SuperSteve3D

The Foundry announced today that Framestore, the largest visual effects and computer animation studio in Europe, has invested in a Nuke site license. Adoption of Nuke at major facilities seems to have hit the tipping point, as Framestore joins Sony Pictures Imageworks, ILM and Weta Digital as Nuke site license holders.

 

What is TopoGun?

TopoGun is a stand-alone resurfacing, and maps baking application. The resurfacing functions in TopoGun will help you modify and/or recreate the edgeflow of your digital 3D models. The maps baking functions, will help you bake various types of texture maps from your high resolution 3D models and then allow you to apply them to your newly created optimized meshes. These texture maps contain information that will help you recover the appearance and features of the original high resolution mesh.

In today’s 3D graphics, high quality 3D models, due to their nature, usually have millions of polygons. This is because most of today’s 3d models are created from real world scanned models, or they are digital sculptures, created using brush based 3D sculpting applications.
In order to better serve their purposes, 3D models should have a much lower polycount and must provide for a deserved ease of handling. Even more than this, they need to have specific edgeflows in order to be more easily animated, or further detailed.

A lot of artists nowadays create their concepts as 3D models, using brush based sculpting applications. They usually start from basic primitive objects, such as cubes. At a certain point, they need to rework the topology of their models. There are several reasons for doing this: to make the 3D models more animation friendly, to create lowpoly versions for gaming or further sculpting and detailing, or as a way to change the highres topology in order to improve the model’s capability of handling the highres information at a lower polygon budget. A resurfacing tool like TopoGun is needed for these purposes.

Furthermore, you can use TopoGun to bake multiple maps out of the original highres meshes. These maps can be used by texture artists when texturing the models. They can also be used by 3D engines in order to preserve the original mesh’s features, (i.e., small details that couldn’t be recovered after retopologizing due to the limited polycount an engine can render in realtime).

 

Development efforts for Autodesk® Toxik™ compositing software have been transferred to Autodesk® Maya® 3D modeling, animation, visual effects, and rendering software. Autodesk Toxik is no longer available for purchase as a standalone product.

Continued Support for Autodesk Toxik
Support resources will continue to be available until March 2010 to support Autodesk Toxik customers.

 

Double Negative (DNeg), one of Europe’s largest post production houses for film and already a prolific user of The Pixel Farm’s popular matchmoving toolset PFTrack, has recently purchased an additional 10 licenses of the product for use in its new facility in Singapore.

Matchmove Supervisor at Dneg, Sam Schwier explains some of the reasons why PFTrack just keeps getting better and is the tool of choice for Dneg: “PFTrack is widely used in the London office and we have found the latest version (v5) to be a huge improvement for problem solving shots we undertake. The interface improvements in this version allow us to see the status of a track much more clearly, and it is now also much easier to feature track.”

In helping to establish the new facility, CG artists and professionals were brought from singapore to DNeg’s London HQ to familiarize them with the DNeg pipeline which tightly integrates PFTrack, so that the two studios can work together seamlessly. “The idea was to expose them to our established pipeline for world class VFX ” Says Victoria Rodgers, Head of HR at Dneg. “As there hasn’t been a lot of tracking done in Singapore it is almost an entirely new concept to most artists in the studio, so we need them to be able to pick it up very quickly and PFTrack allows us to do this.” adds Schwier.

Over the last couple of years, Dneg have invested heavily in PFTrack, making it a significant part of their VFX pipeline using unique tools such as the XML camera data importer, survey data management and geometry tracking. “Dneg are exactly the kind of forward-looking company that The Pixel Farm develops products for. It’s always a pleasure to see the continued high quality results they produce using our software.”, says Michael Lancaster, Product Director at The Pixel Farm. “We wish them every success with their expansion plans in Singapore”.

DNeg is currently hiring local talent to compliment it’s 3D department in the Fusionoplois, Singapore studio, specifying a preferred knowledge of PFTrack. www.dneg.com

 

Since the release of ZBrush 3.2 for OSX and the introduction of GoZ (www.GoZBrush.com), we have received a tremendous amount of positive feedback from the artistic community as well as companies interested in becoming GoZ supported applications.

In order to continue refining GoZ and other ZBrush4 features, we have decided to postpone the release of ZBrush 4 and instead release an interim ZBrush 3.5 for Windows and Mac users. Version 3.5 will have all the features of ZBrush 3.2—including GoZ—as well as additional refinements.

Some of the features in ZBrush 3.5 are…

Multiple texture, normal and displacement maps per SubTool, with enhanced displacement and normal map options such as native export of 32-bit displacement maps. High-Definition displacement and normal maps from HD geometry. Improved perspective with a floor grid. Reorganization of the Tool sub-palettes to coordinate with selected SubTools. The ability to merge all visible SubTools and optionally weld the seams. The new PUVTiles mapping method, which represents the most efficient use of UV space yet. PolyPainting and masking have now been enhanced to 16-bit from the previous 8-bit. New navigation to work with the virtually unlimited zooming. Right-Click Navigation. New sliders added to Project All, providing more control over your results. Memory management enhancements give the capability to subdivide your models to higher polygon counts. New ambient occlusion masking, which can create an AO texture for use in other applications.

Furthermore…

ZBrush 3.5 will also include one of the still unannounced key features of ZBrush 4. We are very excited to include this very powerful and creative new feature in version 3.5, and are sure that you will be too! An introduction to this feature will be made available here, at ZBC, within the next couple of weeks.

The Windows version of 3.5 will be released by the end of August, followed by a release of the OSX version in September. Following the release of 3.5, we will continue to refine ZBrush 4 and its features (such as LightBoxand Spotlight) for release in the 4th Quarter of 2009.

ZBrush 3.5 and ZBrush 4 will be released as free upgrades to all registered users.

 

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