Hasta La Motion!

Kerala now has its own Society of AVGC Institutions (SAIK), as the first ever association for AVGC (Animation, Visual Effects, Gaming and Comics) sector was launched yesterday.

The launch event of Society of AVGC Institutions in Kerala (SAIK) was held in Maurya Rajadhani, Trivandrum on 28 October -International Animation Day. Government of Kerala IT Secretary M Siva Sankar IAS initiated the launch of SAIK, whereas Technopark CEO Sasi PM released the logo and director Madhupal felicitated the gathering. 

Speaking at the launch Sankar said, “Formation of SAIK is very significant as it is for the first time, organisations and institutions related to AVGC sector collaborate to promote and recognise the potential of the sector. The industry is one of a kind and undoubtedly have the advantage of being the market leaders by promoting Kerala as a region providing competent human resources. He added, the government will certainly facilitate SAIK to achieve the sectors deserved position in global map.”

SAIK is a not for profit organisation which is established with an objective of creating a business collective of small, medium and big sized studios engaged in AVGC across Kerala for all information and needs related to the sector. The society aims to accomplish Kerala as a powerhouse of AVGC sector and to promote Kerala AVGC as an important hub- destination in the global map.

“We believe SAIK is the need of the hour for the creative community in Kerala. We have always been proud that this state has produced some of the best techno-creative talents in the country, however there was no full-fledged organisation working towards nurturing these talents and studios to grow into their full potential. SAIK was formed with the purpose of bridging this gap and ensuring that Kerala-based studios and talents have a collective voice as well as access to resources and opportunities. We believe the efforts of SAIK along with the Kerala government’s support will also ensure that Kerala is recognised as a leading techno-creative hub on the global map,” commented SAIK president and Toonz Animation CEO Jayakumar P. 

The post Society of AVGC Institutions in Kerala (SAIK) launched on 28 October appeared first on AnimationXpress.

India is constantly rising as a market for online gaming as people are currently glued to their phones. Due to this craze, Garena, an online games developer and publisher, has launched Free Fire, a mobile battle royale game to tap the market  in 2009, Garena has to its name various other games like Arena of Valor, Call of Duty: Mobile Garena, FIFA Online 3, League of Legends, and Heroes of Newerth. However, Garena is betting big on Free Fire in India. 

Free Fire is apparently the first mobile battle royale game developed exclusively for the mobile gamer. While India has already established itself as a mobile-first economy, its gaming sector is also gaining traction.

To encourage more gamers in India, Garena recently hosted a tournament in New Delhi which attracted participation from over 1,00,000 gamers in terms of registrations. Around 5,000 teams, comprising around 20,000 participants, qualified for the initial playoffs while 12 teams, comprising four members each, qualified for the finals. The total prize pool of Rs 35 lakh was split amid the top ten teams.

Tournaments like these have helped Garena garner more than 450 million registered users for Free Fire. In addition, Free Fire has witnessed more than 50 million peak daily active users from over 130 markets worldwide in Q2 2019.

As per few reports, India has reached  530 million smartphones and is predicted to touch 925 million by 2023. And this is what gaming companies – both local and global – are looking to capitalise. As a spokesperson was quoted saying, “India is one of the fastest-growing esports communities worldwide, said a Garena spokesperson.

Garena’s next global event is the Free Fire World Series, to be held in Brazil on 16 November. India will be represented by Team Nawabzade and this will not be the first time an Indian team gets a chance to participate in Free Fire events on a global stage. The last such event was Free Fire Streamer Showdown, which was held in Bangkok on 1 September. Team Bengal Tiger represented India at the event.

The post Garena is betting big on ‘Free Fire’ in India appeared first on AnimationXpress.

The making of Ed Sheeran’s magical music video “Cross Me,” featuring Chance the Rapper and PnB Rock.

Ed Sheeran and Chance the Rapper weren’t able to actually be in the music video for their new single “Cross Me,” which also features PnB Rock. But Riff Raff Films director, Ryan Staake, and the Moving Picture Company came up with a mind-blowing way to combine motion capture, photogrammetry, 3D animation, and visual effects to allow all three of them to appear anyway.

The result is a video that offers a behind-the-scenes look at what it takes to create a fully CG story.

Beginning with a scene featuring a dancer in a motion capture suit, the video quickly morphs into a game-like fantasy world in which the dancer glitches and is transformed into Sheeran and the other characters in a variety of fantastical environments.

Using Cinema 4D, Maya, Houdini, ZBrush, Unreal and more, MPC worked closely with Staake from the start, offering both creative input and technical capabilities that enabled the team to create the video in less than a month without sacrificing quality.

Kerim Camdzic was MPC’s lead motion designer on the project. Here he explains how the UK-based studio’s small team worked together with the director to create “Cross Me.”

Meleah Maynard: How did MPC collaborate with Ryan Staake on this?

Kerim Camdzic: He was great because he had a lot of ideas and cared so much, but he was also realistic about the fact that we had only three and a half weeks. He started with a storyboard with certain elements in it, but there were so many other ideas to consider.

We all decided to prioritize what Ryan cared about most first, and we re-concepted other things we liked in Cinema 4D to fit our deadline. We were able to have a lot of artistic input, which was great, and everyone really wanted to be involved. Eventually, our whole company worked on this. We’re a small team and the video was really layered, so almost all of MPC’s departments needed to work together and have each other’s backs.

MM: Have you been with MPC a long time?

KC: I’ve been with MPC for four years, first in New York and now here in London. This is my first real job after being an intern. I grew up in Bosnia and moved to Florida when I got a scholarship to study motion design at Ringling College of Art and Design in Florida.

MM: Why did you choose motion design?

KC: I was in middle school when the first level of capitalism in my country meant we got to see some proper advertising. My mom would send me to get groceries, and I could see the way packaging was conveying messages and you could tell people’s tastes were changing.

It was fascinating to watch how design started dictating what we bought and did. Mad Men came out when I was in high school and that was it for me. I knew advertising was the way to go.

MPC used Cinema 4D to create this scene showing Chance the Rapper running on stacks of paper. The city in the background was built with MPC’s custom city kit.

MM: Was the dancer filmed first, so those motion capture moves could be used to concept the video, or did he capture specific choreography because he knew what he needed?

KC: We got the whole motion capture video as an alembic file, so we had all the 3D data for each of her joints. The video made it look like a mannequin was dancing, and we modeled Ed, Chance and PnB to fit onto that mannequin. It was kind of bizarre because it felt like a video game.

We brought the file into Maya and someone would sculpt the character and connect the rig to the character, whichever one it was. It was so fun to switch between the different bodies doing all of those dance moves. The director had a mood board explaining what he wanted us to do with the moves, but we were also free to try things that we liked.

Houdini was used for scenes like this one where the dancer turns into Ed Sheeran and then Chance the Rapper and back to Sheeran again.

MM: What did you use to transform one character into another?

KC: That was mostly Houdini. 3D artist Lewis Orton created a great script in Houdini, using Vellum to achieve a cloth-like tearing between the characters as they transformed. It was a very efficient way of working and, in a way, characters became costumes. We also used a 2D process in comp for some parts.

MM: How did you work as a team on all of these different scenes that had to flow seamlessly together?

KC: We started developing each concept and doing previz in C4D. If an idea was too complicated, we’d simplify it to communicate what we wanted. Like the scene where Ed has a heart pumping out of his chest: we first tried having a giant beating heart behind him, but we found that it looked much better with the heart coming out of his chest, so we did that instead.

It helped that each scene was really modular, so different groups could work on each one. We also had a core group trying to get lip sync on the models of Ed and Chance.

Pre-viz was mostly done in C4D, and then combined with Houdini and Maya to deliver the final shot.

MM: Talk about the scene where PnB Rock is dancing and cell phones overtake him.

KC: I worked on that scene, and it was really pretty heavy. We made it in Maya, and then for the transition between characters, we used Cinema 4D and X-Particles to grow phones onto the character’s surface. Once he was fully covered, we could switch to the scene where the dancer shakes them off.

MM: What were some of the things MPC did to keep this video on deadline but still meet the director’s expectations?

KC: We may be a small team, but we’re used to doing quality work quickly. We have a digital team who works with the game engine, Unreal. Gaming lets you bash different assets that are pre-built, so we did that whenever we could to save time on procedural worlds. It worked really well for this video.

We also used iPhones for some quick facial motion capture for the models. Cinema 4D was great because we needed speed for concepting and trying out our ideas, and Houdini really helped us inflate and deflate complex geometry really fast. We had so much room to try things. Ryan really encouraged that, which made this great to work on.

Meleah Maynard is a writer and editor in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

Want more like this? Check out these interviews.

• Making The Lonely Island’s Unauthorized Bash Brothers Experience
• Designing a Real Ford Rally Car in Cinema 4D
• Assembling Avengers: Endgame User Interfaces and Holograms with C4D

The post How MPC Combined C4D, Maya, Houdini and Unreal for this Music Video appeared first on Greyscalegorilla.

The diyas  and streets are lit, the sparklers have been bought and the puja ki thali is set, homes are being decorated to welcome Goddess Lakshmi on Diwali. The best thing about Diwali is markets keep buzzing with festive shoppers and grand Diwali sales both offline and online – to clutch the attention of more and more consumer. The festival of lights is that joyful time when exchanging gifts become common among loved ones and thus it becomes nerve racking to figure out what to gift whom? When it’s for gamers it becomes even more difficult. To simplify that dilemma in finding out gifts we have rounded up five cool gifts to gift the gamers this Diwali.

Nintendo Switch: We all have at least one friend who spends a lot of time in front of a TV playing video games. If your buddy has always longed to buy the Nintendo Switch, now is the best time to get him or her one because it’s available for just Rs 20,799. It might  go bit heavier on the pocket side but every penny worth the investment. You  can also check out the more affordable Nintendo Switch Lite which is the  toned-down version of the Nintendo Switch with limitations of its own However it  is available for just Rs 16,099 right now.

Capture Cards: Well online streaming of videos games in India has leaped with time thanks to social media. Today every aspiring gamer aims to play as professional in future either in esports or as a streamer in Youtube,Facebook and Twitch. I am sure there must be someone who aims to become one,  and to fast forward their aim this Diwali  you can get streaming accessories as a gift. For example you can start with Elgato Game Capture HD60 S which is an unique device, enables you to record PlayStation or Xbox gameplay to a Mac or PC and share it with your friends and fans. With advanced hardware H.264 encoding, you can capture in stunning HD quality, while keeping the file size low.

VR Headset:
VR Virtual reality headset is one such gadget which every gamer have either experienced at least once or it is still slightly out of reach, as some headsets require an expensive gaming computer or an Android smartphone to run excluding Oculus Go which has built-in display and motion tracking feature. There are a lot of VR gadgets available at the market from Vive to Oculus which completely changes the gaming experience into a whole new level. So a VR headset will be convenient for those gamers who want to lift their gaming skills and experience the next level.

Gaming Headsets: If your gamer friend or relative is more interested in the sounds coming out of gaming headset then recently launched HyperX Cloud Earbuds will be the perfect one. The 53mm drivers and enhanced bass reproduction for clear high, mids and lows and it also comes with a closed-cup design and a Detachable noise-cancellation microphone for isolating noise. The flexible, detachable mic can be easily positioned and can be removed when playing music. The headset is currently available at Amazon for RS.4,490.

Games: For gamers the  better way to celebrate Diwali is by playing new games Borderlands 3, the next instalment in the award-winning, genre-defining shooter-looter series, is now available worldwide on PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC via the Epic Games Store. Borderlands 3 expands and improves many of the key features that made the series a critical and commercial success, while also introducing innovative new concepts to its proven formula and because of the it will be  perfect to gift someone.

There are lot of other options to gift your loved ones who are gaming freaks, from comfortable bean bags to wireless controller and it is endless. This is our pick in considering the Indian gamers so now choice is yours. Pick that one gift for Diwali which will make your gamer ones happy and delighted when they receive it. Wish you all a very Happy Diwali!!

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