Leaderboard

Next up - 1978 Datsun 280z. Just trying to practice as much as I can as I go back and forth between design and modeling.

yeah yeah - take your physics and reality somewhere else, pal 🙂

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.

Vray costs 425€ or (70€ monthly), it includes CPU and GPU engine, and Cosmos assets. Vantage is free right now. 629€ is the price for the whole Vray collection that includes Vray for every platform (C4D, Max, Maya, Rhino, Sketchup, Unreal, Houdini, Nuke etc), Cosmos assets, Vantage, Chaos Scans, Phoenix for fluid simulations, Chaos Player and some Cloud credits. That's the official price, you can still get it for less from other resellers. 425€ seems reasonable for what you get if you consider that otherwise you have to pay for a CPU engine like Corona, a GPU like Octane, and a RT engine like Lumion, all disconnected from each other while using Chaos ecosystem you build your scene once and it will work across the whole platform.

1970 Camaro Pro Touring. My first attempt at modifying a car - which I have no business doing, as I know nothing about cars. Obviously inspired by the work of Carlos Pecino and Ash Thorp. There are some glaring holes and problem areas, but a fun thing to try out. Started out as a texturing demo and then I just start modeling things.

The Datsun looks really cool!

Thanks Stefano. I certainly agree that its much more the user than the engine. As you say, pretty much any of them can produce great images in the hands of a skilled user. I was certainly tempted by Vray when it first became available for C4D, but was a little uncertain about it's future. If I decided to add another renderer to my tool kit it would be high on the list.

You look at the prices from the punky sight of one person. I have a studio, I employ 5 graphic designers, our annual revenue exceeds $ 100,000. I am not eligible for the Indie version of Hudini. The price for Hudini FX for me is $ 4,495 and annual maintenance is $ 2,495 or $ 4,995 for an annual subscription. Compared to the Cinema: 4D $ 858 a year + X-Particle $ 972 and annual maintenance $ 257. To sum up: 1 workplace - initial payment: - Hudini: $ 4,495 - C4D + X-Paricle: 858 + 972 = $ 1,830 ($ 2,665 savings) 1 workplace - payment in each subsequent year: - Hudini: $ 2,495 - C4D + X-Paricle: 858 + 257 = $ 1,115 ($ 1,380 savings) I do not count the options with Redshift, because it will be even more profitable in the case of C4D. Considering that several workstations must be equipped, the savings amount to many thousands of dollars a year. Therefore, in such discussions it is often forgotten that the prices for the Indie version are reserved for a specific group of artists and do not apply to teamwork, even in small studios like ours. We do a lot of scientific, medical, biological and chemical simulations. Unfortunately, I cannot show them, because they are often reserved contracts.

Here you have a very similar simulation in X-Particles (at the beginning of this video). I think this water looks very fine.

While there is some absolutely top quality architectural visualisation around, I find much of the middle market decidedly 'cookie cutter' these days. It all looks the same. Same stock materials. Same stock assets. Same stock animation. That's why some of the renderers have the market. It's not so much the quality of one vs the quality of another - it's much more about the overall system. Is the renderer supported with a large library of the materials and assets that are needed? When I was developing my little visualisation studio many years ago I was doing some architectural work, and seriously thought about specialising in it. I'm pretty glad I didn't. For the vast majority of projects it's become a drag-and-drop production line.

Nice free character rig up on The Pixel Lab. Fun to play with and work on posing.

They remind me of this well known european Boardgame (called "Mensch ärgere dich nicht" in Germany). The playfigures there look very similiar. Triggers PTSD since I despise this game with a passion. Other than that great job though 😄

Render Weekly Week 5 Challenge. I went with Salt & Pepper shakers. Here's the prompt: Design and render an object where the main form gesture is a combination (addition, not subtraction) of 2 primitive forms. Part lines, detailing fillets and rounds, and functional details are allowed.