3 Day NUKE Training with Steve Wright

3-DAY NUKE CLASS

Motion Media & renowned NUKE Trainer Steve Wright bring you this unique Friday, Saturday and Sunday class on Feb.11-13th, 2011,  that will explore and demonstrate the key features of Nuke and equip attending artists with a basic understanding of Nuke’s powerful workflow. Prerequisites for the class are a solid background in compositing visual effects using programs such as Shake, Combustion, Digital Fusion, Motion, Flame, Toxik or After Effects.

3ds Max and Microsoft Kinect Motion Capture

In 2009, Microsoft gave us a sneak peak of development of the Kinect unit under the name "Project Natal"

Quote: Wikipedia

” Kinect for Xbox 360, or simply Kinect (originally known by the code name Project Natal),[7] is a "controller-free gaming and entertainment experience" by Microsoft for the Xbox 360 video game platform, and may later be supported by PCs via Windows 8.[8] Based around a webcam-style add-on peripheral for the Xbox 360 console, it enables users to control and interact with the Xbox 360 without the need to touch a game controller, through a natural user interface using gestures and spoken commands.[9] The project is aimed at broadening the Xbox 360's audience beyond its typical gamer base.[10] Kinect competes with the Wii Remote with Wii MotionPlus and PlayStation Move & PlayStation Eye motion control systems for the Wii and PlayStation 3 home consoles, respectively."



The introduction in 2009 looked promising for our industry and I spoke to others who thought the same thing.

Could Natal be used to capture motion for the 3D industry, and be used for character animation?

Recently Kinect was released and the community started to experiment with it under windows with open source drivers.

You can read a bit of the history on the drivers and hacking here at Asim Mittals blog.

He also gives a step by step setup of the unit under windows.

Here is a video of real-time motion capture with a custom 3D interface application.

MikuMikuDance with OpenNI

Here is the first known video of Real-time motion in 3dsmax using biped.

Kinect and 3dsmax

It’s just the arms, but it’s a step forward in Development for the Kinect unit and Motion Capture for everyone!

Resources:
OpenNI
OpenNI Google groups
OpenKinect project

NUKE 6.2 & NUKEX 6.2 Released

The Foundry is delighted to release NUKE 6.2 and NUKEX 6.2.

Now shipping, this major release encompasses artist feedback to deliver continued refinements to core operations and the latest technology to emerge from The Foundry's highly regarded in-house research team.

Check out the information below to find out more.

This update is free to anyone with valid maintenance.  If your maintenance has expired, please contact brad@motionmedia.com

NEW IN NUKE 6.2

NUKE 6.2 gets the eagerly anticipated timeline Dope Sheet, making light work of manipulating animation key frames and interactively positioning and trimming read clips.  It also brings significant improvement to rendering performance, flip book playback and 2D tracker interaction, along with enhancements to the expression editor and file browser - all core improvements contributing to improved productivity and workflow.

NEW IN NUKEX 6.2

NUKEX 6.2 adds new image-based modeling tools allowing any artist to easily combine a tracked 3D camera with a selection of 2D image features, automatically creating simple scene geometry. When added to new dense point cloud generation and automatic calibration of projection cameras from 2D images and geometry, NUKEX 6.2 provides new ways to reference and re-apply composited elements more efficiently and realistically into live action scenes.

For those working with CGI rendered elements, NUKEX 6.2 brings Pixar RenderMan Pro Server support to the 3D compositing environment. As an alterative to the in-built scanline renderer, integration with RenderMan aligns NUKE-rendered scenes with the rest of the 3D pipeline, seamlessly matching motion blur and depth of field, whilst providing the compositor with more flexible control of new rendering capabilities such as ray-traced shadows and reflections.

Luxology Delivers New Version of 3D Software modo 501!

Luxology has released modo 501 with many awesome tool updates and performance enhancements.

modo is an innovative 3D modeling, painting and rendering software designed to accelerate the creation of world-class models, associated color , normal maps, and ultra high-quality renderings.

modo 501 Offers Increased Rendering Speed, Ray-traced Viewports, Multi-res Sculpting and Plug-in Opportunities for Third Party Development

Check out all the new 501 features video tour here.

Motion Media is an Authorized Reseller of Luxology's flagship product modo 501.

Free Mocha Pro Webinar Tomorrow

Free mocha Pro webinar tomorrow
Register now:
VFX techniques with mocha Pro webinar
What: a free live online webinar with instructor, Ben Brownlee of Curious Turtle Training
When: December 16, 2010 @ 10:00 AM PST to 11:30 AM PST - Convert Timezone
Register: New Media Webinars

AGENDA

• * How is planar tracker different from other types of tracking?
  * Identifying the best planes to track - even when they are not directly linked to our target.
  * When to split tracking data from the shapes you want to work on.
  * The principle behind removing elements from a shot.
  * Removing a lens flare from footage shot with a moving camera.
  * Stabilizing shots with the Stabilize module.

DURATION

90 Minutes

WHO SHOULD ATTEND

Visual Effects Artists, Video Editors, After Effects Users, Final Cut Studio Users, Online Editors, Compositors, VFX Producers, Mocha Users, Mokey Users

PREREQUISITE

Understanding some of the basics of compositing (layers, motion tracking, masks) would be useful as would a basic understanding of the Mocha interface.

Phoenix FD 1.20 now available

The new version of the fluid dynamics system will astonish all fans with the opportunity for liquid simulations

The latest version 1.20 of the grid based simulator for fire and smoke Phoenix FD has just been released. This is one of the newest products of Chaos Group. The software perfectly combines a grid based simulator with outstanding rendering capabilities. In addition to the usual uniform fluid behavior, Phoenix FD is capable of simulating a whole array of additional processes like pressure decay, thermal radiation cooling and mass-temperature dependence.

The grid based simulator is ready to bewilder all fans with an amazing new feature added – the extension for liquid simulations! This product also comes with a lot more features like Turbulence helper, Forward Transfer advection, Randomization, and Analytic scattering mode.

Click Here to Purchase.

Maya Testers Needed

Greenbutton, a cloud rendering plugin company has teamed up with Autodesk and is looking for a test group for their new plugin.  GreenButton software plugins deliver you high performance cloud computing directly to your desktop application. Imagine offloading complex multimedia tasks, statistical analysis from your computer, to thousands of computers.

What is Greenbutton looking for?
"We have just entered a proof of concept with Autodesk to begin development of GreenButton plugins for both Maya and 3ds Max. While we understand the complexity of Maya, what we really want to know, is how we can do this better with the GreenButton.

The idea of this product steering group is for us to better capture what you, as the users really want. So before we charge off and build the standard acceleration functions, we want to ensure that we deliver a truly stunning solution and perhaps add other features that web based services can deliver, e.g. Remote viewing of jobs currently being rendered from a mobile device. "

Click Here to Sign Up

Autodesk 3ds Max and 3ds Max Design 2011 Hotfix 4 Now Available for Customers

An update for Autodesk® 3ds Max® 2011 software and Autodesk® 3ds Max® Design 2011 software is currently available on the Autodesk website. This hotfix helps resolve issues with the following features: the 3ds Max® Character Animation Toolkit, Autodesk® FBX® interoperability, Autodesk® Materials, and mental ray® software. It improves the overall operation of the 3ds Max software products.

For more information on issues resolved in this hotfix, please visit the Shane Griffith's Blog on the AREA

The Foundry Storm NEW STORM BETA RELEASE AVAILABLE

New release of the Storm open Beta.

"This release fixes some critical issues including pre-set look crashes, launch failures and display issues with R3D clips set to the new RedColor2 colour space."

The STORM Public Beta is available for free trial

Also don't forget to watch the introductory videos with Nick Shaw

An introduction to STORM basic workflow

Buy MARI, Get a FREE Quadro 600

Buy MARI, Get a Quadro 600 Card Free!

For a limited time when you purchase MARI, either standalone or floating, you get a free Quadro 600 Card.

Maya running on an iPad

Cloud Computing, Maya and the Ipad

All Things Digital have a technology Video with the folks of OnLive showing off Cloud Computing, Maya with the Ipad.

To skip to the 3D Portion of the video scrub to about 7:25.

Video Link:

cebas releases finalRender 3.5 and 3.5 SE

New Features Deliver 3D-Stereo Camera, Ultra-Fast Global Illumination Engine and More

“We have brought out a new release for our industry leading tool finalRender much faster than usual,” said cebas CEO Edwin Braun. “Our users asked us to make new features available as we develop them so they can put them into production immediately. cebas has responded by releasing a ‘.5’ version as a major release for the first time in our 20-year history. ”

Link for More Information

Adobe® Premiere Pro® CS5 now offers GPU acceleration on laptops

Adobe Premiere Pro CS5, version 5.0.3 is an update available worldwide on December 7, 2010.  This update to Adobe Premiere Pro CS5 adds support for two new NVIDIA cards: the Quadro 4000 (Mac) and the Quadro 5000M (Windows). The addition of these new cards extends the power of the Mercury Playback Engine’s GPU acceleration to users working on laptops as well as workstations.

The 5.0.3 update also includes performance enhancements to further improve the experience of switching between Adobe Premiere Pro CS5 and other applications, as well as other user interface, stability, and performance enhancements that make the Adobe Premiere Pro CS5 editing workflow even more efficient and robust. For a full list of enhancements, check out Adobe Premiere Pro team’s blog post that highlights the 5.0.3 update

Learn How You Can Save Cash on Software Purchases in 2010

Learn how Section 179 Can Increase Your Bottom Line in 2010

Join Motion Media and Jacob Lager of Zuber & Taillieu for a free webinar explaining the details of Section 179, and how you can best use this tax deduction to your advantage. This is not a complicated tax, and it is much easier than you might think to deduct your software & even other purchases as well.

Jacob will go over:

• Section 179 overview


• What you can write off


• How it works


• How financing software this year can actually make you money in 2010


• What other purchase you can deduct with Section 179


• Q&A - Get all of your questions answered.

The Details

Who Should Attend: Anyone who has purchased any software in 2010, or is planning on purchasing before year's end.

When: Thursday, December 9th - 1pm-2pm

Where: Online

Cost: Free

Free Mocha Pro Image Stabilization Tutorial

Check out this free Image Stabilization tutorial using Mocha Pro that was done by the guys at Curious Turtle Training.

mocha Pro: intro to stabilize module from Ross Shain on Vimeo.

Amazing Video made with 3ds Max & Vray

If you haven't already seen this, it is a must see for any aspiring or current visual effects artist. The work here is absolutely amazing, and all done by one person.  It just goes to show that you don't need an entire studio to create something incredible.  The software he used in this is 3ds Max, Vray, After Effects and Premiere Pro.  Enjoy.

The Third & The Seventh from Alex Roman on Vimeo.

Matrox MXO2 Software Updates for Mac

For the MXO2 family of I/O devices on the Mac, this release includes Adobe Creative Suite 5 Production Premium support and a powerful new stand-alone capture software application, Matrox Vetura Capture.

Matrox Vetura Capture lets users quickly and easily capture QuickTime files using popular codecs installed on their editing systems. Users of Adobe Premiere Pro CS5 can capture to the Matrox MPEG2 I-frame full raster (1920 x 1080) HD codec or to other popular Adobe-supported codecs. Users of Final Cut Pro can capture to ProRes and other popular Final Cut Pro codecs. Users of Avid Media Composer can capture directly to Avid DNxHD .mov files or other popular Avid-supported codecs.