L'Ancien Regime

A lot of Substance Designer textures frankly aren't very good, so it's very encouraging to see that Substance Designer is capable of producing work of the very highest quality. The work by this guy just blows me away. This far beyond mere game asset quality. https://80.lv/articles/001agt-creating-a-gothic-ornament-in-substance-designer/

Did you check it though? It comes automatically turned on with Windows 10 installation.

you should be working for the team that made Dishonored 2

And for me there is nothing in the world that gives me more pleasure than working in 3D Coat with a powerful rig. I just love it. I love just messing around. I've really missed it every day of those two years.

Check your night mode

I've been doing that Chris P tutorial for the last few hours and is it ever fun. I'm really amazed because I've tried a couple times to pick up Blender and it was sheer torture, but now it's actually a pleasure to use. Normally when I start working with a new program there's always mysterious glitches that drive me into a hellish rage. That hasn't happened yet. I'd rank this tutorial up there with Pixelbahn's Maya tutorials on You Tube.

This is probably a superfluous post for most of you but I'm finally getting around to trying it, and learning its interface and it's beautiful. I'm thinking it's better than Maya's. It's got a really good feel to it. EEVEE is awesome. Is there another preview renderer out there that's as fast with such great results? It's just amazing to me because Blender was such a steaming piece of ***** for such a long time. This seems to be an excellent series of getting started in Blender videos. I'm enjoying it.. https://youtu.be/7MRonzqYJgw

http://www.cgchannel.com/2019/08/amd-releases-radeon-prorender-2-0-for-blender/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+cgchannel%2FnHpU+(CG+Channel+-+Entertainment+Production+Art) AMD has officially released Radeon ProRender for Blender 2.0, the latest update to the Blender edition of its free physically accurate GPU renderer, at Siggraph 2019. The update rewrites the plugin to support Blender 2.80, and adds AMD’s new AI-driven denoising system, adaptive sampling and the option to render large images as tiles. The Maya edition of the renderer has also been updated, with version 2.7 adding support for tiled rendering, improved denoising, and support for portal lights. AMD also announced new integrations of the renderer for a range of BIM, CAD and industrial design tools, including InstaLOD’s Studio XL. A plugin for Unreal Engine is currently in beta. Blender: support for Blender 2.80, AI-driven denoising, adaptive sampling and tiled rendering First released in open beta earlier this year, Radeon ProRender for Blender gets a complete rewrite to support the new features of Blender 2.80, itself released during Siggraph. ProRender now supports the most commonly used Blender shader nodes out of the box, including the Principled BSDF shader and Blender 2.80’s new Principled Hair BSDF and Principled Volume shaders. Some native Blender nodes, particularly noise nodes, are not supported – you can find a list here – but native Radeon ProRender nodes are provided for more “expert-level” set-ups. Other changes include a new AI-driven render denoising system, which supplements AMD’s existing GPU denoising technology, introduced last year. The update also introduces support for adaptive sampling, focusing computational effort on the noisiest parts of a render; and for rendering images as tiles, making it possible to render at higher resolutions than would otherwise be possible in the GPU memory available.

This looks pretty impressive... SideFX is pleased to announce SideFX Solaris at SIGGRAPH 2019. This presentation was recorded on Tuesday July 30 at the Houdini HIVE in Los Angeles. Solaris brings a new context called LOPS, or lighting operators, that brings native USD [Universal Scene Description] support to Houdini to allow for comprehensive lookdev, layout and lighting workflows. Geometry brought into LOPS becomes USD - USD remains USD while in LOPS. Solaris provides a visual editor for working with USD. Solaris supports a wide variety of lookdev, layout and lighting tasks. Solaris is a new context in Houdini Core, Houdini FX, Houdini Indie and Houdini Apprentice - not a separate application. A new USD-compliant renderer called SideFX Karma Render was announced for Solaris/USD This new renderer works with Hydra for fast IPR. This will be a fast CPU-based renderer with a GPU version of it being developed for a future release. Solaris also works with other Hydra-compliant renderers such as RenderMan. Solaris is planned to be released as part of Houdini 18 in late 2019. Karma Render will be released in beta at the same time. https://www.sidefx.com/community/sidefx-solaris/ http://www.cgchannel.com/2019/08/sidefx-unveils-solaris/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+cgchannel%2FnHpU+(CG+Channel+-+Entertainment+Production+Art) What is USD? Pipelines capable of producing computer graphics films and games typically generate, store, and transmit great quantities of 3D data, which we call "scene description". Each of many cooperating applications in the pipeline (modeling, shading, animation, lighting, fx, rendering) typically has its own special form of scene description tailored to the specific needs and workflows of the application, and neither readable nor editable by any other application. Universal Scene Description (USD) is the first publicly available software that addresses the need to robustly and scalably interchange and augment arbitrary 3D scenes that may be composed from many elemental assets. USD provides for interchange of elemental assets (e.g. models) or animations. But unlike other interchange packages, USD also enables assembly and organization of any number of assets into virtual sets, scenes, and shots, transmit them from application to application, and non-destructively edit them (as overrides), with a single, consistent API, in a single scenegraph. USD provides a rich toolset for reading, writing, editing, and rapidly previewing 3D geometry and shading. In addition, because USD's core scenegraph and "composition engine" are agnostic of 3D, USD can be extended in a maintainable way to encode and compose data in other domains, https://graphics.pixar.com/usd/docs/index.html

Thanks guys. https://www.amazon.ca/X-Rite-CMUNDIS-ColorMunki-Display/dp/B0055MBQOM/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=xrite+colormunki&qid=1564722616&s=gateway&sr=8-1

Eevee is amazing. http://www.cgchannel.com/2019/07/blender-2-80-ships/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+cgchannel%2FnHpU+(CG+Channel+-+Entertainment+Production+Art) And while we're talking of add ons here's the site for all the addons compatible with 2.8+ https://blender-addons.org/

I'm looking seriously at the Wacom Cintique 24" pro; https://www.newegg.ca/black-wacom-dtk2420k0/p/172-000R-000P0?Description=wacom cintique pro&cm_re=wacom_cintique_pro-_-172-000R-000P0-_-Product# That's a good price to me. It was $3500 just a year ago. This is the USD price; https://www.amazon.com/Wacom-Cintiq-Pro-Creative-Display/dp/B07BDDYK99/ref=sr_1_2?keywords=wacom+cintique+pro+24&qid=1564273027&s=gateway&sr=8-2 There's one problem though; color calibration. For example, this review at NewEgg; https://www.amazon.com/Wacom-EODIS3-DCWA-Color-Manager/dp/B01B96L2QE/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=wacom+color+manager&qid=1564273320&s=gateway&sr=8-1 Apparently the Wacom Color manager is exactly the same hardware as the X-Rite i1 Display Pro with different software setup. https://www.amazon.com/X-Rite-EODIS3-i1Display-Pro/dp/B0055MBQOW/ref=sr_1_2?keywords=wacom+color+manager&qid=1564273378&s=gateway&sr=8-2 There are other solutions both hardware and software. https://hub.displaycal.net/forums/topic/xrite-i1-display-pro-colormunki-or-wacom-color-manager/ I'm a complete novice to this stuff and I suspect a lot of other people here are too so any knowledge you have that you'd like to share on this matter would be welcom.

Thanks so much for this. I've never been so excited by the release of a new 3D Coat update. It's getting some good positive press too, which is richly deserved. http://www.cgchannel.com/2019/07/pilgway-releases-3d-coat-4-9/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+cgchannel%2FnHpU+(CG+Channel+-+Entertainment+Production+Art) And is THIS ever some good news. "Holes in geometry are now automatically closed before voxelisation, and the closure operation is described as being “much more stable and powerful”.

Actually, I think the train has already left the station on Maya and 3DSMax...they're stacking bits of new code on top of old code while Blender is totally rewriting their code. I know this very cynical guy who claims that the reason Blender is so small and lean as opposed to say, Maya which is massive and bulky, is that much of Maya's code is not only old, but they're obsessed with encrypting and decrypting everything you do with them to maintain their proprietary secrecy so everything is matched by huge and growing hash files for the encrytpion. Thus the crappiness of Maya Binary Files.

http://www.cgchannel.com/2019/07/epic-games-donates-1-2-million-to-blender-development/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+cgchannel%2FnHpU+(CG+Channel+-+Entertainment+Production+Art) Epic Games has awarded the Blender Foundation, the nonprofit organisation that oversees Blender’s development, a $1.2 million cash grant, to be delivered over the next three years. The money, which has been awarded from Epic’s new Epic MegaGrants program, will be used to fund Blender’s Professionalizing Blender Development Initiative. New grant nearly doubles development funding for Blender This isn’t the first time that Epic has funded Blender development, but it is by far its biggest donation. Before the grant was announced, the crowdsourced Blender Development Fund stood at €37,538/month (just over $42,000/month), meaning the award almost doubles development Blender funding at a stroke. Roughly a further €40,000/month (around $50,000/month) is donated through Blender Cloud, but the money is primarily used to fund Blender Institute‘s open-source animation projects. Blender Foundation chairman Ton Roosendaal said that the grant money will form “a significant investment in our project organization to improve on-boarding, coordination and best practices for code quality”. “As a result, we expect more contributors from the industry to join our projects.”

I can see it's going to be a big investment in time to learn it all though *sigh*.

Yeah there's some great plug ins out there for Blender alright. Thanks for listing those. This Gleb Alexandrov has a massive 30GB hard edge tutorial for Blender using just native tools.

So is this guy modeling in 2.8 as it comes in its basic package or is he using a collection of 2nd party plug ins? And if so, which ones exactly?

What an amazing modeling toolset.

The work that went into this 3D animation was just amazing https://youtu.be/4IKUeIEdRMY

I thought, this has to be Houdini. The purple ocean in particular had to be Houdini Ocean. So I started looking for info and it came down to a company called BUF. Like a lot of high end companies they don't use anybody's software. They created their own; B Suite. https://buf.com/films/twin-peaks/ http://bufsoftware.com/products/bsuite#bstudio We’ve regrouped all our powerful integrated software in 2 separate packages. Bcreative Suite includes all the tools BUF has built and improved to ease the creative process : A complete 3D pipeline studio from modeling, dynamics, animation to high end rendering, a node-based compositing software, a batch process manager and many more… Bpipeline Suite is the collection of efficient tools creating a coherent pipeline that meets productions biggest challenges in Full CG Animated films and live actions movies especially regarding financial constraints : A production management tool, an asset management tool and many more… Only Bview is available so far! Bcreative Suite is coming progressively, then Bpipeline Suite. Interested in Bsuite or just one of these software. Register now and find out more.

Is it overpriced or underpriced? https://www.techradar.com/news/msi-mocks-apples-dollar999-pro-display-xdr-stand-with-a-5k-monitor-for-almost-the-same-price

Top fully loaded version is $35,000.00 USD!