Demo Reels and the Consequences.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zeoKBjJuvhk

The work is great but its a little slow

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6BMtWFkF3EM

Cool Reels

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q3qbVFLkWyE Model Reel 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WE35VWV16-w Animation Reel 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?x-yt-cl=84359240&x-yt-ts=1421782837&v=4-6TUwrQuCQ Another Animation Reel

Amazing Bounces

This story on the BBC contains some great footage to study as animator trying to figure out the physics of bouncing balls. Made out of water:

Laser-etched metal 'bounces' water

Obama 3D

Scanning a sitting Head of State, so you can 3D print a likeness. Sounds like an oddball idea but the Smithsonian got Paul Debevec (the one who scanned the Parthenon) to make it a reality:

Full arcticle: SIGGRAPH.org

Maya / Mental Ray not batch rendering blendShapes

There seems to be a bug in the currently installed version of Maya 2015 (SP2) that causes Mental Ray to ignore blendShapes when batch rendering (or even mess them up?). But there is a workaround!

• Select the object that has blendshape animation on it
• From the animation menu, choose

  Geometry Cache → Create New Cache

• The default settings should work is you have your entire animation visible on your timeline, if you only use blendShapes for a small part of your animation you may explore the options
• Repeat for each mesh with blendShapes

How does this fix things? It creates files in your project directory (yes, you do need to set your project!) with the correct vertex (=point) positions of the deformed mesh. These vertex positions are then directly used for rendering, ignoring all deformers.

Render Farm coming soon to a lab near you!

Oscar Short List

Bill Plympton posted the shortlist for the Academy Award for animated sorts on his (and Patrick Smith's) blog, and his "Footrprints" is on it: Oscars Short List