Warner released an official poster for the upcoming Batman movie, The Dark Knight Rises (click on the picture for a bigger version). And they also released a teaser trailer for the movie, although a lot of the footage is just recycled from the previous two movies. But you do get a shot of the new villain: Bane.
What little I know of Bane is from the animated series (and from reading the Wikipedia entry, of course). It seems like this character, supposed to be one of Batman’s toughest foes in the comics, has not been used very much in television or film. It will be very interesting to see Christopher Nolan’s version of the character.
After a very long hiatus, I have added a new entry to the gallery. My goal was simply to reacquaint myself with Lightwave, including basic modeling, texturing, lighting, rigging, and rendering. I’m pretty happy with the results, and it only took a few days to complete from start to finish.
As an added bonus, I compared the performance of my new computer (well, six months old, anyway) to my brother’s computer, which is about the performance I’m used to using. A render that took 19 minutes on my brother’s computer only takes 3 minutes on my computer, which is a very impressive increase in speed!
I found a couple of good sites that discuss general animation technique. The first, http://genedeitch.awn.com/index.php3, is a free online book by an animator that has been in the industry for decades. I’ve read the first few chapters and I look forward to reading the rest. The author, who is trained in classic 2D cel animation techniques, talks about animation as a general art form, not tied to any specific mediums or technologies. So it can apply to cel animations, Flash, 3D CGI, or (the author hopes) any new forms of animation that are created in the future.
The second, http://tooninstitute.awn.com/main.html, has a few short tutorials about hand-drawn 2D animation. It covers some pretty basic material, but it’s still a nice read. It’s good to be reminded of the basics every once in a while, just to make sure you don’t forget the fundamentals.
Over the past few weeks, I’ve fallen behind on keeping my Inbox neat and tidy. I just started catching up today, hoping to clear out all of the emails that I want to read and deleting the ones that are just junk.
One of the first emails I opened is a daily newsletter from G4TV’s Attack of the Show (which I haven’t really watched since Sarah Lane left, but I do like some of the occasional features in the newsletter). In it I found this link, which is a short video segment from their show about 3D animation blogs: http://www.g4tv.com/attackoftheshow/blogwatch/65912/Best-3D-Animation-Blogs.html.
If you want to skip the video (it’s only 1:47 long), here’s the summary:
Sadly, I haven’t visited these sites yet, but I plan to once I’m done cleaning out my email.
UPDATE (11:07am): Another G4TV video, this time about digital graffiti: http://www.g4tv.com/attackoftheshow/blogwatch/66021/Digital-Graffiti-Blogs.html
It’s a very interesting topic about an intersection between technology and art. I especially like the PiKAPiKA stuff.
What is going on with my street lately? First, a fire truck catches on fire. Later that same week, I heard someone crash into light post late at night. And now today, a car dealer’s transport truck trapped itself during a turn by hitting a parked car with its rear end. This took over an hour to fix, because the truck could not move without doing more damage to the car (and possibly to the next parked car, too) and no tow truck could get to the victim car to move it out of the way.
Finally, the owner of the white SUV in front of the victim car showed up and moved his car, giving a tow truck enough room to pull the grey SUV off the truck’s back end.
I finished one floor of the high-rise I’m modeling, so I rendered out a quick test with a bunch of the floors stacked on top of each other. You can take a look at a much higher resolution image of the render by clicking on the image.
Part of the final building will actually look like this, but the top half of the building has a slightly different layout. And, of course, I will need to setup texturing and shading.
In response to a comment from the previous post: I am creating this in Maya.
What is irony? How about a burning fire engine, that needs the fire department to come and put out the flames?
The picture above was taken after a fire engine crashed into a building and caught on fire. Two hours later, the streets are still barricaded for a block in every direction. The building is missing a good section of that corner, too.
EDIT: According to the news, the fire engine was knocked into the building by a another car (I think the grey one parked next to it in the picture) that did not stop for the emergency vehicle as it crossed the intersection.
I’ve been playing around with Maya recently and created this simple image to learn basic texturing. The modeling is… well, there wasn’t really any modeling except for creating a few NURBS spheres and a flat plane.
But the textures are my own. I created the one in the top-left first, to try different layering and bump map effects. The green glassy one was a simple dielectric. I’m quite proud of the marble one – I think it looks really good! And I added the last one just to have a very reflective material in the shot.
Last year, Geneon announced that they will no longer distribute their anime to North America. That meant that I could no longer get official dubs of two new anime shows I like, Hellsing Ultimate and Black Lagoon. But I just found out that Geneon has found a new North American distributor for their works (it was actually announced a few months ago – I guess I haven’t looked in a while). Funimation, a well-known North American distributor, will pick up the licenses for Geneon distribution.
Hellsing Ultimate follows the vampire Alucard, who is in service to a secret British military order, the Hellsing Organization. The Hellsing Organization’s mission is to destroy monsters, such as vampires and ghouls. The series (it’s actually an OVA, or direct-to-DVD series) follows the original manga pretty closely, which is why I’m a fan of this anime. The original Hellsing TV series did not follow the manga after a few episodes, at which point the writing quickly went downhill.
Black Lagoon has been compared a lot to Cowboy Bebop, except the main characters are mercenaries and they are not in space. I’m not saying it’s as good as Bebop, but it’s a good show and has some cool scenes.
Watch a lot of late-night television, like me? If so, you’re probably sick of all those Enzyte commercials they show during every commercial break. You know, the ones with the creepy “Smiling Bob” guy? Well, you won’t be seeing Bob or his commercials anymore.
The owner of the company that sells Enzyte was sentenced to 25 years in prison for conspiracy, fraud, and money-laundering related to Enzyte. Surprise: the product didn’t work. Plus, he refused legitimate returns from customers and had a bad habit of overcharging customer credit cards.
