L'Ancien Regime

This is sad news...I'm hearing that Paul Pepera has died.

Download files A tool for creating a cool effect! vfxhomeland.com/tools.php Direct link: vfxhomeland.com/Assets/VFXHOMELAND_knit_solver.zip Tutorial;

Yeah it's for Zbrush but so what. Applies equally to 3d Coat http://pixologic.com/zbrushlive/

http://www.scorn-game.com/ Scorn is an atmospheric first person horror adventure game set in a nightmarish universe of odd forms and somber tapestry. It is designed around an idea of "being thrown into the world". Isolated and lost inside this dream-like world you will explore different interconnected regions in a non-linear fashion. The unsettling environment is a character itself. Every location contains its own theme (story), puzzles and characters that are integral in creating a cohesive lived in world. Throughout the game you will open up new areas, acquire different skill sets, weapons, various items and try to comprehend the sights presented to you. History Ebb Software was founded in 2013 by a group of highly motivated individuals with the sole purpose of creating a different breed of video games. Currently it has ten full time team members as well as a number of freelance artists it cooperates with. Looks like it was all sculpted in Polybrush and painted in 3d Coat.

Booleans in Houdini are really robust now.

A development reference image mocked up using Blender’s existing Cycles renderer, showing the kind of visual quality the dev team hopes to achieve in the software’s upcoming real-time Eevee render engine. http://www.cgchannel.com/2017/03/sneak-peek-blenders-new-eevee-real-time-render-engine/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+cgchannel%2FnHpU+(CG+Channel+-+Entertainment+Production+Art) The Blender Foundation has posted the first details of the feature set for Eeevee, the new real-time not-quite-PBR render engine due to roll out in Blender 2.8. A real-time PBR render engine – kind of First announced last year, Eevee is effectively a PBR renderer in all but name. According to the latest post on the Blender development blog, it will “follow the (game) industry trend” for real-time physically based rendering, “supporting high-end graphics coupled with a responsive … viewport”. However, its name – it stands for ‘Extra Easy Virtual Environment Engine’, as well as a type of Pokémon – has been chosen to “avoid the confusing and too-much-hyped [term] PBR”. While meant to be a “nice photorealistic engine”, Eevee isn’t necessarily intended to be as advanced as implementations of PBR in game engines, with the blog noting that the goal is “not feature parity with UE4”. Unreal Engine-style ubershaders for common material types In practice, that should mean that all of Blender’s “realistic” lights – that is, everything but the Hemi Lamp – are supported, using Blender’s existing shadow buffer system for real-time renders. The work will implement UE4-style ubershaders for common material types, but with some advanced shaders – notably, SSS and volumetrics, and a clear-coat shader for car paint – missing in the initial release. As a fallback when working with legacy scenes, materials set up for Blender’s existing offline Cycles render engine should work in Eevee by default, even if they look “slightly different”. Image-based lighting via in-scene on-demand light probes For image-based lighting, Eevee “will support pre-rendered HDRI followed by in-scene [light] probes”. To ensure that something is displayed in the viewport while light probes are being calculated when a scene is first loaded, the output of the diffuse shader will be cached in the .blend file using spherical harmonics. According to the blog post, cube maps – more accurate, but also more computationally intensive than spherical harmonics – will only be used for baked specular highlights. Support for key post effects The initial implementation of Eevee will also support a range of key post-processing effects, like motion blur, bloom, depth of field, tonemapping, and Ground Truth Ambient Occlusion. Temporal anti-aliasing and screen-space reflections are due to follow in subsequent releases. Availability Eevee is due to form part of the upcoming Blender 2.8 release cycle. Core features are due to be implented by Siggraph 2017 in August, with “a more polished usable version” for the Blender Conference in October. https://code.blender.org/2017/03/eevee-roadmap/

Hot off the presses or rather Twitersphere.

Freehand Photoshop painting from photo, no tracing. I spent about two and a half days on it.

http://linkis.com/www.youtube.com/Aubd1

I emailed Jama and just got this back; Thanks for your email. Both of them are standalone . First one is about 360/VR technique in Photoshop and second one in 3d, Coat. Hope it helps!)

This is what Jama Jurbaev says... https://www.artstation.com/artwork/KgNv9 BMW A project i did last year. The goal was to see how far can i push things using 3D. Most of this stuff is done in 3D-coat, rendered in Keyshot. There is a slight touch of Photoshop as well. Mainly grading and some additional atmos.

Very nice; thanks for sharing this with us. One question; do you think the Photoshop version of this tutorial (Vol 1) is necessary as a precursor to the 3d coat version of the tutorial or is the 3d Coat tutorial (Vol 2)) a standalone?

Public knowledge by now but AMD has a new HEDT platform coming out in a couple of months. You’ll see more of it at Computex I believe. It’s a 16 core /32 Thread, quad channel behemoth. And it is insanely quick in the tests that Ryzen is already excelling at. So Cinebench, and all other related productivity programs. The gaming issues that were causing the Ryzen AM4 CPUs to behave erratically to say the least have been ironed out. It’s akin to a newer revision on a newer platform. This should be competing with the Xeon and of course 6950X Intel offers for $1700~$1800USD, but at about $1,000 USD if not less for some Skews. Coming soon. CPSs are pretty big physically, about twice the size of surrent 6950X CPUs and a bit more perhaps. And if you were hoping for pins, nope it’s strictly LGA! It’s NOT 8 channel, but Quad. Will be a splendid competition between X299 and this AMD platform. Skylake-X is pretty good, not revolutionary but a meaningful step up in IPC and the clocks are pretty high as well. If Intel will have a 32 core part to compete on X299 remains to be seen, but the HEDT platform is going to change quite a bit in the next 4 to 6 months.? The Naples chip of course has been spotted multiple times on Zauba’s shipping database. The Summit Ridge platform is AMD’s mainstream platform with Zen architecture and 8 Core dies. Naples on the other hand is the codename of the server platform; the very same platform which will be rocking Zen in 32 core flavors. This is not to be confused with the Zeppelin platform which will include a 32 Zen Core/Vega based APU as well. The 32 Zen cores are tied together using AMD’s very own Coherent Fabric. The homegrown interconnect will support data rates of upto 100GB/s which is alot faster than what the PCIe interface sustains (around 15GB/s). Not only that but latency has been reduced from 500ns to an unknown but allegedly smaller number. Thanks to AMD’s lego-like build philosophy even Naples will actually be fabricated in an 8-core base design, with 16 and 32 core chips being produced in an MCM (Multi Chip Module) format. Up till now however, we had seen no real evidence (apart from the usual documentation) that such a monster processor was actually on the charts in the near future. The shipping entry was marked 20th June 2016 and lists the Naples Test Board. It is marked FOC which I assume stands for ‘Full Operational Capability’ meaning AMD has achieved this significant milestone in its Zen roadmap quite some time ago. Here’s the thing though, this very same lego-like build philosophy can allow AMD to roll out a 16 core variant in the commercial space as well, since both utilize the same socket, it really shouldn’t be an issue at all. In fact, yield theory dictates that AMD can roll out any number of cores from harvested dies from failed Naples chips (this includes 10 core, 12 core and yes even 16 core chips). Interestingly however, the rumor says that such an SKU might be based on the LGA socket – that would increase the difficulty of porting and conflicts with AMD’s current philosophy and is the one thing that makes me doubt the authenticity of this rumor. That is to say that AMD can easily roll out a 16-core Ryzen processor but its not going to be based on LGA – for that to happen, it will need to revamp everything from scratch and create a new socket (which this rumor dubs as the X399 socket). http://wccftech.com/amd-working-16-core-ryzen-cpu/ If only, if only...

http://www.nag.co.za/2017/03/17/amd-reportedly-has-a-second-zen-launch-for-high-end-desktops-coming-soon/ https://forums.anandtech.com/threads/ryzen-strictly-technical.2500572/page-34#post-38797798 AMD has had its hands full with launching Ryzen 7 and Ryzen 5 in the last few months, and they’ve managed to also launch a new platform with DDR4 support alongside some decent overclocking software for the Ryzen family. It’s already been quite a busy year for them, and according to new rumours, it’s about to get even busier. A member of the AnandTech forums has posted new details from a source inside PC testing circles that AMD is working on a high-end desktop platform (HEDT) to combat Intel’s chips in the Core i7 range, with the Core i7 6950X being the current flagship. Credit for the rumour goes to “OrangeKhrush”, who’s posted a few details about the new platform from AMD. The leaks originate from the China-based Chiphell forums, where almost every leak about new silicon seems to start. The post reveals a couple of details about the socket design, as well as the possibility that AMD’s HEDT platform boasts a quad-channel memory controller. “Public knowledge by now but AMD has a new HEDT platform coming out in a couple of months. You’ll see more of it at Computex I believe. It’s a 16 core /32 Thread, quad channel behemoth. And it is insanely quick in the tests that Ryzen is already excelling at. So Cinebench, and all other related productivity programs. The gaming issues that were causing the Ryzen AM4 CPUs to behave erratically to say the least have been ironed out. It’s akin to a newer revision on a newer platform. This should be competing with the Xeon and of course 6950X Intel offers for $1700~$1800USD, but at about $1,000 USD if not less for some Skews. Coming soon. CPSs are pretty big physically, about twice the size of surrent 6950X CPUs and a bit more perhaps. And if you were hoping for pins, nope it’s strictly LGA! It’s NOT 8 channel, but Quad. Will be a splendid competition between X299 and this AMD platform. Skylake-X is pretty good, not revolutionary but a meaningful step up in IPC and the clocks are pretty high as well. If Intel will have a 32 core part to compete on X299 remains to be seen, but the HEDT platform is going to change quite a bit in the next 4 to 6 months.?” The post adds that there’ll be new silicon revisions for Ryzen and the HEDT platform, and that most of the teething issues seen in the initial batch of chips at launch will be solved. All of these things seem quite unreal, but it’s probably all true. A source that I spoke to today confirmed some, but not all of these details. The use of an LGA socket is confirmed (although server chips have used LGA for more than a decade), and the core count is correct. Any pricing speculation, though, is just that: speculation. AMD has an upcoming server platform called Naples, which launches with dual-socket motherboards featuring 16 channels of DDR4 memory support, as well as Zen-based processors with up to 32 cores and 64 virtual threads, as well as 64MB of L3 cache. Considering that Ryzen 5 processors are based on the same die as the Ryzen 7 chips, that means that AMD’s Naples platform starts out at 32 cores and 64 threads, and scales down from there as they bin the faulty chips. However, it seems more likely that this new family of processors uses a different die starting out at 16 cores and 32 threads, scaling down from there into cheaper designs with 14, 12, and 10 physical cores. That gives AMD a lot of room to play around with the pricing, and perhaps they’ll start out with the 16-core processor retailing for less than what Intel charges for the Core i7 6900K, which is currently at $1,050 in the US.

http://www.theverge.com/2017/3/12/14899804/sony-touchscreen-projector-display-prototype-sxsw-2017

Wow Steven Knipping has excellent free tutorials https://houdinitricks.com/a-few-words-with-steven-knipping/ 990 How long have you been using Houdini? Have you always been a Houdini user or were you using other packages prior to Houdini? Is it exclusively Houdini now? Steven I’ve been using Houdini since just before the H11 launch, so maybe sometime around 2011? Before that, I started modeling with Maya 5 and then switched to 3DS Max and then back again. Even after devoting most of my energy to Houdini though, I’ve still had jobs that required going back to 3DS Max or Maya. More recently however it’s been pretty much Houdini exclusively for my work outside of ILM, and a mixture there. 990 I started with Cinema 4D but once I started coding, I wanted to do more with simulations and have a bit more flexibility and found Houdini to be a perfect fit. Although I still use C4D. Why did you start using Houdini? Considering your background, you must have felt right at home. Steven You are exactly right! My programming background made picking up Houdini pretty intuitive. I think in graduate school I was using Maya for rigid body stuff, Real Flow for some liquid stuff, and Maya again to do particles and toon shading. Then I was writing python scripts to do some post image processing effects on my rendered images, etc. I had heard whispers on the internet of some Houdini thing that could handle all of that, but that it was more programmy and maybe even tricky to use. I eventually took the dive once I started focusing more on FX and never looked back! 990 What was the hardest concept for you to grasp in Houdini, if any? Working between the different contexts always felt confusing. Even today, some node trees can get a bit crazy. Steven The DOPs context probably took a little more time than other areas, mostly because trying to set up complex networks of constraints often ended up requiring unwieldy scripting expressions and setups. This has improved dramatically however, and the benefits of having one largely unified simulation environment has proven super useful. Also like coding in general, a well organized/commented network can go a long way towards alleviating confusion. 990 Houdini has this reputation for being a TD’s application. Being that you work in large and complex pipelines, do you agree with that? Steven Ha, first I’d say that TD seems to mean something wildly different at each place that I’ve worked! That said, Houdini definitely lends itself to be used on complex productions and pipelines as its procedural nature allows setups to be passed around and run easily by different members of a team, as well as in different shots. 990 Do you think programming is necessary to reach a high level of proficiency in Houdini or at least a basic understanding? I feel basic coding will always be beneficial, but do you even need it for Houdini? Steven I’d say yes absolutely – Houdini is pretty technical, and requires a technically minded approach. A user is going to be expected to know at least basic programming principles to get the most out of it. You can run Pyro simulations, build procedural modeling networks, etc without writing any code of course, but you will be limiting yourself to a tiny subset of what Houdini is capable of. VEX and its node based representation, VOPS, alone demand some facility with coding and are cornerstones of most advanced setups. Even the whole attribute based data management approach relies on programming concepts like floats, strings, and integers. Fortunately, you really only need to know relatively basic coding to do most of this! https://www.cgcircuit.com/course/applied-houdini---rigids-i https://www.cgcircuit.com/course/applied-houdini---dynamics-i

http://www.cgmeetup.net/home/houdini-16-hair-fur-tutorial/

It's all there to recreate, you just have to slow down/stop the video to figure out everything he does to get this beautiful result. And while we're on the subject of Houdini, wow this guy is really worth subscribing to

sorry about that...delete the thread then. NP

It's a lot nicer that way. You can strike up friendships here that way.

It's incredible work, really 3d art and historical reconstruction of the highest quality https://twitter.com/Byzantium1200 http://www.byzantium1200.com/ http://www.kadingirra.com/introduction.html Lots to explore here, enjoy! https://youtu.be/hFXiLbnQhgQ https://youtu.be/uX4UJv-eIjQ