Tuesday, April 20, 2010

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.

free-hidden-object-games

“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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Monday, April 19, 2010

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.

Tuesday, April 13, 2010

12Amazing 3d Characters in Movie Posters

CGI DragonWhen 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.

The Wolfman poster (rendered werewolf)

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.

Alien vs Predator Requiem poster (CGI alien)

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.

10,000 BC poster (computer generated smilodon)

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.

The Golden Compass poster (armored ice bear)

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.

LOTR poster (3d character gollum)

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.

King Kong poster

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.

Where the Wild Things Are poster

08. Eragon: 3D Dragon

Eragon brought us one of the best CGI dragons ever.

Eragon poster (cgi dragon)

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.

Transformers poster (3d robot character)

10. Terminator Salvation: CGI Terminator

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

Terminator salvation (3d terminator characters)

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.

Clash of the Titans (3d characters

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.

Avatar poster (Neytiri cgi character)

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

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Monday, April 12, 2010

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Saturday, April 10, 2010

Stunningly Realistic 3D Character Models

rock climber

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

knight

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

flamethrower

Franck Zbrush | Ced66

franck

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

blitz

Thursday, April 8, 2010


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.


Wednesday, April 7, 2010

The Popular Ashmoogh

Ashmoogh is a breed of creatures which are very wild, blood thirsty with little brains. They usually attack their targets while in groups. Every Deev is usually escorted with a few of these creatures…

The type shown below usually can be found in higher altitudes with a more dry climate …

Ashmoogh_A

Initial 3D model done by Syros Pourlatifi, polished in ZBrush for normal maps by Tohid Razavi.

Ashmoogh

High Poly Model

At last we can say sculpting our Supper hero “Garshasp” is finished. these are all Zbrush models for baking the normal maps and resurfacing of the Low res meshes. Due this weekend I’ll upload some render, screen shot and wire frame from the Low poly in-game model. a huge thanks goes to Soheil for pushing me to make everything the way it should be, of course I should admit here that he was not satisfied at last and done some parts of face sculpting by himself :) .

click to enlarge

here is Garshasp:

garshasp_all_low

his props in detail:garshasp_props_low

Hope you like it!

Monday, April 5, 2010

3D Character Pipline

Here is a Construction shot along with the Arzoor Zbrush model and a Beauty shot, just to show the technical part of our character art pipeline.

click to see a it in 3 different angles.

arzoor3dmodel_wf_low

This construction shot is an screen shot from max viewport. We use ShaderFx for testing normal maps inside Max during development of the character and before importing it to the engine. this is a shader I have made that supports 4 realtime lights and an overall ambient light. maps to use with this shader are : Normal,Diffuse,Specular and alpha.

arzoor3dmodel_zb_bs_low

Almost every character in the game take the same path to come alive (aside from animation though), let me explain it. the model will be first modeled in Zbrush, then it will be retopologized inside Zbrush for making the low poly mesh from the original sculpt. then every parts of the low res mesh will be taken to 3ds Max for Unwrapping and normal baking. right now we bake our normals inside max. In 3ds Max environment we have the ability to easily adjust the cage mesh for an accurate normal map generation and easy bug fixes. But the problem arises when your high resolution Zbrush mesh goes really HIGH!! at this moment we usually brake the high res mesh according to low res unwrapped chunks. But almost recently 3mm has proposed to use xnormal for baking the normal maps as it is an stand alone software just for normal baking purposes (and of course some other great tasks). but using it require to solve some other problems (like making additional cage). 3mm volunteered for taking this tedious path for our next boss character, so i hope this new pipeline will work for us

Thursday, April 1, 2010

3D Environment Concept Artist
Work with a small team on a puzzle-exploration game that is philosophical, and quiet, and is being made for reasons other than crass profit motive. Because the team is small, your work will be a large influence on the look of the final game. The team is run by the designer/programmer of the critically-acclaimed game Braid; the team is fully-funded and pay is high
Remote work is a possibility, but the ability to meet regularly in San Francisco is preferred.
Duties
  • Help determine the visual style and tone of the game.
  • Sketch locations to help determine spatial relationships among objects in a scene.
  • For each major location in the game, working with the designer, iterate from the sketches through full-color concepts, so that at the end we have a clear p
  • icture of how color and shape will interplay in each scene
Job duration
An estimated 6 months of full-time work, with light work available afterward through the conclusion of the project.

The ideal candidate understands the nuances of storytelling via environmental cues and has a good feel for the use of color and lighting.

Please have a convincing portfolio, good traditional art skills and the ability to self-direct, working without micromanagement.

The majority of the portfolio should consist of things absent from the following list: Girls With Big Tits; Barbarians Wielding Axes, Covered in Blood; Aliens; Space Ships; Gangsters Getting Shot in the Face; Orcs; Giant Robots; and, of course, Postapocalyptic Wastelands.