Alexander Kucera

I got access to my copy of Shadowrun Returns right on release, July 25th, and immediately ended up playing it of about five hours. Probably your first clue that I liked it. It has been described as Neverwinter Nights meets XCOM by its creators and that description is pretty accurate. I’d add that it at times also has a little point and click adventure feel to it. On A Budget Harebrained Software got $1.

Today,29.05.2013, was the official premiere of Prisoners of the Sun, the movie I was VFX producer for and that crashed and burned in 2008 due to a licensing issue. Luxx Studios bought the rights a while back and finished it. It turned out to be a modestly solid B-movie with 3D effects that looked very game-y, which is very sad, because we all—the former production crew—knew what it could have been.

I planned to write about it, but the presentation was just blowing all our minds and I got sucked into simply watching to not miss anything. What can I say? I’m sorry. You should have been there. Subtitle: Talk by Guy Williams (Weta), Aaron Gilman (Weta)

Do not add tangible rewards below $60! Shipping and manufacturing is simply too expensive. You might not make any money for your actual goal otherwise. Make the first minute of the info video count! People turn off the video after that time on average. I’m going to also post a whole array of slides or rephrase them. At least that’s the plan. But first. Sleep and family time. Subtitle: Talk by Kai Bodensiek (Brehm & v.

Phil Tippett had a dream. “Mad God” a film that he wanted to make, but for a variety of reasons got put on hold around the time of Jurassic Park. The Problem Lack of money. Simple as that. To get it you used to ask friends, family and people foolish enough to invest In your little project. That lead to a lot of concession being made. Giving the rights to creative input away to investors, having investors kids in the movie, etc.

We startend the session with a quick history of subdivision surfaces. Invented by Pixar and first used in the short Gerry’s Game they made away with the constraints of both polygonal modeling as well as Nurbs modeling. What’s wrong with Nurbs? Nurbs surfaces are based on control vertices or hull points through which a b-spline is calculated. This leads to smooth curvature and inherent UVs. Both are good. However, Nurbs modeling relies on adding a multitude of Nurbs patches together to form you final surface.

This talk was very theory heavy with lots of formulas and photos of curves that summarize pretty badly. I still gave it a try here. The session started with the history of camera tech. From the first wooden boxes with a hand crank. A hand cranked camera had severe restrictions in that it obviously only could film where a human operator could go and there wasn’t even adjustable focus. Since then we have come a long way.

Not too much to record for this one. It was mostly company heads trying to weasel their way out of loaded questions by the audience and discussion chair Eric Roth. Things like “Do you think a VFX union is a solution to the problems?” “…” It was interesting to see the panel stammer around the issue. But mostly it was sad that they still don’t see that they are a part of the issue.

Opening with a joke about the botched Oscar ceremony, this is promising to be a good yet sad talk. Rhythm & Hues went from 1000 artists to a small fraction of that recently. Why was Life of Pi “unfilmable” Three simple reasons, combined making for a perfect storm: water animals kids (the actor playing Pi while technically not a kid played his first role and could not swim) Research Ang Lee did some hands on research of how a life boat or raft behaves in the ocean and how water and waves behave.

Topics discussed center around what the industry can do to improve interoperability and workflow to strengthen the business instead of running it into the ground. Open Data Platforms Rob Bredrow took the lead by talking about the work he and SPI has worked on to create a good open standard onto which companies can build to achieve something greater. Alembic, OpenColorIO, OpenEXR to name a few. Before every company needed to reinvent the wheel in-house to set itself apart.