Kozí Příběh se Sýrem (Goat Story with Cheese), a sequel to the first czech 3d animated feature is soon coming to czech cinemas, and later to other countries on DVDs. In the czech small industry of visual effects and 3d animation, it`s a little miracle that a sequel to full cg movie is being finished this year. The same director who did the first movie talks about his problems with having to outsource from Bulgary or India (I guess to meet the tight budget), difficulties finding experienced team and reasons for not choosing stereoscopic technology (czech language): http://kultura.idnes.cz/kozi-pribeh-miri-do-pohadky-animovat-ho-bude-spanel-bulhar-ci-ind-p82-/filmvideo.aspx?c=A120221_202110_filmvideo_jaz
I just found this early 2011 article about Sony Pictures and Michael Bay buying screening rights for Zombies Vs. Robots comic book. Since World War Z will come to cinemas in less then a year, this could pave way for more similar titles. So Michael Bay (either as director or co-producer) could take his robot filming drill and combine it with zombies (some organic stuff after so many tons of steel which, fair enough, squeezed out of audience over a billion $ with Transformers 3) and this iconic comic book material could come alive in a very high visual quality.
I wanted to make this review a while ago already. Sort of second look at this game. Because I found myself leaving Borderlands after 10 hours of play not being so addicted or excited. I couldn`t look again at those half-hand drawn designs and not very good looking dog mutants (Skags). Plus the speed of the engine wasn`t very high as well. On other hand I played Rage another time on Hard difficulty and reached 75 hours on Steam. And recently started again on Nightmare, to give it a shot in spare time. By my opinion, there is hardly a game title at the moment that can match Rage. Maybe Farcry2, but I didn`t play that. I played Battlefield3, but that wasn`t the right thing.
"We don't really conceive Rage as an open world. It's more open environment. So, you're not just going to be going out and doing arbitrary things for however long you want to do them. There are some things that you can do within the game that you can do for an arbitrary amount of time, like racing circuits or whatever, to improve your time or to climb up leaderboards and things like that. It's kind of an activity that you can participate within the game. But the game does have a story, it does have a progression. You can deviate off of that, and there's some things that you can do that, again, don't follow this linear path, and you can go off the path and do different things"
So they didn`t want to make another Borderlands, Fallout or Skyrim, but something like post-apocalyptic Quake with couple of RPG elements, so you can collect things, build items and heave different ammo in one weapon. But keeping it simple and easy to play. This is quite smart move to expand id software`s portfolio of titles with something less linear-action and more like living at location and getting to know the world around, completing different tasks and having some freedom about what to do next. Rage wasn`t accepted so well, it was sometimes rated even less then 80%, but id software has opened the door for them to expand in a different direction and once again add to what they can offer and help them grow with the evolving game market.
I would never think that Lynch was considered for directing Star Wars (Return of the Jedi in this case), but everything is possible, in Hollywood. So here Mr.Lynch recalls his experience about meeting George Lucas, long time ago. This video cannot be played embedded unfortunately, you will have to go to youtube website
In case you bump into this dark IK solver matter of ikSpringSolver, first time you probably had a problem with some kind of double IK plane rotation. This is due to a bug, according to Juss Rig It blog since Maya 7.0.
Fix:
Unparent the joint chain and keep it under world identity (origin) group with scale of your rig connected. Parent constraint the top joint of this chain (translate + rotate + offset) to its desired parent from the rig. Keep the handle parented anywhere you want or also use parent constraint. Also, as with ikRPsolver, you have to connect the pole vector values to rotate its plane (usually by making pole vector constraint).
This is interesting talk about recent achievements and pipeline of Framestore creature department (the video includes other disciplines too). For riggers/animators just start from 20:34.
