see all the great short films and features or attend all the parties but one of the highlights was to see "Partly cloudy" and get to know what went into the making of the short film which was presented by Peter Sohn, the director himself.
Here is a summary of recommendations given by different artists for sketching or sketchcrawling.
Glenn Vilppu uses a Namiki Falcon fountain pen filled with a range of Sepia, brillian brown and black non waterproof Pelikan ink but also Polychromos Faber-Castell pencils. The Namiki Falcon nib is solid gold hence the price but doesn't corrode like cheaper models. Glenn also recommends the $15 "Pen and ink sketching fountain pen" which comes in extra-fine, fine or broad size. expensive but the pigments are much stronger.
Enrico Casarosa is a storyboard artist from Pixar which I discovered through his watercolour sketchbook "The Venice Chronicles". I had been reading the book through Flikr and loved it so much that I ended up buying the book immediately on Amazon when it came out and ordered an other dedicated copy through his blog few weeks ago.
A series of videos showing the behind the scenes of Miyasaki's "Princess Mononoke" surfaced on the Youtube a while ago. I would recommend anyone interested in Miyasaki's work to watch that really long documentary (3 x 15 videos) showing some exceptional footage from Ghibli's backstage.
Some interesting moments are when Miyazaki works out the story plot using schematic drawings but also how he goes about choosing colours or framing the action. It is also fascinating to see him working on a messy desk amongst the other artists in a cramped office which is probably the old studio.
"This Backstage of Princess Mononoke consists of 3 documentary series directed by Toshio URATANI, who rolled a small VCR for overall of 300 hours (before editing of course!)during his 2-year reporting of Studio Ghibli and its struggles in making the phenomenal animation film Princess Mononoke (released in 1997).
While in Annecy I got told that I was hired to work on a pilot for a TV series at french production company "2 minutes" in Angouleme, starting the 1st of July.
"2 minutes" is well known for their 2d work but for the past few years they have started working in 3d as well and went on producing the new Pierre Coffin "Pat and Stan" series for Mac Guff.
I am not too sure how long the project will run for but it is already a great experience and a great opportunity to visit Angouleme which is the capital of "Bande dessinées" ("european Comics").
Here are some renders of my new Bishop mod. This is a new project I am gonna work on when coming back from Annecy. Yes I am a Dreamworks fan boy but there is an other reason I chose Shrek for inspiration.