Assassin’s Creed was a great game and an excellent premise for a movie; I don’t know if it succeeded or not, because I haven’t seen it yet. The critics seemed to be underwhelmed, with “confusing” and “disorienting” being the two words most often used to describe it. I don’t know if that’s because none of them ever played the game, or the script was that poorly done, but either way I will stream it before I consider buying it. I also haven’t seen Sing, but there is no question that this animation needs to be a part of my permanent collection. In Anime the new title is Attack on Titan: Junior High, probably the silliest series from this franchise, but still very worth watching. We also get a S.A.V.E. edition of BlazBlue: Alter Memory; The Complete Series, for those who haven’t seen it before now.
If you are playing with 3D modeling, be aware of MakeHuman, a free open source tool for creating 3D characters. Written in Python, it integrates seamlessly into blender, and allows you to instantly generate a fully rigged and ready to animate human or near-human. It’s slider set has over a thousand morphs you can apply to modify your character, including (but not limited to) Age, gender, height, weight, body proportions, face shapes, eyes, nose, mouth, chin, ears, neck, hands, feet.. the list goes on. And it is licensed under the CC0 license from Creative Commons, giving you unparalleled freedom to use your creations however you like. The folks over at Games From Scratch did an excellent introduction video on this, which I am including here so you can see just how easy and powerful this package is.
The LEGO movie team are on a roll, and on September 22nd we get another one: The LEGO NINJAGO Movie. It is Master Builder Lloyd aka The Green Ninja vs. Evil Warlord Garmedon aka The Worst Guy Ever, in one hysterical battle for supremacy. I really like what they are doing with this franchise, and I hope they will keep cranking them out.
We get a couple of very different movies this week. The gritty near future dystopia The Girl with All the Gifts, based on the novel by the same name from Mike Carey, is a story of spoor crazed zombies and human experimentation. On the other hand the fantasy Rock Dog is about a Tibetan Mastiff who wants to play music rather than guard sheep. I know which one I will be watching; how about you?
The SIGGRAPH Computer Animation Festival 2017 entries are still open, and will be until March 21st, which is also their deadline for VR Theater entries. So you still have a bit of time to submit your projects to the gathering, which will be held from July 30th to August 3rd in Los Angeles this year. Yes, the competition can be daunting; after all, these are most of the folks doing serious VR and Animation work on the planet. But if you have something that you are proud of and willing for others to see, this could be the perfect venue for you to put your work in the public eye. And maybe it might be you standing on stage and accepting the award this year.
The LEGO Batman Movie should be the same silly fun as the last LEGO movie, and my choice for the one to see this weekend.