Short Film - Sintel

Something worth sharing. Funded by donations, and created through FREE software [Blender]. You can read more about it here and watch the full HD version on Youtube.

Calling All Aspiring Artists and Painters

Maybank is organizing a painting competition for young contemporary artists and painters aged 18-35 years old. All you have to do is submit a 2D artwork of your artistic interpretations of 'Expressions of the Malayan Tiger'.

More info on this here.

Competition ends Oct 29th 2010. Miracle of time needed.

Kudos to Roze, a friend of mine and fellow artist, for sharing this info.

Film Fests

Two film fests to look forward to this Friday and weekend.

Films on 8. Organized by the Junior Chamber Society (JCI) Taylor's University. They look forward to have a weekly film fest every Friday nights and decided to start off with French films.

Venue: University Square, Taylor's Lakeside Campus, Sunway
Date / Time: Oct 22nd 2010, 1930 - 2200
Fee: RM5 per person or RM8 per pair.

More info on this here.

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And to those who perhaps prefer an unconventional or different approach to film-making.

The first Kuala Lumpur Experimental Film and Video Festival 2010 (KLEX 2010) starts this Friday (Oct 22nd - Oct 24th 2010) at The Annexe Gallery, KL and a night event at the HELP University College on Monday (Oct 25th 2010).

More info on this on their Facebook and their blog.

More Sculptris

Talk about Sculptris. EASY to use is right. It's FREE and no installing needed. This was done a couple of months back when the freeware was just released. I decided to have a quick doodle with it. No Wacom. Just fully mouse-drawn.

This post was originally published at Senimitos.

Sculptris

Also old news... but this is too good to not share.

Couple months back, Pixologic [the makers of Zbrush] released the alpha build of Sculptris... for free.

It's essentially a stripped down version of Zbrush, but still really really amazing - no knowledge of 3D modeling necessary to have fun with it. Just download it from here (it's only 3MB), unpack it, and run it... no need for installing.

It's pretty easy to get into [the 1-page help menu pretty much says it all], but for extra help, you can always go to the Sculptris forum on ZBrushCentral.

This is especially cool for the members of the group who've always wanted to jump into 3D modeling without worrying too much about the tech stuff, and just want to draw in 3D. Try it out! It's awesome and FREEFREEFREEFREEFREE.....

GPU Rendering Solutions

This video shows some of the capabilities of DX11 - and it really shows off how good things can look in today's games. The amazing thing about this is that all this looks this good in realtime - no need for hours and hours spent on rendering.

Which makes you wonder... how come it takes so damn long to render good looking stuff in our 3D software, if you're using mental ray or any other renderer, when all the games do it on the fly?

Recently there've been a lot of advances in GPU rendering [rendering using the power of your graphics card, as opposed to the normal CPU-based method]. This used to be reserved only for those who had the extra cash to spend on workstation-level graphics cards... but now those techniques are available and working on normal gaming-class cards as well!

These are some examples of realtime renderers:
http://www.mentalimages.com/products/iray.html
http://furryball.aaa-studio.eu/

It's nuts... you can render reflections, refractions, soft shadowing, render passes, ambient occlusion, global illumination, etc, etc... all with your graphics card, sometimes 300 times faster than a normal CPU renderer. I've only tested Furryball for Maya, and it works great.

Here's a good link for reading up on realtime and offline rendering advancements.

And those of you who are into the hardware tech stuff, check out Nvidia's new line of Fermi & Tesla based GPU-based cards, and what they can do. That's the future right there.

Vector Displacements & Texels

This is pretty old, from a couple months back, but there's some really interesting stuff in here.

Highlights :
- The use of the new Vector Displacement Maps, which you can export out of Mudbox (which can also be viewed in realtime, if you have DirectX10 enabled!)
- Texels vs the old UV+texture maps method we've been using for years (on the bright side, no more UV layouts or seams.. on the down side, probably more resource usage)

Who knows, these techniques could be standard procedure in coming years, the same way sculpting and normal maps changed the way we model and render.

For those who have no interest in the technical bits, you can always watch this just for some Behind-The-Scenes stuff for Toy Story 3 :) Enjoy!