X-Men: First Class Gets Director

Marvel intends to return to the roots of the X-Men folklore with X-Men: First Class slated for June 3, 2011. Now the franchise gets its intended reboot with a new director in the helm.

X-Men: First Class has been always about the original fivesome of the X-Men namely Cyclops, Marvel Girl (Jean Grey), Iceman, Angel (Archangel) and Beast. But the movie will delve into the complicated friendship of Charles Xavier (Professor X) and Erik Lensherr (Magneto).

Bryan Singer will be heavily involved in its production while Ashley Miller and Jack Stentz will be in charge of the script.

Says Singer: “This is the formative years of Xavier and Magneto, and the formation of the school and where their relationship took a wrong turn… There is a romantic element, and some of the mutants from ‘X-Men’ will figure into the plot, though I don’t want to say which ones. There will be a lot of new mutants and a great villain.”

It is encouraging to see these high-powered comic characters get a movie treatment that is not larger than life. For fans of the X-Men mythology, the love story of Cyclops and Jean Grey has always been well-chronicled and it will be interesting for fans to see how their puppy love develops.

For their part, Professor X and Magneto have always been portrayed as old men who are on the separate ends of the spectrum. But a movie exploring their youth together may help fans understand the complexity of their friendship.

In any case, Wolverine won’t be of much exposure here, owing to the fact that he had his own spin-off. Marvel is really hauling in the goodies for all their licensing properties. But with all the hard work they’ve put in, Marvel seems to deserve all this.

Discovery Channel,Spielberg Team on Animated Miniseries

Discovery Channel announced today that it is working to develop a new mini-series project with Academy(R) Award-winning filmmaker Steven Spielberg, DreamWorks Television and DreamWorks Animation SKG, Inc. (Nasdaq: DWA) entitled FUTURE EARTH (wt). DreamWorks Television and DreamWorks Animation will co-develop this future project, of which Spielberg will personally oversee development.

“We pride ourselves on bringing the best storytellers in the business to Discovery,” said Clark Bunting, president and general manager, Discovery Channel and president, Science Channel. “Steven Spielberg, his team at DreamWorks Television and DreamWorks Animation are at the top of that list. We are excited and look forward to collaborating with them on an exciting array of new nonfiction programs.”

FUTURE EARTH aims to be an epic mini-series examining what life on Earth will be like in 25, 50 and 100 years. The mini-series will draw from a vast number of sources, including the leading futurists, scholars and great minds of today, to dramatize and explore how various facets of our daily lives – health and medicine, technology, the environment, the military, the economy and media – will evolve over the next century.

“I am excited to be back in business with DreamWorks Animation and all the active imaginations and creative artists at the best animation company in the world today. Joining together with Discovery, we have an opportunity to bring exciting new experiences to take television audiences into the imagined future of planet Earth, said Steven Spielberg.

“We are thrilled to join forces with Discovery on such a uniquely positioned new mini-series and look forward to reuniting with Steven and his team to bring FUTURE EARTH to life for viewers in creative and innovative ways,” added Jeffrey Katzenberg, Chief Executive Officer of DreamWorks Animation.

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Behold my fascination with Character Animation and Blender 3D

I have been a huge fan of cartoons ever since I was a kid, something that hasn't changed in the last 30 odd years. So it really isn't any great surprise that once I discovered Blender 3d and the ability to animate my own characters, that I would become hooked.

I am utterly fascinated with Character Animation. Even though I am not what you would consider a master yet, I love creating and then watching my little characters move across my screen.

There is nothing I have tried that even compares to breathing life into a character that you have created yourself. And the funny thing is that the more you work with your character, the more life-like they become. It is all too easy to start thinking of them as real as you watch their personalities grow and develop with each step of the animation process.

12Amazing 3d Characters in Movie Posters

When you want to be inspired by stunning 3D graphics, you could watch a film with beautiful visual effects. Today I’d like to share my favorite movie posters with convincing 3D characters. There are monsters, beasts, aliens, humanoids, animals, and robots. I’ll concentrate on Hollywood movies and leave out superheros at this time. I also present only one poster per movie to give you variety.

01. The Wolfman: 3D Werewolf

We’ve seen werewolves in movies several times, but the latest is probably the most convincing in terms of CGI.

02. Alien vs Predator Requiem: CGI Alien

The movie sucks, but these legendary beasts still look awesome. And let’s not forget the predators. I could’ve just as well chosen a poster of a predator.

03. 10,000 BC: Smilodon

10,000 BC features three great prehistoric 3d animals: mammoth, phorohacus, and smilodon. They all look amazing but smilodon is my favorite.

04. The Golden Compass: Iorek Byrnison, an Armored Ice Bear

The Golden Compass is full of talking 3d animals. The poster shows Iorek Byrnison, an armored ice bear. The Golden Compass won an oscar for the best achievement in visual effects.

05. The Lord of the Rings: 3D Character Gollum

The Lord of the Rings trilogy is soon 10 years old, but the CGI still looks really convincing. Each one of the movies won an oscar for the best visual effects.

06. King Kong

Perhaps the most believable furry monster seen on the big screen. King Kong won an oscar for the best achievement in visual effects.

07. Where the Wild Things Are: CGI Monster or is it?

Just when I said Kong Kong was the most believable furry monster, I realize there are wild things that look amazingly good as well. However , the monsters are actually actors in costumes combined with CGI faces. Beautiful poster nevertheless.

08. Eragon: 3D Dragon

Eragon brought us one of the best CGI dragons ever.

09. Transformers: 3D Robot Optimus Prime

Transformers was nominated for the best achievement in visual effects. The robots look great and their movement and interaction with the live footage is stunning. My favorite is Bumblebee but in the poster Optimus Prime looks just a little better.

10. Terminator Salvation: CGI Terminator

Terminators looked good already in the 90s. Today, they look even better.

11. Clash of the Titans: CGI Monster

I haven’t actually seen Clash of the Titans yet, but the trailer and the posters make a promise of amazing 3d visual effects.

12. Avatar: 3D Character Neytiri by Zoe Saldana

It was no surprise that Avatar won an oscar for the visual effects. The highlight of the CGI characters was beautiful Neytiri portrayed by Zoe Saldana.

That was my take. Feel free to complete the collection and let me know your favorites!

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Stunningly Realistic 3D Character Models

Knight | Dani Garcia
It’s a low poly character I’ve done using a confrontation figurine as reference. 7887 Tris with normal mapping. – Dani Garcia

Flamethrower SU | Andrei Cristea
This character was inspired by some medical units from WW1. The gear is a mix from diferent periods and regions. – Andrei Cristea

Franck Zbrush | Ced66

Blitz | Chemb0t
I took the lineart of my character ‘Blitz” and used it as reference to sculpt the him in Zbrush. I used the project to learn the software and its production pipeline. – Chemb0t

Read more: 21 Raw and Stunningly Realistic 3D Character Models | Inspiration http://www.hongkiat.com/blog/21-raw-and-stunningly-realistic-3d-character-models/#ixzz0kgkQp71x

New Screen

So we decided to come up with some updates at the far end of the production phase.

As you can see above we got new beauty shot for Garshasp with his mystical mace. This is our in game model rendered in 3ds max along with some paint over that our concept artist “Soheil” has done on it.

And here are some in game screen shots which came out right from Iranvij, our Level editor tool. I managed to grab some props too.

In the past weeks, a very common sight at Fanafzar was a series of 4 or 5 machines, all running Garshasp on a pre-recorded command sequence (or timedemo, or whatever you might want to call it,) trying to get the game to crash or fire an assertion or behave erratically to help us pinpoint some intermittent or hard to reproduce bug.

First of all, we have a quite cool replay feature in Zorvan (our engine) that lets us record and then play back a game session. It’s not perfect, and not quite fit for end-users, but you wouldn’t imagine how useful it has been (and will be) to us.

This replay system is serving as our unit test (“You added that feature? Let’s see if the boat sequence is playable now.”) and our regression test (“You committed that fix? Let’s see if the game is still playable!!!”) and our performance test and playability test and much more. Since the structure of our game is linear by design, we can get very good coverage with a straightforward replaying of the entire game.

In any case, since we are almost feature-frozen now, our (programmer’s) lives mostly consist of running the game till it crashes (or does something it shouldn’t do) and then tracking down the bug and working it out.

I guess the next step will be finding the few major performance bottlenecks and optimizing them (that we have put off till now because they would have made debugging and adding features quite hard.)

My point in all this was that debugging is usually considered a gruesome and intimidating task, or boring and uninteresting at best. Right now, I quite enjoy debugging our engine and game for two main reasons: first is the replay system (which makes debugging much more effective, targeted and efficient) and second and more important is finding out bugs in my own (and our own) mental processes by finding bugs in the code that resulted from those processes.

It can be illuminating to find out what you had missed when you designed or implemented a piece of code, or the bugs caused by lack of communication or a problem in the general work flow (these are not common, but interesting nonetheless.) This form of revelation that results from finding a bug in your code is quite a rush and can make us better programmers.