Remember all the great Japanese animations that have had rumors of being turned into a Hollywood live-action movie? For example: Cowboy Bebop, Evangelion, and Dragon Ball Z? (Oh wait, that last one was made into a laughably bad film.)
Well, you can add Ghost in the Shell to that list. According to Variety, DreamWorks owns the rights to the movie and has just signed on Scarlett Johansson to star as Major Motoko Kusanagi, the main character. It will be very hard to top the original Ghost in the Shell animated film. But I’ll be honest, if it gets made I will probably watch it just to see Scarlett Johansson in some of Major Kusanagi’s outfits.
Speaking of a live-action Evangelion movie – there were rumors a few months ago that Michael Bay was interested in directing a Hollywood production of the franchise. Fortunately for any fans of Evangelion, he later squashed those rumors as completely made up.
As I mentioned in a previous post, I have been busy putting together a new computer. My current computer is about four years old and still runs fine, but my backup computer recently died and that gave me an excuse to get some computing upgrades. (My “backup computer” is actually used to back up my files, along with any files my wife wants to back up from her laptop. Then the files on my backup computer are uploaded up to CrashPlan for even better data security.)
Inspired by the computer that Pi Visuals built, I decided to build my own computer. My last few computers have been Dell, but I have noticed that there are less customization options through the Dell website. Since the main goal of my computer is to perform well during 3D animation tasks, it will have similar characteristics to a gaming computer. But I do not need all of the features that come with a high-end gaming system, like RAID hard drives or overclocked processors. And that is the best advantage of building your own computer: you can pick and choose between any features you want, as long as it fits into your budget.
I have been using LightWave 3D for about nine years and I have been extremely lucky that I have only purchased software once during that entire time. I originally bought it at version 8.5 and it came with a free upgrade to the as-yet-unreleased version 9.0. I have continued to use the 9.X versions ever since and I have not felt the need to upgrade.
But I am in the middle of putting together a new computer (more details here) and I was hoping to buy the latest version of LightWave 3D to go with my shiny new hardware. But the upgrade sale price has not been available for a few months, and I do not want to pay the full upgrade price when I know that Newtek likes to frequently offer $200 discounts. I was hoping that with Black Friday and Cyber Monday around the corner, Newtek would put LightWave 3D back on sale.
And then I received an email yesterday from Newtek announcing that the latest version of LightWave has just been released, named “LightWave 2015”. And to celebrate the release of the new software version, the software is on sale again.
I am still waiting for one more component before I can finish building my computer (expected arrival date: tomorrow), but once I have my new system fully up and running I plan on buying my first LightWave 3D upgrade. If all goes according to plan, I will be running LightWave 2015 by the end of the weekend!
For any long-time Adult Swim fans out there, you probably remember in 2002 when Adult Swim expanded from a single block of Sunday night programming to include a second Saturday block dedicated to anime. And one of the first shows on the new Saturday anime block was Inuyasha.
Inuyasha, which originally aired 167 episodes in Japan, was a mainstay of the Adult Swim anime lineup through 2006. But despite its long run, the series ended abruptly without any conclusion to the major story arcs that had been in place for nearly the entire series.
In Japan, a new Inuyasha series was created and aired in fall 2009 through early 2010 that wrapped up the story, aptly named Inuyasha – The Final Act. It follows the last chapters of the manga, finally concluding the main story lines involving Naraku. Or so I hope, anyway – I have not read any of the manga or seen any plot information about the series.
But finally, after years of waiting, Adult Swim will begin airing Inuyasha – The Final Act on Saturday nights, starting this coming Saturday. But be warned: some of the voice actors have changed, most notably those that voice Kagome and Sesshomaru.
Even though I’m worried about Sesshomaru’s new voice, my DVR is already set for Saturday’s first episode!
I continually switch between my personal computer and my work laptop. Rather than physically move from one computer to another, I use a KVM switch. For those that do not know, KVM is short for “Keyboard, Video, Mouse”. By connecting one monitor, keyboard, and mouse to the output of the switch and multiple computers to the inputs, I can easily switch between computers by just changing the port number on the KVM. The computer that is connected to the active port of the KVM is able to access the monitor and receive input from the keyboard/mouse.
Modern KVMs are more than just physical switches, however. When a computer is connected but not on the active port, the KVM still has to regularly communicate with the computer to pretend that the devices are still connected. For instance, you do not want your video card to lose sync with the monitor and revert to a default small resolution, causing your desktop icons to reshuffle around! And to make life even easier, many KVM switches include “hotkey switching”, which allows you to type in a short sequence of keys on your keyboard to switch to a different port or even activate other options.
Following up on my last post, I managed to get a stylus fully working with the Motion Computing tablet. I received the new stylus that I ordered from Motion and gave it a try, but it acted the same as my current stylus. So I had to do some more digging and I found out that I was using the wrong device driver.
The driver on Motion’s website does not add pressure sensitivity. I originally found some old forum posts saying that legacy Wacom drivers will work, but I was never able to get any of them to install. So I went to the official Wacom driver website and downloaded the drivers from the “Legacy Drivers” section, All of my attempts failed with “no compatible hardware found” errors.
Then I noticed a different link on the main Wacom driver page: “Wacom Feel IT”, also subtitled “Visit our Table PC driver page”. It turns out that the driver on that page successfully installed and added advanced features, especially pressure sensitivity.
I have played with it a bit since getting it working, but not extensively. However, I have found that when I use the eraser side of the stylus, I still try to brush away the eraser dust as if it was a real pencil. It will take a while to erase that habit, I guess.
But then I remembered that I already have a tablet computer with a stylus, the Motion Computing LE1700. My wife originally used it at work, but she preferred a laptop so eventually this came home and ended up in my closet.
So this week, I looked into the details of the the LE1700 and found out that the stylus technology is from Wacom, maker of probably the best stylus and tablet hardware. The LE1700 includes pressure sensitive input, which is an amazing feature to use for drawing. This particular model does not have touch input, but for my purposes that is actually better: I can rest my hand on the screen and it will not affect the drawing. And it runs a full version of Windows (Vista, unfortunately), so I can install full applications like Photoshop or GIMP.
The downside to the machine is that it has a very short battery life, is very heavy compared to an iPad, and it tends to get pretty warm. But, considering that I already own it, I cannot complain too much.
Unfortunately, the pressure sensitivity on my machine is not working. I have spent a lot of time this week trying to figure out the problem, hoping that it was just a software or driver issue. The device was also exhibiting some strange behavior in Internet Explorer (probably caused by its tour of duty at my wife’s work), so I ended up doing a full restore from the initial factory image. Actually, due to some bizarre patch problem that completely broke Windows, I had to rebuild it twice, which cost me about a day. And after all that, the pressure sensitivity is still not working.
I read online that the stylus itself can lose pressure sensitivity. So, I am buying a replacement stylus from Motion Computing and hoping that fixes the problem. It would be great to have a full Wacom slate computer with pressure sensitive stylus for drawing. But, if the pressure sensitivity is still broken with the new stylus, at least I can use it in the same manner as an iPad, but with a more full-featured OS and applications.
Pixar Animation Studios announced that the next version of RenderMan, their award winning render engine, will be free for non-commercial use. The non-commercial license will provide full functionality without any restrictions, watermarks, or time limits. And the next version is due out sometime soon (fourth quarter of this year, according to their website).
The render engine works with Maya, but currently does not work with LightWave. Some third-party developers are creating plugins for LightWave that will add RenderMan integration. I expect that once the RenderMan non-commercial licenses are available, there will be more developers working to make this happen (the non-commercial license allows for developing commercial tools and plugins).
In their FAQ page for the non-commercial licenses, they explain why they have chosen to give away these licenses. One of the reasons is exciting to see from such a leading studio:
“It is Pixar’s experience that limitations on software access have become an impediment to the development of the production industry, and that universal access and a set of common standards and practices can only stimulate further growth.”
Hopefully this type of open access for educational and personal use becomes more common, which I believe is good both for aspiring artists and the companies selling high-end software packages.
To promote his brand new record, Weird Al has created eight music videos and is releasing a new one each day. You can view the new videos as they are released at his website, WeirdAl.com (four have been released so far).
In Tuesday’s video he parodies “Blurred Lines”, a song I find extremely annoying and repetitive but with a music video I cannot help but enjoy (warning: NSFW). Weird Al’s version, “Word Crimes”, is a huge upgrade to the original song. Pay attention to the video and you might learn a little about good grammar!
Another great video is “Foil”, a parody of Lorde’s “Royal”. This one was created with CollegeHumor.com and features Patton Oswalt!
“Tacky”, his first video of the week, was produced by Nerdist and is one long continuous camera shot. Unfortunately, it is another piece of otherwise solid comedy that was fatally tainted by the addition of Kristen Schaal. You have been warned.
I stumbled onto a new 3D animation product website that also has a marketplace for 3D models. The product is DAZ 3D and their site is daz3d.com. It looks like the software uses preexisting models and provides an interface for animating those models. But I was more interested in the model marketplace, which are provided without any restrictions for use.
There are a few models that are priced at $0.00. That’s free! Unfortunately, the site’s search features make it very difficult to find the full list of free models. However, I did find two model sets that are pretty cool, both of which are for cityscape buildings. The models are in LWO format (the native LightWave object format) and include textures.
Another good 3D model marketplace is TurboSquid, which has much better search features than DAZ 3D. TurboSquid also has a semi-secret way of filtering for only the free models: filter by price and set the min and max values to “0”. The only downside to TurboSquid is that a lot of the models are only available in 3DS Max format, which is proprietary and cannot be opened by LightWave or Blender.
