Using a combination of solid and liquid printing, MIT printed the first ever 3D Printed Hydraulic Powered Robot. No assembly was required, beyond popping on a motor and battery. Which means now our Evil Robot Overlords will be able to print up their minions themselves. The advance that made this possible was developing a technique to print both solids and liquids in the same printer, and I find it somewhat surprising that they got the best results for the liquid printing using a regular ink jet printer.
This short CG film Ascension has won multiple awards and certainly made me smile when I watched it. As so many of these are, this is a graduation movie, meaning it was built to prove they deserved the degree or certification offered by their school, the same way you do it to get a degree for film school. The school in this case was the Supinfocom Arles in France (if you don’t speak French they have an English version of the site), and the students who created this are Thomas Bourdis, Martin de Coudenhove, Caroline Domergue, Colin Laubry and Florian Vecchione doing the animation, with Seth Stewart composing the music.
I usually leave music for Saturday’s entry, but this one is about 3D modeling and motion capturing to create an amazing video. When The Chemical Brothers and Beck got together to record Wide Open they decided they needed the dancer in the video to be wide open as well. So they made a 3D model of Sonoya Mizuno and used it to transform her gradually into a 3D printed matrix of herself. The result is as enjoyable on the eyes as the music is on the ears. Thanks to Digital Trends for the heads up on this one.
For decades Virtual Reality has been expensive and flaky, but no more; this is the year it goes mainstream and affordable. Part of that is because of projects like Google Cardboard, allowing you to assemble your own VR headset for as little as $150 (cell phone, head set, and trigger button). Until recently there has been a lack of content for VR, but that has changed as well, with everyone from the Discovery Channel to the Dali Museum putting together presentations for it. In the case of the museum, they converted one of Dali’s paintings into a Virtual Reality exhibit entitled Dreams of Dali. Once at the museum they have Oculus Rift headsets for you to wear while exploring the VR environment they created of it.
2015 was a great year with some excellent films, and 2016 looks like it will do just as well. Zootopia is an example of one of the ones I am waiting for, filled with the kind of animals-as-humans animation Disney is famous for and looking quite tasty in the second trailer for the film. This will be hitting the big screen on March 4th, and has an amazing cast doing the voice overs. Other movies worth checking out in 2016 include La belle et la bête, The 5th Wave, Ip Man 3, Kung Fu Panda 3… and that is just in January!
Gods of Egypt looks like a lot of fun if this trailer is any indication. It will be in theaters on February 26, 2016, and this video makes me think somebody looked around for inspiration after watching the Thor films and Stargate series, landing on the rich mythology of ancient Egypt for their way to access the other franchise’s audiences. While I don’t expect this film to turn out to be an award winner, it does look like it could be silly fun.