hvanderwegen

I used to be a certified Adobe Expert for Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, and some others years and years ago when the training institute where I worked as a freelancer decided all their instructors had to be certified. Simply stated: these type of certifications are more often than not a cash cow for the software companies in question. Knowing which buttons to push is standard fare in these exams, but actual deep knowledge and skills how to approach real-world projects, creativity, and solutions are generally completely missing or only tangentially touched upon. But I suppose that is the point. I see no reason for this type of software certification but for bragging rights. A typical employer would only be interested in an applicant's portfolio - the quality of the work. Who cares about certification? A waste of money and time, in my experience and opinion. Besides, software can be learned in a few weeks, while modeling, animation, VFX, texturing, composition, etcetera, technical rigging, and so on, require much more time to learn. I apologize for the negative tone - based on my experience with "software certifications".

The early American cartoons from "the golden age" in the forties and fifties were made for theatrical release, and frame rates were 24 frames per second - the animators would animate on ones mostly. The delivery times were slower, and more time could be spent on polishing the quality. Consequently, budgets were much larger. Later, when the target platform switched to broadcast, delivery times shortened and budgets shrunk. More animation had to be produced, however. Corners had to be cut somewhere, so the obvious first solution is to animate on twos only: meaning only 12 frames per second are needed, and half the number of drawings. (This was not true for Disney's feature film animation, which kept being animated at 24fps for the most part - budget accommodated this). TV animation budgets kept shrinking, however, as the thirst for more animation shows grew when advertisers realized they could target children much more effectively than adults. It was then that corners REALLY got cut, culminating in the advent of "filmation": minimally animated static drawings, concerned with building as much reusable animation as possible, animated on threes or if necessary, twos. Typical examples are He Man and Jen and the Holograms. In the meantime Japan's animation industry grew and grew as well, dealing with similar issues. More animation had to be made to quench the thirst of the TV audience. Budgets kept getting tighter. Similarly, they cut the number of frames of animation, but also relied on many under-paid junior animators. Then suddenly Flash appeared on the market, and it was quickly adopted by many animation studios. Cut-out character animation, already a staple of cheap animation, in combination with the computer doing all your tweening for you meant more animation could be produced. It still wasn't enough, so a lot of work was outsourced to animation sweat shops in Korea. All in all, even feature film animation quality was badly affected by all of this. If junior animators are no longer required to draw and animate at a high level, and most are working on low-quality TV animation, the average skill level of a typical 2d animator naturally could never hope to match up with the likes of the Golden Age animators. And a lot of knowledge and skill was lost. There was a brief revival of 2d feature film animation though that began with The Little Mermaid. Then 3d animation began to replace 2d animation quickly. No more need to draw, the computer renders pretty pictures out-of-the-box. Or so it seemed. Pixar happened, and the rest is history. 2d animation seemed headed straight to the trashcan of history. But in the past two decades there's been a revival of interest in the old Golden Age animators and their work, because, well: it's just so darn good. Animators wanted to understand WHY and HOW that quality was achieved. Pixar's animators studied the work of these animations zealously (which they had started doing in that short 2d revival I mentioned). Luckily animators like Richard Williams collected and preserved all that knowledge, and it is now readily available to anyone. Williams, while he had no idea how to work with 3d, taught and instructed many 3d animators the universal core principles of GOOD animation - irregardless of platform. The above is oversimplified: other studios like Aardvark made a huge impact, there was a revival of British 2d and stop-motion animation at some point, Japanese animation studios did outstanding work (Ghibli, etc), so many factors at work globally. So now we see a similar thing happening in 3d animation: it takes time to produce quality animation, whether it is 2d or 3d. Animation like the new Roadrunner ones are really bottom-of-the-barrel productions. You can tell the lack of direction, the lack of story telling, the lack of originality, the lack of animation skills and/or the lack of time the animators had to polish their work. Timelines have to be hit, budgets are tight. Anyway, budgets were cut because the amount of animation that had to be delivered grew and grew over time. And that cut into the quality. Badly in many cases. Luckily there have been notable exceptions to the rules. And even when some shows have questionable animation, at least the story telling makes up for it.

Those 3d remakes are soulless, completely misunderstand the timing, anticipation, setup, scripting, and overall rhythm of the original cartoons. What a mess. Also not helpful: the background orchestration which is obviously done with a virtual orchestra such as Spitfire or EastWest Hollywood orchestra. I disagree that it's well done. Way too heavy handed and bombastic. No surprises, cookie-cutter type stuff, in my opinion. Everything about the 3d version is cookie-cutter. Boring, boring, boring. Do something new and novel with the concept, instead of trying to rehash the originals and failing miserably. Most of the newer loony Tunes versions were pretty mediocre as well compared to the original from the golden age of cartoons. A lot of knowledge was lost due to cost reductions going from the 40s/50s to the 60s, 70s, and 80s (and beyond). Shortcuts became more important than actual animation skills. You can tell that even with all those 3d tools at their disposal, if knowledge and skills are lacking and costs have to be reduced, well... It is understandable, of course. The originals were meant to be shown in theaters, and had a good budget plus animators who actually knew what they were doing - they were the inventors of it, after all. The newer ones are conceived with mass-media consumerism in mind: fast and cheap. The third component suffers for it: quality.

The Blender Studio is a separate entity from Blender.org. If you want to access the content, pay for one month of access (which hardly breaks the bank) and download all the content you need/want. I'd say 15 euros to access real world production files and tons of other content is quite worth it. Where else are you going to find similar content and for such a small fee? After all, hosting all that content is not exactly inexpensive. It requires infrastructure, people managing servers, etcetera. Where else in the world are you going to find actual production files, rigs, characters, environments and loads of production content and info for less that the cost of going out to dinner or lunch (in the West). Before the Blender Foundation were selling their movies and production files on DVD. This is not so much different. There's this myth doing the rounds that because Blender is open source, anything related to it "should also be free". Besides, it's not as if this is essential content. Tons of free high quality stuff for Blender out there (in particular compared to its commercial brethren). Also, all the content is GPL. Most of the content is available on the net for free via torrents. Sharing is allowed. The assets are free. But the cost of hosting all that content is not. Simple as that. If you are looking for (a) specific file(s) from the Blender Studio site, let me know, and I can share it with you.

Today the Blender Studio team is excited to announce Project Heist (development title). This project is inspired by the game cinematics and realtime demos formats, and it’s meant to be a high-visual-impact, action-packed 2-minutes-long animation. The main goals for this project are: Challenge Blender and the creative team to make characters and environments at an unprecedented level of realism and complexity Push Blender’s capabilities in the interactive PBR workflow, improving and developing new tools (EEVEE, texture painting, baking, etc.) Develop and share production assets and pipeline with Blender Studio supporters, and with the film and games industry The short will be directed by Hjalti Hjalmarsson with production design by Andy Goralczyk and produced by the Blender Studio team. The production timeline is approximately 7 months, with the upcoming months dedicated to visual development, R&D and working with the Blender developers to align as many technical targets as possible. https://studio.blender.org/blog/announcing-project-heist-high-end-cinematic-experience/ https://studio.blender.org/films/heist/

Ooh, I am replicating that with Blender's Geometry nodes. Already have a basic setup up and running. Pretty simple to implement so far, but I still have some of those features to finish.

Indeed. I spoke to an interior design guy last year, and they were utilizing Unreal and VR augmented tech to allow clients to view their proposals in the actual client spaces.

https://www.cgarchitect.com/features/articles/712bd906-2021-architectural-visualization-rendering-engine-survey-results Interesting to see how real-time rendering is making inroads, in particular Unreal. Renderer usage in production among respondents to CGarchitect surveys (Figures in brackets show change since previous survey) 2021 2020 2019 2018 V-Ray 60.6% (-4.3%) 64.9% (+6.0%) 58.9% (-4.5%) 63.4% (+1.0%) Corona Renderer 37.2% (+2.2%) 35.0% (+3.7%) 31.3% (+0.9%) 30.4% (+11.3%) Lumion 24.9% (-0.2%) 25.1% (-3.7%) 28.8% (+15.1%) 13.7% (+4.8%) Unreal Engine 22.5% (+2.9%) 19.6% (+3.2%) 16.4% (-4.5%) 20.9% (+10.4%) Twinmotion 19.2% (+5.1%) 14.1% (+9.9%) 4.2% (+0.9%) 3.3% (+1.5%) Enscape 12.4% (+2.2%) 10.2% (+5.3%) 4.9% (+1.3%) 3.6% (+2.8%) 3ds Max Interactive 7.4% (-1.0%) 8.4% (-2.9%) 11.3% (+2.6%) 8.7% (+8.0%) Cycles 6.9% (+1.0%) 5.9% (+2.0%) 3.9% (-0.2%) 4.1% (+0.6%) D5 Render 5.0% (+3.5%) 1.5% (+1.5%) 0.0% (+0.0%) 0.0% (+0.0%) Eevee 4.9% (+0.4%) 4.5% (+4.5%) 0.0% (+0.0%) 0.0% (+0.0%) CPU renderers remain staples of production: V-Ray and Corona Renderer top the 2021 poll Despite the growth in GPU rendering in recent years, CPU render engines remain staples of production. Chaos’s V-Ray takes the top spot in this year’s poll, as it has done in the past four surveys, followed by its sibling application Corona Renderer, whose market share continues to rise. Unreal Engine, Twinmotion, Enscape, D5 Render and Eevee all rise However, Act-3D’s Lumion retains third place in this year’s list, albeit with slightly reduced market share, while further down the top ten, other GPU-based renderers are gaining ground. Unreal Engine reaches a new peak, with 22.5% of respondents using it in production, while Twinmotion, also now owned by Epic Games has also continued to gain market share. Use of Enscape, Enscape’s self-titled real-time renderer – due to become part of the same product family as V-Ray and Corona – also continues to rise steadily. In addition, two new real-time renderers make their debuts in the top ten. Eevee, Blender’s real-time render engine, climbs a place from 2020, but has been leapfrogged by Dimension 5’s D5 Render: a striking performance, considering that it was only released publicly in 2020 Changes outside the top ten: Cinema 4D down slightly, Chaos Vantage up As a consequence, two renderers drop out of the top ten this year: Cinema 4D and V-Ray GPU. Cinema 4D falls a single place from tenth to eleventh, its lowest placing since the survey began, although it was still used in production by 5.5% of respondents. In the case of V-Ray GPU, CGarchitect hasn’t posted separate figures for it and the main V-Ray production renderer, as it did in previous surveys, leaving only a usage figure of V-Ray as a whole. Chaos Vantage, Chaos’s new real-time renderer, climbs ten places in the list, now sitting just outside the top ten with 4.0% market share. http://www.cgchannel.com/2022/02/2021-cgarchitect-rendering-survey-shows-trends-in-arch-viz/

That would be Blender nowadays: cool and free. And funnily enough l as well returned to making music a year ago during lockdown. I used to own a Yamaha DX-21 (the dream DX-7 was too expensive for the young me at the time), an electric organ, and a Yamaha cheap keyboard. I now own a really nice Alesis VI61 Midi keyboard, and was amazed to see how good (and affordable) DAWs have become. After trying a few, I settled on Reaper. Really astonishing how powerful that software is - and very affordable, amazingly enough. Only $60 for personal use! https://www.reaper.fm/ I recall similar software costing at least ten times that much. Rather than investing in expensive (sound) monitors, I invested in a high-end open headphones set instead. Things have moved forward since I last played that DX21 😉 I plan on getting an orchestra VST next and compose my own orchestral sounding game themes this upcoming Summer. If anyone has a good suggestion, I am open to them.

I really loved the exceptional character acting animation in Encanto. It really stood out to me in a good number of scenes. Top notch.

Yet another animation tool that will probably tank within a year or two. Why do these start-ups think they'll do better than the ones that tried before? I see nothing here to lure me away from the built-in animation tools in Blender, C4D, Houdini, etc. The only redeeming feature seems to be AI based motion capture. But the notion of purchasing "AI credits" to be able to take advantage of this is enough to make me walk away. And what is the point anyway? As far as I can tell from their video the software is meant for very light-weight animation stuff. Expressions, hand/fingers, are not even supported - nor will they probably ever be, because the resolution of images and videos will be too low. Nice try, but no cigar.

Indeed. We may all be very grateful for the existence of Blender. "Blender gives us options", right?

They've posted a clarification: https://pixologic.com/announcement/ "Yes, we are anticipating that perpetual licenses will continue." "Yes, we are anticipating that subscriptions will continue." Translating to: "We have no say over these decisions anymore." I will hazard a guess here, and predict that perpetual Zbrush licenses are a thing of the past within 3 years time, by 2024. My second prediction is that Zbrush users will pay many times over the money they've spent on Zbrush up till this moment by that time.

Oh wow, I did not see that one coming. Not a good thing. At all. I am not a Zbrush user (never got along with it, prefer 3DCoat and Blender sculpt mode myself), but this move will worry most professionals in the industry. I mean, Maxon is not really known to be a forward-thinking company anymore. It used to be, but no longer. I agree with @Igor, this is unwelcome news indeed. If Pixologic needed an inflow of cash, they could've just easily asked for a 50% upgrade fee from their users - most WANTED Pixologic to finally start asking for more money! Not good. Not good at all.

If you need light groups and light linking now I'd suggest to check out E-Cycles, which has both.

...and they don't even mention on the main feature page that mesh editing performance was improved by 2-3 times! It is now on par with most other DCCs (well, excepting Max - which is on a whole different level).

From their site: For a list of new features: https://www.blender.org/download/releases/3-0/ The new updated Cycles X renders between 2 and 8 times faster. Geometry nodes have seen a dramatic update, and the new (much awaited) Asset Browser is another key new feature. An animation pose library is integrated. And of course a boatload of other improvements and bug fixes across the board.

Was Embergen already mentioned? Planning to get that myself. Perpetual license! Who: JangaFX What: EmberGen (Indie annual subscription) When: Until 29 November Discount: 30% – use code BLACKFRIDAY at checkout Save 30% on an Indie annual subscription to EmberGen

E-Cycles improvements are slowly making their way into standard Cycles as well. Yes, the light linking was part of the old internal render engine, but for some reason it never made it in Cycles. Light linking seems to be on the CyclesX roadmap now, however,

Finally, light linking for Cycles users. Combined with the rather awesome light groups implementation in E-Cycles, and the faster renderer, well... What's not to like? (Except for that it's not free 😉 A must for anyone working in Architectural/environmental rendering and Blender. It saves so much time. https://ecycles.gumroad.com/l/E-Cycles/launch https://blendermarket.com/products/e-cycles https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5sBHOvHTq_g And the new Animation denoising.

Wow, where did that come from? I never claimed that, nor do you have any notion of who I was at that age. I began creating stop-motion animations at 11/12 years old when I got an inexpensive super 8 camera for Christmas. I converted our attic to a moon surface with DIY studio lighting setups to re-enact the moon landing and inspired by reruns of Space 1999 scenes on telly. I went to the local tiny library to find the odd book on cinematography and lighting. I blew up plastic models of space ships! I was doing wireframe renders of simple 3d objects on an Amstrad at the age of 13/14 by manually coding them in basic - self taught. In 1987 at 15/16 I created my first 3d renders and spaceship animations on the Amiga and completed my first commercial freelance work. Same for friends of mine (we were all part of the European hacker scene in the 80s and 90s). One of my friends was coding visual effects and games in pure assembly language on the C64 at the age of 12 and went on to work on AAA PlayStation titles later. Others in my circle of friends were accomplishing stuff that you would not expect at their age: one was an accomplished C64 and Amiga musician, and his career got him to work for Electronic Arts and became one of the more well-known game music composers/musicians. Another had an innate feel for business strategy, which landed him deals at 16-17 years old to convert commercial games like Lemmings for the C64. And so on. I teach young adults in design, and you wouldn't believe some of the quality of the work that they produced years before entering the program. Those people are not prodigies, but spent time and effort to learn to become good artists even at a young age. Don't tell me or others what they could have achieved at that age. We "first-gens" in computing and digital art were accomplishing things at a young age that were pretty amazing seeing the technical limitations. Besides, the available tutorials and pools of online knowledge are VAST compared to the 80s where we all had to figure stuff out by ourselves and the Internet didn't exist. Nor the available free quality assets and high-level user-friendly software. Just because someone is young of age doesn't mean they can't accomplish wonderful things if they set their minds to it. You don't have to be a prodigy to do so. Hard work, practice, persistence and dedication are the key elements. By stating someone is a 'prodigy' at that age just because they produced impressive art or accomplished a great feat, you basically ignore and downplay all their efforts and time that they put into learning that stuff and their persistence in finishing such a project. Perhaps I read too much in your comment, but I find it abrasive and rather condescending. And down-playing the hard work of many young artists and their future older selves. "Dude"

Yes, ever so slightly intimidating that this was produced by a 14 year old teen in his free time. When I look back at my design work from that age - well, at least I was producing pixel art animations in Deluxe Paint and doing simple wireframe animations in Sculpt Animate 🙂 To think what we could have done with the tools that are now available to young artists and for free to boot! Very cool.

Open an Explorer window. Open a second explorer window. And a third one. Position these and scale them so that each has a unique position and size. Now close all three, and open one of the other two windows that were closed before the last one. Result: that window opens in the same position and size as the last closed window. I don't want that: I prefer to have each window to be opened where I left it last time, which is why I use a window manager tool to do this for me. But I read Windows 11 now behaves properly too, just like the Mac or Linux windows managers.

Is it true that Windows 11 FINALLY remembers the position and settings of each Explorer window and the position/size of app windows? That alone would be worth the upgrade.