vukster.com

http://vfxplanet.vox.com/

Motionographer link

I’m seeing a lot of articles about how Watchmen did not outperform 300 this weekend and I have to point out that 300 had a running time of 1 hour and 57 minutes, while Watchmen clocks in at 2 hours and 43 minutes, and I’m not sure if this includes credits or not. Since there are only so many times you can play Watchmen in a day it’s no wonder it came in just slightly under 300! No one is pointing this fact out!

Also I wanted to address all the bad reviews, if you read the majority of negative reviews it’s from people who really didn’t give a lot of thought to the material nor did they really pay attention like this guy from rotten tomatoes:

” Watchmen left me looking at the exit far more often than at the screen.”

Well maybe if you watched the screen and paid attention you might have noticed that the story was actually complex and required your intellect to be tuned in in order to process all the information presented. Watchmen is NOT a story that you can watch once and soak up everything the first viewing! It’s much more complex and you really need to pay attention and see it a few times before you can even begin to appreciate all the work that went into making this multi layered complex story!

I think Zack did an excellent job and I am very happy about the changes! Especially the ending! It was way more believable and made a lot more sense then the graphic novel! I fucking HATED the squid, it was so left field and out of no where that it made me wonder if Alan Moore simply got bored or tired and just wanted to end the novel, the end seemed always rushed to me and the whole conversation between Manhattan and Ozzy didn’t make ANY sense. Zack actually managed to clean up the loose ends and I loved that Laurie and Manhattan had one last moment before he is exiled. That was brilliant and it made so much more sense. I also liked the change in dialog between Adrian and Night Owl 2, Why would Rorschach warn Adrian anyway, it never made sense to me.

I have already seen the movie twice and on each viewing I catch some new nuance and detail I missed the first time around and I look forward to the BluRay version. I’m also very happy to see that the story was treated with respect and did not dumb down or try to explain to the audience too much, instead the film left many questions and fewer answers which at least to me, was a breath of fresh air.

Also, I wish Bubastis was cut from the film completely, only in the graphic novel did his presence make sense and I never cared for that fur ball anyway! He was more of a distraction and had no reason at all to be in the film, other then for the fanboys.

Dark Eye Galaxy (m64)

A collision of two galaxies has left a merged star system with an unusual appearance as well as bizarre internal motions. Messier 64 (M64) has a spectacular dark band of absorbing dust in front of the galaxy’s bright nucleus, giving rise to its nicknames of the “Black Eye” or “Evil Eye” galaxy.

http://www.custompc.co.uk/news/605374/amd-plans-supercomputer-with-1000-gpus.html

Over 1,000 Radeon HD 4870s to be chained together to make online supercomputer, allowing games to be played using online processing power.

“Australia”
“The Curious Case of Benjamin Button”
“The Dark Knight”
“Hellboy II: The Golden Army”
“Iron Man”
“Journey to the Center of the Earth”
“The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor”

My money is on CCBB, it is by far the most painstaking and meticulous VFX work done to date. Think iron/metal is hard to raytrace? Try human skin, eyeballs, and believable emotional performances by a synthetic character. I would be very surprised if anything beat CCBB this year.

Vote for change! GO OUT AND VOTE NOW!

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Find your states information

Project Vote Smart

Rock the Vote

Well, I was wondering how long it would take for photoshop to have 3D support and it looks like it’s finally here!

photoshop 3D paint article

The 3D paint tools however do not support 32 bit paint mode, which means all your textures must be 8 bit since the render engine does not support float, oh well, while this might be OK for games it is not sufficient for film quality.

Some cool new features are content aware scaling, great for resizing images and building textures.

File formats which are currently supported are:

.3ds 3d studio

collada DAE

Google Earth KMZ

U3D

OBJ

So, it looks like 3ds, DAE and obj files are the only way to get data in and out of maya. Thin on the file format support for 3d and still not clear on how UV is supported, I’m assuming Photoshop reads the data from the obj file.

Zooms and pans are now smooth and updated in real time, GL support thanks to the 3D paint tools I bet, which means you should have some type of gpu graphics card installed to get the benefit. Documents can now be tabbed like in a web browser…

Also, Photoshop now comes in both 32 bit and 64 bit flavors, so if your OS can support 64 bit you can finally use all that extra ram! Although, I wonder if all the tools take advantage of the 64 bit architecture….