Pixar in a Box

March 17, 2016
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Pixar has partnered with Khan Academy to provide free education about the animation process to students. The course is named “Pixar in a Box“.

Khan Academy provides free online courseware for students. Unlike Coursera and other so-called “open” education sites, Khan Academy does not charge for any of their courses and does not even use advertising. The website originally started as a series of YouTube videos by founder Salman Khan, who was tutoring his cousin.

Most of the courses are geared towards general education of K-12 and college students, with courses like “6th Grade Math” and  “Chemistry”. More recently, Khan Academy has started partnering with other companies, universities, and museums to provide more niche education. The “Pixar in a Box” course is designed for middle-school and high-school students, but it is available to everyone.

The courses are math-heavy, showing how math is used the animation process. For example, one course explains how trigonometry is used to create the Pixar worlds and another teaches how weighted averages are used to create characters. Pixar’s goal is to show how academics relate to real-world applications that students care about.

Paul Rudd vs Stephen Hawking

January 29, 2016
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Enjoy a funny short film with Paul Rudd playing quantum chess against Stephen Hawking — for the fate of the future! The film premiered at Caltech’s “One Entangled Evening” event and features some excellent cameos.

Also, today I learned that quantum chess is a real game that adds concepts like uncertainty, superposition, and entanglement to the gameplay.

 

Metroid Short Film

December 31, 2015
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Rainfall Films, a production company from Los Angeles, has created a new short film set in the Metroid universe. They did a great job of conjuring the sense of isolation, deep space, and exploration that is the hallmark of the Metroid games. Plus they used many of her iconic weapons and suit features, including the morph ball.

It makes me nostalgic, remembering playing the original Metroid game on the NES.  And, much later, playing through the Metroid Prime trilogy. In fact, this film really captured the feeling of Metroid Prime 3: Corruption, one of my favorite games of all time.

You can read more about the creation of the film at CGSociety, where they interviewed the writer/director, Sam Balcomb.

Maya Marble Material Tutorial

December 3, 2015
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Creating a marble texture in Maya is as simple as adding a single node. But you can use a more advanced node network to further improve the look of the material. This tutorial will show you how to assign a simple marble texture to an object and then build on that simple texture by adding additional nodes.

Scene

In preparation for this tutorial, I created a very simple scene: a polygon sphere (radius: 1.000), a camera pointed at the sphere (focal length: 55), a key light off to the left of the camera and a fill light (40% intensity) from the right of the camera. Continue reading “Maya Marble Material Tutorial”

Open Source Screen Recorder

November 11, 2015
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I recently needed a screen recorder to capture some video for a short product demo. After doing some research, the best commercial option is Camtasia Studio, which combines screen recording capabilities with a video editor. But the $299 price tag for the PC edition is pretty steep for such a simple project, so I started digging around for free alternatives.

The most common alternative that I found was a free package called CamStudio. Do not download this software. It comes with adware (fortunately, Norton stopped me from visiting the page).

After more research, I found an excellent open source alternative (without adware!) that is commonly used for live streaming: Open Broadcaster Software. Although it has plenty of options for live streaming the output, you can also send the output directly to a MP4-encoded file.

The software is highly configurable. You can choose from any connected video source, such as a web cam, a full monitor, or just cropped view of a monitor. You can record high frame rates, if your goal is to stream or record games you are playing on your computer. And you can combine multiple video sources together to get your final stream; for example, you can show a game stream in the full window but include a smaller pane in the corner with the feed from your webcam.

The software is still relatively new, so it is rapidly evolving. But the current version has a lot of great features, it performed very well for my simple recording task, and it seems to have a lot of adoption in the live streaming community. It is a great addition to my toolkit and good to have for any future screen recording needs.

LightWave Premultiply Alpha

October 20, 2015
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Render Globals - Alpha FormatBy default, LightWave 3D enables a render option that could cause headaches when you get to the compositing step of your pipeline. I am referring to the “Alpha Format” setting, which can be found in the “Output” tab of the “Render Globals” settings. When you first open a scene, LightWave sets the value to “Premultiply Alpha”.

If you are rendering your frames without any transparency and you do not need to composite your renders together, this setting will not change the look of your final result.

However, if you are relying on the alpha channel to control transparency of your renders and then compositing multiple renders into a single frame, this value becomes very important. And, unfortunately, the default is probably not the best setting to use.
Continue reading “LightWave Premultiply Alpha”

Hover Ads

October 7, 2015
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I have become increasingly frustrated with the latest advertising trend on the Internet:  hover ads. These are similar to pop-up ads, except that they are fully rendered within the website you are viewing and prevent you from reading or using the website until you dismiss the ad.

At first, a lot of webpages started using this functionality to solicit requests for feedback, usually through third-party survey companies. Then, sites created similar pop-ups to ask you to sign up for their newsletters or beg for donations through PayPal or Kickstarter. Sites then added logic to wait until you have scrolled down to a later point in the article before popping up the request, to ensure that you are fully engaged in the reading material (and therefore even more annoyed at the interruption). And now third-party advertising has joined the game, preventing you from reading content on a page until you scan the advertisement enough to figure out where the “close” button is hidden.

This type of tactic is straight from Advertising 101: the more eyeballs you get on the ad (or the more times you directly ask for money/email/survey), the more successful conversions you will get. And content publishers that use these tactics will argue that advertising revenue keeps content on the Internet free. If the content publisher was unable to make money from advertising, then the content would either disappear or move behind a paywall (or so the argument goes). Continue reading “Hover Ads”

New Justice League Series?

September 4, 2015
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Warner Bros. Studios Posters

There are some new rumors floating around Reddit about a new Justice League animated series from Warner Bros. The thread on Reddit shows a picture, allegedly taken inside the Warner Bros Burbank studios, that shows a series of framed posters. All of the posters are of current or announced shows except for the last one, which simply has “JLA” and a series of superhero silhouettes.

Not all of the other shows in the poster are from Cartoon Network, so it is possible that any new Justice League series could be on Boomerang or another Warner-owned station. Since Cartoon Network is still keeping quiet about this revelation, everything about the new series is all speculation (including the name and even existence of it). I hope we get to hear more information about a new Justice League series sometime soon!

In a related topic, Bruce Timm has been working with DC Animation to create a new Justice League film, titled Justice League: Gods and Monsters. Unfortunately, the film is set in an alternate reality where Superman is the son of Zod instead of Jor-El, Wonder Woman is married to one of Darkseid’s sons, and Batman is not Bruce Wayne, but Kirk Langstrom (aka “Man-Bat” in the comics). There is one more bizarre surprise about Batman in this reality — he is a vampire.

DC is releasing a three-episode prequel to the movie, named Justice League: Gods and Monsters Chronicles. You can view the first episode online and see for yourself how dark this alternate DC reality is and the tone of the upcoming movie.

Leap Motion Controller

August 20, 2015
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There is a new human-computer interface device on the market that lets you manipulate the cursor or even 3D objects by just waving your hands in the air. That device is called the Leap Motion Controller, and it is surprisingly inexpensive. Using infrared cameras, it can track exactly what you are doing with your hands and use that to control your mouse cursor or run specialized code written into compatible applications (similar to how pressure-sensitive tablets have even more options in Photoshop than just the operating system you are running).

Autodesk has integrated the Leap Motion into Maya, so it is already possible to use it with at least one popular 3D software suite. Leap Motion has a promotional video on their website showing it in use with Maya, although the technical details and examples are very sparse: Continue reading “Leap Motion Controller”

Fastest Ship In The Universe

July 28, 2015
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Fastest-Ship-In-The-Universe-tnFatWallet.com has put together an infographic of the fastest ships in the universe. They calculated the speeds of spaceships and other vehicles from a collection of sci-fi classics and ranked them by their top speeds.

I’m sure that the list is far from exhaustive, but I had fun reading the list of ships they chose. I was surprised, for instance, that the USS Enterprise NCC-1701D (from Star Trek: The Next Generation) did not even break the top 20.  But I did enjoy the fact that the Swordfish II made it on the list.

And I am definitely a fan of the third-fastest ship in the universe.

Click on the image for the full article at FatWallet.com and their infographic.

***Updated June 12, 2019 – FatWallet.com no longer exists, but the Fastest Ships in Sci-Fi study still exists at http://fastestships.com. The image link has been updated.