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3D total is coming out with its Digital Arts Masters, Vol.2 book. The book is a collection of 60 of the most eye popping computer generated imagery. 58 artists have contributed in total. The book also describes how the artists went about creating their masterpieces. The book can be ordered online by following this link. But for those of us who would like to have a preview, follow the same link to find a cool interactive book. You can turn the pages of this interactive book as you would any physical book, and feast your eyes on the artwork.

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Ratatataaa…what? Ratatouille (pronounced rat-a-tooey) is the next movie from Pixar. If you haven’t heard of it, lets get acquainted with it!

Ratatouille is the story of a rat named Remy, who wants to be a chef. He tries hard, but finds himself chased out of kitchens, hanging for his dear life. That’s when he meets a scullery guy named Linguini. Even though Linguine cannot understand what the rat says, he gets the point that the rat understands him. Slowly they become good friends, and with Linguini’s help, Remy is on the path to realise his dream.

And if that is not charming enough, have a look at the trailers here. The Pixar people have taken great pains to make the food look edible. The animation, I heard, is supposed to be great too, considering that the lad and the rat don’t talk to each other, but just communicate through nods and frowns.

You can view the latest trailer here. You can also read a great article in Time magazine here, which goes into more detail about the work done behind this and other Pixar movies. The movie is releasing on the 29th of June, atleast here in Canada. Can’t wait…

Via : 3Dtotal

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Now that Spidey’s been swinging around for a while, let me show you glimpses of how the amazing shots in the movie were made. It all looks so simple, but you will be startled to know what the team over at Imageworks and others did to get it all on screen - its just mind boggling!

The visual effects of spiderman 3 were primarily done at Sony Pictures Imageworks, with help from BUF, Evil Eye Pictures, Furious FX, Gentle Giant Studios, Giant Killer Robots, Halon Entertainment, Tweak Films and X1fx. Let us start with the swinging scenes. Swinging scenes were a mixture of live-action and Computer Generated (CG) elements. Like one such breakup shown here, Toby Maguire was shot against a blue-screen, which was replaced by the background. In the last part of the scene, the actor was fully replaced by a digital model, which gets violently wedged into the wall.

You can see the performance-capture methodology here, where the photos of the actor are used to digitally reconstruct them in 3D, which was in turn used for their performances in scenes which were too dangerous for the actual actors. A similar methodology was used for capturing performances in the Matrix films (2 and 3).

But the biggest challenge that faced the good people over at Imageworks was the sandman. It is never easy to do stuff like sand and water in CG. They are composed of millions of small particles, which have to interact with each other, and the environment around them. As you can see here, a basic shape was first animated, and then sand was added to the character. The motion of the sand was calculated by a combination of rigid-body dynamics and fluid-simulations. Basically, stacking was calculated as small spheres, like stacking up oranges, and then, smaller particles were simulated in each sphere to give a believable sand-like feel.

For the black-goo, they used a combination of hand-animation (hard-work) and simulations. You can see it here.

If you want to get more details, you can read the wonderful article at CGSociety here.

Yeah, the videos take their time to load, but are worth it. If you get an urge to see the movie after knowing how it was made, well, it is natural, don’t be alarmed.

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After releasing Shrek 3 into the wild, what is Dreamworks upto these days? They are doing what they are good at, making another animated movie. This time, its about bees!

So, what’s so special about this movie, aptly titled the ‘The Bee Movie’? Well, for starters, it signals the return of Jerry Seinfeld. Yup, the same guy who disappeared after wrapping up his outrageously popular TV series. From what I’ve heard, Seinfeld wrote the movie and pitched it to Dreamworks animation. They loved it, and the rest is history (in the making).

Check out the trailers of the movie here. See them in sequence. They are hilarious. One even has Spielberg explaining how he made the E.T!! Also checkout Cartoon Brew’s take on the movie here. The comments are quite enlightening.

The cast includes Renée Zellweger, Matthew Broderick, John Goodman, Chris Rock and of course, Jerry Seinfeld.

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Here is some great News! The people behind Ubuntu, the free Linux distro, have launched Ubuntu Studio.

Ubuntu Studio is a multimedia creation flavor of Ubuntu, aimed at both hobbyists and professionals alike. It comes pre-loaded with a suite of open-source applications used for creation of audio, video and graphic design. So, people waiting to record that dream song, or just wanting to prep-up that holiday video, can head straight to the download section.

Audio applications include Ardour 2 - A multitrack recorder/editor geared toward people familiar with Pro-Tools. For graphic design, there are The GIMP, Inkscape and Blender, along with plugins like dcraw to help with RAW camera files and wacom-tools for people with Wacom drawing tablets. PiTiVi, Kino, Cinepaint are included for video creation.

All the above applications are open-source and don’t cost a penny. Ubuntu has done the hard work of assembling all these together into one delicious distribution. For those who don’t know, Ubuntu is a free Linux distribution, which is gaining a lot of popularity. It satisfies both hardcore Linux users and newbies alike. Dell has even started to pre-load some of its machines with Ubuntu.

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