Cinesite!

Hello all

some news for you this month as of last monday (the 18th) I am now an employee of Cinesite London. Its great to be working in Film again, and it looks like im gonna be here for the best part of a year, so should have some exciting new work to show at the end of it all.

Working as a modeller again, but i think it may be straying into texturing before too long, will keep you posted with any news that I can.

In the meantime heres a little about Cinesite:

"Cinesite offices in Hollywood and London were established in 1991 and 1994 respectively, as test sites for Kodak's Cineon computer system, an end-to-end solution for 2K and 4K digital files. Cinesite became so successful in its own right, however, that after Cineon was discontinued by Kodak in 1997, Cinesite developed into a visual effects facility. In 2003, Cinesite's Hollywood branch became incorporated, by Kodak, into LaserPacific, a multimedia, DVD authoring digital intermediate and post-production facility.

Initially, the company worked solely as a visual effects facility for film. Since 1999, it has increasingly become involved in television, creating effects for several productions, including HBO's Band of Brothers in 2002; Rome in 2006, again for HBO; and The State Withi for the BBC in 2006.

The company has won awards for its visual effects, gaining an Emmy Award nomination and a Royal Television Society award for Band of Brothers. Its work for Rome was awarded the Emmy for Visual Effects in 2005."

Cinesite is also part of the visual effects team that won an Oscar for the Golden Compass in 2007

you can fine more info HERE

fatcap competition

Hello all

another update from the animation workshop, just thought I would post some details here of a competion I ran for my class while teaching in denmark.

I wanted to see how they would handle a basic brief that was much simpler than it looked, so I challenged them to model and render a 'fatcap' figureing by kidrobot. Kidrobot sell these figures as collectables and in unmarked boxes so you never know which one you will get, the designs on each model come from various artists and designers around the world and are rather cool if you ask me. The challenge here is that the shape is, while organic quite specific and has both hard and soft edges, so while it look simple, is in fact, somewhat of a challenge. (there are some pics below, i must confess, they arent mine.)




I gave them three weeks to submit (waaaayyy too much time, but we had other things to do), to model one of these figures and here are the winning results. The catagories were: BEST RENDER, BEST TEXTURE and MOST IMPROVED MODELLER.

Here are the winners:

BEST RENDER (and) BEST TEXTURE:

Jonothan Brusch

I thought Jonothans image was excellent, the texture is interesting and cool, and there render is nice and simple, works perfectly for the subject. also the model is spot on, so well done Jonothan.



MOST IMPROVED MODELLER:

Casper Wermuth

Casper modelled this as soon as I set the task, dedicated and enthusiastic his attitude to the project was admirable, and while the model isnt 100 percent accurate, it showed huge improvement as a modeller and a good approach all round. well done Casper



so thats it for Denmark for now, may well pop back here later in the year to teach another group basic modelling, we shall have to see. Its been fun!

some work by my students

Hey all, just wanted to post some work by my students, this was from an exercise in low poly speed modeling, they had roughly one hour to model a new york style building (which i had given them reference for), and then these models were pieced together to make a "block". I think the end result is excellent and just goes to show what you can do with a limited time if you keep things simple.

here are some renders (we duplicated the block several times to give the impression of a city)