This tasty little animation is called Orbitas, and was put together by the students at PrimerFrame, an animation school. Some of the student created productions have won awards, and after watching this gem it will be obvious why. You should take this as inspiration to build your own.
There is a very creative guy called Joey Shanks who puts together videos that are tutorials in how to create various kinds of special effects in association with PBS. One of his recent projects was to show how to create a scientifically accurate Black Hole like the one in the movie Interstellar. The video allows you to see step by step how each element was captured by the camera, and then gives you a peak at how they look when all the elements are added to the composite layer by layer. This is not how the effect was actually created for the film, in part because a big piece of Joey’s approach is to do as many elements of a given build using real world objects and a camera to film them as possible. But it does give you enough information that you might get some really good ideas of how to build your own effects. I found out about this series from Cinefex, a great place to learn more about how the effects you see on the screen get built, and who is doing them.
Black Hole creation | Shanks FX | PBS Digital Studios from Joey Shanks on Vimeo.
There are many aspects to a SIGGRAPH convention, but one of my favorites has always been the Computer Animation Festival, and the SIGGRAPH Asia 2014 con coming up next month looks to have a good collection. The gathering takes place in Shenzhen, China, from December 3rd to the 6th, and as always will feature the cutting edge in what is being created in the world of computer graphics.
A couple of classic tunes put together in minimal time to tie them to an animation, created in iClone. The minimal time factor explains why the lip sync is so bad, and the crudeness of some of the other animation aspects. But while as a viewer I can critique these as not being as perfect as the music videos from world class productions like Frozen, as a creator I am in awe that a single person working from an extremely tight deadline managed to put out anything at all, let alone anything as tightly animated and choreographed as this. I mean, compare the budget, timeline, and production staff between the two projects and see if you don’t understand what I am referring to. Kudo’s to Jay for creating such amazing product under this kind of constraint. And he did it using a couple of my all time favorite tunes, always a bonus!
I have sat through a lot of tutorials about how to do things in a 3D CGI modeling and animation software package before, and this one just made me grin. Jay Johnson has a kid who had an animation project in mind, which he shared with his dad. Dad installed the full free DAZ Studio Pro software suite on his computer, the child beat on it for half an hour getting nowhere, and gave up in frustration. Jay then showed his kid how to use the software to make his project come to life in about 20 minutes, and he reports that two days later the end result was amazing according to dad.
That event caused Jay to assemble this 20 minute Quick-Start Guide for DAZ Studio Pro, paring the process down to just those components needed to get a project started and come up with a final product. Mind, he did jump to the various library segments that he knew held the components needed for the specific project to hand, so you can expect to spend a bit of time looking through each area for the building blocks required for yours. But the important part is the way he trimmed back the process to just the bare bones required to complete the task. Follow that process, and save your work often under incremented file names so you can go back to any step of it later. Once you get the first one built, you can go back and tweak any aspect of it to your hearts content until you get it perfect, but this tutorial should help you get started (and finished) a lot quicker than you expected to.
You could not fit in the drivers seat and roll out with this prototype model on the highway quite yet, but I love the fact that there is a crew of engineers working their butts off to build an actual working transformer system! Looking at their progress to date, I guesstimate something in the 10 to 20 years range to have working versions you could actually use to commute to work. Thanks to Tech Crunch for the heads up on this one!