What a week to be both finishing one assignment and starting another. I wasn’t really set up to film reference while in Vegas, although one assignment option was drunken stumble, and there was plenty of that I can assure you.

Anyways, refined a lot f it, I’m still not happy with the ending, but thats what this is all about, learning right?

GDC is this week, and while MAXON does not have a booth again this year, Kris Orpilla from EA Sims Division will be doing a session sponsored by MAXON. I will be there as well to help Kris out and pay a visit to the EA Redwood Studio. If your going to be At GDC or in the area on Friday March 27th, I highly recommend getting a pass for this session. I know I’m excited to see how they are using BodyPaint 3D.

Real World Texture Painting Tips for Game Developers
Kris Orpilla (Character Artist, Electronic Arts)
10:30am – 11:30am Friday, March 27, 2009
Room 2000, West Hall, Moscone Center, San Francisco
Session Sponsored by MAXON Computer Inc

Session Description
Kris will reveal inhouse workflow from EA’s Sims Division, demonstrating how to create custom 3D textures – from reference material to hand-painted detail for next- and current-gen games. Using MAXON BodyPaint 3D he will reveal workflows used in house to quickly generate in-game assets such as those deployed on Sims Animals and other leading game titles, attendees will also learn how BodyPaint 3D easily integrates into current Photoshop, Maya, Softimage and/or 3dsmax workflows.

Professionally, most of my work has been General TD and Character TD stuff. Rigging, pipeline, scene optimization etc. here is a list of essential plugins that have helped me get my job done. Keep in mind my list is not the ten best free plugins overall, there’s some other cool ones out there I really like, but these are my 10 essential I use all the time. (more…)

Cineversity keeps growing and growing, so much that I constantly discover new tutorials there myself when I go to update or publish a tutorial. I did want to point out some important ones that already disappeared from the New Tutorials list.

Both Bret Bays and Jon Ware, have done some awesome work on adding some Rigging Related tutorials. Bret has been doing a great series on Intermediate Rigging that is 9 tutorials now, and will grow a little more once I get Video 10 done myself.

Jon’s series is a little more advanced, it isn’t going to teach anyone how to make a rig, but actually how to adapt a a rig to work with motion capture data, so that the data drives the IK rig.

Finally Chris Chestnut has started what I hope grows into a really cool series of “as seen on TV” tutorials where they try to come up with a solution to recreate a cool motion graphics effect on TV. Most have probably been done in CINEMA 4D, some maybe not, and the setups they teach wont’ necessarily be how they were actually done, but each tutorial will try to simulate an effect seen on TV. Check out the first one simulating an effect from NBC.

Cineversity has reached 1275 Live tutorials and looks like it wont’ stop any time soon.

Cartoon Network Rebrand by Capacity

I’m a cartoon-a-holic if I do say so myself, so despite being 26 years of age, my first favorite button on the remote is assigned to Cartoon Network. With that said I’ve been a big fan of their recent rebranding, focused around the recent popularity over the last few years for Graphic style Vinyl toys often painted but now also more and more becoming available in solid white that one can purchase and paint their own design on.

Now I’ve known that Turner themselves uses CINEMA 4D, so I’d had my suspicions that these spots had at least a little CINEMA 4D here and there particularly as there’s some notable MoGraph type effects in there, but as an animation fan, what I really wanted to know was whether the character and cool material effects stuff was done in CINEMA 4D. Recently at the AENY meeting and then later on a Creative Cow Podcast I discovered the it was actually Capacity, a really kick ass studio that also uses CINEMA 4D, that did the rebranding for them. Well sure enough, despite Capacity being in the middle of a website redesign, (the old one is still here) they’ve posted a new landing page with the Cartoon Network Rebranding reel, and sure enough the characters and everything else is done in CINEMA 4D. Check their site and the new rebranding out and lets hear what everyone thinks.