What are you watching this Christmas season?

With Christmas already here, it’s time for some hot cup of cocoa, books, Christmas trees, festive lights, dazzling ornaments and a whole lot of cheer and happiness. Oh! and how can we miss the very dear Netflix!

The streaming giant recently announced some new originals, all giving out the Christmas vibe. The movies are loaded with warmth, fun, love and definitely more love. Grab a blanket, snuggle with your loved one, get a hot cup of drink and you are all set for a perfect pre-Christmas bliss.

Holiday in the Wild:

Starring Kristin Davis (Kate) and Rob Lowe (Derek), this simple romantic feature will fill your heart with love. After an unexpected separation from her husband, Kate finds her travel partner Derek, while she is on a solo trip in the wild. And like teenagers, both fall in love, unknowingly, bringing out the holiday magic.

Klaus:

Created by Sergio Pablos (Despicable Me), a former Disney animator from projects like The Hunchback of Notre Dame and Tarzan, Klaus tells the story of Jesper, who is stationed on the frozen isolated island. The adventure brings to picture, the reality behind Santa Claus and how he along with his mates bought holiday cheer across the globe.

The Knight Before Christmas:

Vanessa Hudgens, in this new romantic comedy plays a science teacher and falls in love with a medieval English knight (Josh Whitehouse) who magically transports to the present day.

Holiday Rush:

A widower (Romany Malco), who is raising his four children after the death of their mom, spoils his kids at Christmas. When he loses his job right before the holidays, he’s forced to simplify his life and discover what really brings his family true joy: each other.

A Christmas Prince: The Royal Baby:

Christmas brings the ultimate gift to Aldovia: a royal baby. But first, Queen Amber must save her family and kingdom by unwrapping a monarchy mystery. The film follows the real-life trajectory of Meghan Markle’s journey from American actress to royal and new mom.

So, start your Christmas eve early. Go binge watching!

The post What are you watching this Christmas season? appeared first on AnimationXpress.

Use Clip-Geo to Create a Cross-Section Toon Effect in Arnold + Free Model

Create an isometric cutaway effect in Arnold for Cinema 4D with this clip-geo toon tutorial. Download the free engine model and follow along.

In this C4DtoA tutorial, Chad Ashley will show you how to give a Bugatti engine a toon look, and then use clip-geo to create a cutaway effect to see inside the engine body.

The versatility of the Arnold toon system combined with tools like Clip Geo gives you some really interesting effects. It’s not hard to get a super realistic sketchy vibe going if you break it down into some fundamentals.

Use Clip-Geo to Create a Cross-Section Toon Effect in Arnold + Free Model - Render

In this tutorial you’re gonna learn how to set up an isometric shot, make an interesting sketchy toon shader, and use clip geo to create an interesting illustrative cutaway look.

Download Free Bugatti Engine Model

This asset was provided by GrabCad. You can click the button below to visit their site and grab the model file.

Get the Free Model

Tutorials – Make a Cross-Section Toon Effect in Arnold

Now that you’ve got your model, let’s just in to the tutorial.

Learn More about Arnold

Ready to take a deeper dive into Arnold? In addition to all the popular Arnold tutorials already available on our site, you can now find the in-depth Introduction to Arnold training series in Greyscalegorilla Plus.

This two part series will not only get you up to speed using Arnold in Cinema 4D, you will also learn about the latest new features in Arnold GPU.

 

Learn About Greyscalegorilla Plus

Arnold Tutorial Transcript:

Chad Ashley: 00:00 In this video, we’re going to create a cool cutaway to an effect and Arnold for Cinema 4D. Let’s get started.

Chad Ashley: 00:10 Hey, what’s up? It’s Chad here from Greyscalegorilla and in today’s video we’re going to be using Arnold for Cinema 4D to create a cool isometric toon effect using clip geo. The model I’m using is a free model from GrabCAD. I’m going to put a link to that below the description. If you want to learn all about Arnold, I recommend checking out our intro to Arnold series over on Greyscalegorilla Plus we’ve got over 10 hours of professional Arnold training to get you up and running. All right, enough talk. Let’s jump into the video.

Chad Ashley: 00:35 Okay, so here we are in Cinema 4D R21 we’ve got our Bugatti engine, which you can grab for free on. GrabCAD through a link to that down below. Let’s set up our isometric camera first and then there’ll be that first step. So let’s grab our menu, our Arnold menu over here.

Chad Ashley: 00:50 Go to Arnold camera, grab an ortho camera, and let’s zero this out and boom, zero it all out. Let’s grab a skylight and let’s turn off the render or sorry, in the viewport. So I don’t blind myself. Let’s, uh, hit go on the IPR. And there we have it. Let’s look through our ortho camera and let’s set up the, the correct isometric, uh, angles on this camera, which is going to be a 45 degrees in the heading and negative 30 and K. cool. So it looks pretty good, but we need to move that camera out of the center. And if we do that right here and we move it up, you’re going to see that we are no longer clipping, but we’re not really getting any closer to our engine. So what do we need to do here? Plus our viewport is not matching what we’re looking at here in the IPR.

Chad Ashley: 01:42 So let’s fix that. Let’s grab our camera, go over to the object and we’re going to choose projection mode of parallel. And what that does is it now aligns it in a way that makes sense for our, uh, matches our IPR. The other thing that we’re going to do, uh, you can do this a couple different ways. You can grab the handles right here on your camera and adjust the zoom. Or you can just do that right here in the zoom tab under the camera object. I kind of prefer to do it with these handles cause it’s a little bit easier to see. And then I’m going to come over to my top view. Let’s go over here and maybe now we’re just going to center this out a little bit and try to find our center and something like in this range. Looks pretty good.

Chad Ashley: 02:25 And let’s look at the all right. Yeah, that looks pretty good. All right, so we got our, our a isometric camera going here, ready to move on to the next step, which is going to be getting the clip geo working with our engine. Okay. So let’s do some clipping with our clip geo. Uh, firstly I am going to add a ground, so I’m going add a disc and we’re going to bring that size pretty high up here. I’m not really gonna pay too much attention to the lighting or anything. I’m just using a skylight in here right now just to get us started. Um, let’s go ahead and add a object that we’re going to use to clip out. We’re going to use a cue because that’s going to be super simple and I’m just gonna bring it over. Whoops. Let’s go ahead and grab a cube.

Chad Ashley: 03:08 Put it right here on the edge of our engine. That’s looking pretty good. Okay, so, um, the way clip geo works is, uh, it’s a shader, it’s a material, a, you come down here and grab a Arnold surface clip geo and whatever you assign this to, it’s going to chop out of everything in the scene. So if I put this on this cube, we’re instantly going to see this cool cross section of this engine and I can move this around and it’s super fast because this isn’t doing a real bullion. It’s doing like a render time bullion and it’s super useful. You know, you can use any shapes, you can use a sphere, we can describe a sphere, drop that in, hide the cube, throw the clip geo on the sphere and boom, there we go. We’re got like a cool like cross-section sphere happening maybe just on this edge here.

Chad Ashley: 03:57 We want to see the insides of this engine, see how it works, all that kind of crazy stuff. Pretty cool. Now if I have this go down to the ground, you’re going to notice that we’re also chopping it out of the ground too and that’s not anything that we want so we can control what it’s chopping out and what what it’s not chopping out and I’m going to show you how to do that really quickly here. Let’s say that we have this cube that we’re going to use to chop out this engine and we are going to, we’re going to make it kind of tall and it’s chopping out our ground and that’s not something that we want. Well, we’re going to control that with trace sets in Arnold here. So grabbing the clip geo material. You’re going to see here what we have a couple of different controls.

Chad Ashley: 04:34 What we are going to be messing with is tray set. We’re going to give it a name. We’re just going to say engine going to type engine in here. It could be any word you want, anywhere that you can remember. I’m just going to copy it so that I don’t have to remember to type it. So, um, right now we need to tell it. Okay. This trace set, that click Joe is working with is called engine. So anything with that tray set is going to get this chopped out. It’s going to be applied to it. So if we grab our engine and we put on an Arnold tag, we can now come over to the uh, show custom parameters. We’re gonna make sure that’s turned on and we’re using a poly mesh as our type and jump back over to the main tab and we’re just going to click one on an old tray set here to add a tray set and we’re going to type in, or I remember to copy it so I can paste it engine.

Chad Ashley: 05:17 There we go. Now we don’t have this, uh, this clip geo object chopping out of the ground. It’s only going to chop out of things that have that tray set of engine. So that is pretty nifty. Of course you can use multiple hook geo objects. In fact, you can do all sorts of crazy stuff with a clip geo and I can do some weird stuff like that. We’ll get into that weirder stuff a little bit later. But I wanted to show you the tray sets and how to initially set up the clip geo object. Uh, another interesting bit, um, that you can do as well as you can have a completely different shader inside of your clip geo object. So I have my clip geo object here. I could actually just drop in a new standard material and let’s just change the color to something that we’ll recognize and we’ll dump this into the clip geo intersection.

Chad Ashley: 06:05 And what that does is it’s going to create a completely different material on the intersecting edges. Now keep in mind the, the UV being of anything that’s intersecting is going to be taking the UVS from your cutting object. So in our case right now, this cube, so if we had, let’s say a checker pattern, oops, not a cache, but a checker checkerboard. If this was a checkerboard being fed into the base color of our object and maybe we want to like increase this frequency by quite a bit so we can see it. You’re going to notice that we’re getting the UVS from our cube. It’s not actually coming from the engine itself. So that’s kind of a, a something to remember. It’s a cool feature actually so that you can sort of have, you don’t have to worry about those edges, not, not mapping correctly.

Chad Ashley: 06:54 All right, so, um, we’ve set up our, our clip geo. There’s really not much else to it. Of course you can have multiples, you can use whatever shape you want. And with tray sets you can control who and what is affecting which, which clip geo object. All right, so we got this in a pretty good place. So I’m going to go ahead and clean this up and then we’re going to start to apply all of our cool Toon shading stuff. Okay. So the first thing I want to do is set up my scene for toon rendering here in Arnold. Uh, you can see I’ve got my a scene backup here. I’ve got a cube as my clip geo object. Uh, I don’t like the way it looks in the scene here, so I’m going to go ahead and add a display tag to that. That’s going to go into a rendering display.

Chad Ashley: 07:32 I’m going to just change this to a line mode just so I don’t have to look at that in my port and I can see my engine. Okay. Uh, the next thing I want to do is delete this light cause we are going to set up some actual like distant lights and whatnot. Next thing I’m going to do is go into my render settings under the main tab and Arnold, I’m going to tweak some things. I don’t, I’m not going to be using any volume in direct. I’m not going to use any subsurface or transmission and I’m just going to knock down the remaining settings pretty low. Actually. I think I want to leave camera AA at like four. The next thing you need to do when you’re doing toon rendering in Arnold is set your default filter type from gazillion to contour. And that’s gonna allow us to draw lines.

Chad Ashley: 08:14 We don’t have any transmission. A diffuse at Juan is fine, spec at one is fine. And then under my system I’m going to change, uh, my display bucket corners and make sure that’s enabled. I’m gonna change my bucket size to 32, which is going to be a little smaller than default. And I usually work with the initial sample level of like negative one or something in that range. Okay. So when our settings are pretty decent for right now, uh, I’ve got my setup, let’s go ahead and add some lights. I’m going to add a, uh, distant light. And immediately when I add a distant light, I’m also going to add a null. And the reason I’m gonna do that is cause I’m going to throw this null into the lookout, uh, input here on my distant light so that I can pull my distant light out and have it sort of be pointing at the center.

Chad Ashley: 09:02 And I’m just going to find a nice like lighting scenario that works for what I’m doing. A nice light here. Maybe another like key light somewhere in this vicinity, maybe down a little bit lower. And what I’m doing, I’m not worried about these shadows right now. I’m just worried about how it’s falling off on our object. And I’m going to move these in a second. I just wanted to establish a few lights in here. Okay. Um, that’s pretty good for right now. I’ll know what I need to do in far as, as far as like tweaking that in a second. Uh, let me bring also my size up to a hundred and I’m just going to region over the engine itself here. Okay. Now let’s add a Toon shader to our engine and start to work some of these, uh, settings in. Let’s go to create Arnold surface toon.

Chad Ashley: 09:51 I’m going to rename this engine and we’re going to drag this onto the engine null and immediately we start to get the toon lines, which is what we want, but we’re also getting some, some black in here and we’re going to fix that in a minute. But for right now, I’m going to actually turn off my clip geo object just so we can concentrate on the lines and where the shadows are falling on our engine here. All right. Um, so if you haven’t played around with the toon system in Arnold, it’s fantastic. I’m not going to go into detail on all the settings, but I’m just gonna kinda quickly go through how I like to set up this type of scene. I like to work with a base color all the way at one, and then I’m just going to do some simple tone mapping. So let’s grab the ramp and the tone mapping is what’s going to give us those Toon shading lines.

Chad Ashley: 10:39 So the ramp, you’re going to want to set this to you, the type to you. And then I usually just right click this and say interpal tribulation of all nuts set to step. Then I drag this around a little bit. Two levels is fine for right now. Uh, and then we just drag this and we put this into our base tone map. And wallah we have some Toon shading going on. All right, so the shadow areas are going to fall on the far left of this ramp and the highlights are going to fall probably somewhere in the middle. So let’s go ahead and make some shading levels. All right, let’s start with our base shadow and you can see I’ve got a couple of swatch libraries here, uh, that I’ve been using for this sort of illustrative marker drawing kind of toon system look. And the first one is the darkest one, and that’s going to be for my toon line, so I’m not gonna use that, but I’m going to use this one for my absolute darkest point.

Chad Ashley: 11:30 And then this knot is going to be this gray. And then I’m going to add another knot and there’ll be the highlight. All right, so now I’m just going to work in this mid. I want the majority of the engine to be this like gray color and not the highlight color. So I’m going to try to find a good spot for that. And if you notice here, if I drag the shadow out, all the dark areas become extremely as they start to take over the engine a little bit. So I don’t want that. I want to see them, but I don’t want it to be overpowering right now. And of course we can change this later and you don’t have to work with a hard line. You could work with a smooth line and you can sort of dial in exactly how you want those to be interpreted.

Chad Ashley: 12:14 Maybe you want that to be kind of a soft line. So now we’re getting some of that’s offline, but keep in mind this is a distant light and that’s why the shadows are going to be sharp like that. And of course you could change that as well. But I’m going to go undo all this stuff and get back to where I was cause I’m kinda digging that. All right. So the next thing we want to do is mess around with the toon line itself. And let’s jump back into our settings here. So if you jump back into your settings, under the Arnold main tab, you’re going to notice down here the default filter type, we changed that to contour, but next to that, or under it, it says default filter with two. And that’s going to be the, the max width of our, of our toon line.

Chad Ashley: 12:50 And that’s going to be a resolution sort of dependent. So the larger your render, the uh, the larger your line will get. So you’ll have to sort of like push and pull that around. Uh, I know that I’m working at 100% here, so that’s what I want to see. So I’m going to change this to make it a little bit wider so that I have some give and take on my toon line, uh, inside of my material cause you’re gonna adjust the, uh, the, the width of all the different types of toon lines. So I’m not doing anything too crazy here. I’m going to grab my main, uh, contour ER, sorry, my main color here, under edge, and we’re going to give it that color that I chose or I called out earlier for our two lines. Okay, that’s good. And the main edge, I can adjust the width here and I’m going to do that.

Chad Ashley: 13:35 I’m going to do that actually with a noise in a second. So I’m just going to leave this at one for right now. We could also turn on silhouette, but in an object like this that has so many different pieces, silhouette isn’t really gonna help us. So if we made this the silhouette line red, you can see like pretty much everything has a silhouette and maybe we will use that, but I don’t think I’m going to use it right now for this sort of simple setup. Okay. Um, immediately I can see I’m not getting tuned lines on a lot of these different edges that I want. So I’m going to bring my angle threshold down to maybe like 20, something like that. And you can see everything is way too thick right now. And we’re going to adjust that very, very quickly. I’m going to grab a noise and I could use a C4D noise, but, uh, I’m gonna just gonna use a regular Arnold noise.

Chad Ashley: 14:22 I’m going to look at the, uh, put that out to the beauty here and change the scale to like, I dunno, 30, something like that. Go back into the main tab. Uh, adjust the actives to maybe like five. And the distortion kind of distorted a little bit. Now I feel like they’re too small. So let’s go back to 20, something like that. So I’m just going to break up the uh, the Toon shading or the tune line scale. So from here I’m going to pipe this into a range inter, dump this into the input and then our range, I’m going to set to like 0.7 and maybe 0.3. So at the most small, the line we’ll get will be a 0.3 in the largest it’ll get will be a 0.7. Let’s drag this into the tune edge with scale and let’s look at the output of that.

Chad Ashley: 15:14 And immediately it looks more illustrative and it’s looking pretty good. I feel like it could be a little bit thicker. Let’s see what it looks like when we add a silhouette. So I’m going to pull this off and we’re going to split this off into another range and this range is going to be a little bit bigger. It’s going to go all the way to one and then maybe like an owl putting in of there. And I’m just going to pipe this into the silhouette, a silhouette with scale and let’s turn that on and let’s see what that’s doing. The red will help me understand what’s going on here, but we don’t want that for final. So let’s go ahead and see what it looks like with our main tune line. Actually, Lao is pretty good. I’m not gonna lie. I kinda dig it. And now I’m going to just dial in, uh, this highlight cause I feel like it’s a bit, it’s like everywhere right now and I don’t want that.

Chad Ashley: 16:12 I kind of want the highlight to be a little bit more just in the highlights there. All right. That’s looking pretty good. I’m not gonna worry about the ground just yet. We’ll probably do that last, but I’m going to add a little bit of speckled leanness to this. I really like the way that, uh, that looks. So let’s grab a, I could do that right in here and, but I’m not going to, cause we’re going to reference that into a couple different places. So I’m just going to grab a standard surface, delete it, grab a noise. This time I will use the [inaudible] noise and we’re going to use the boo-yah. I’m not sure if I’m saying that right, but I like to say it that way cause it sounds funny. All right, we’re going to use boo-yah and we’re going to like clamp this way the heck down and bring the scale down as well.

Chad Ashley: 16:58 And let’s see what that looks like and let’s go ahead and invert it so that we can use it as a mask compliment, boom. And it’s already connected there. Cool. All right, so let’s jump back into our engine and let’s just drag. Let’s rename this noise and let’s drag this, uh, noise into our engine as a reference and now we can sort of figure out what we want this to be. Uh, let’s throw this into a, um, let’s do a mix. And the way I’m going to do this is I’m going to mix this into the base color. Uh, so let’s do a mix here and we’re going to throw this into our base color and we’re going to make sure that we grab that color. That is our lightest color, oops, a darkest color rather. And then for the second color of our mix, we will grab the lightest color.

Chad Ashley: 17:59 There we go. And now I’m just going to tweak this noise, uh, into a place where I like it. Uh, jumping back into the noise, let’s maybe bring the scale down a little bit more and I feel like there’s probably a bit too much grunge right now, so I’m going to go ahead and clamp it back the other way. Yeah, that’s looking pretty good. Of course, I would output this and filter it in like in comp and make it look a little bit more, uh, you know, maybe a little more grain, little more tooth to it, but yeah, that’s looking pretty good. All right. Uh, I might want to add that same, uh, I need to now work on my, my ground a little bit. So let’s do that really quickly here. Let’s grab a, another Arnold tune and we’ll rename this background and we’ll drop this onto our disc and did that work?

Chad Ashley: 18:55 Yes. Okay. All right. So for this guy, I’m going to, uh, pull in the exact same line, or sorry, the exact same shading. So I’m going to grab this ramp and say copy and I could make a reference for that too, but I’m not going to cause I’m lazy. I dropped this right into our base color or boast tone map rather. All right. So there we go. Let’s make sure the base color is all the way to one. Good. All right, so now we’ve got something that’s working. And for this, if you notice, if I start to like push in the, uh, the tone mapping, uh, the knots on the, on the ramp that’s feeding in the tongue map, you’ll see the background, the shadows start to go away, which is actually good cause I didn’t want this shadow over here as sort of, uh, annoying.

Chad Ashley: 19:43 I didn’t really like the way that looks. And I’m going to just pop out to like an 80% so we can see the whole frame now. All right, that looks pretty good. Um, but I think I want to change my base color to match this color here. So I’m describing that base color and I don’t know, I kinda liked it before the way it was. I’m gonna bring that back to like a brighter color. Okay, cool. I do not want my shadow to be such a harsh edge going all the way to the back so I could get fancy and I could throw some ramps and masks and all that sort of thing, but I don’t want to be fancy. I’m actually going to just throw in a point light and drag that off over here and we’re going to raise it up into the air.

Chad Ashley: 20:29 And what this is going to do is you’re going to see, it’s like no longer a shadow. It’s actually a light. Uh, and we’re getting a harsh line here and that’s because in our background, we’re using a harsh line in our tone map. So if I right click here and we say interpolation smooth, I’m just going to start to pull these off until I fade that shadow off. Yeah, that’s looking pretty dang good. Okay, so now I might want to add some of that noise to that background as well. So let’s do that. Let’s pull our noise as a reference in and let’s figure out how we want to mask this into our base color. So let’s grab a mix and it could use a layer, but I use a mix just because it’s simpler. Um, I’m gonna throw, let’s see, what do I want to do here?

Chad Ashley: 21:16 One a mask that in via a ramp. All right, so Garver ramp here. Make sure that ramp is set to circular. Let’s go ahead and look at, connect the output here so I can see exactly what’s going on. And throw this back in here cause I just want that dirt to sort of exist under the engine. All right, so that’s looking good. Let’s throw this into a, uh, input. Let’s see, what do I want to do here? I want to use it as a mix. So let’s go ahead and do this. Let be input one. Okay. And this guy wants to be white. Can see I’ve got it flipped right now. So I’m just going to come over here and say invert gradient. Uh, unfortunately there’s no invert colors, which would be fantastic, but lo and behold, here we are. We don’t have that. All right. That’s looking good. Um, pretty good. Anyway, just a little bit of that tooth there. Okay, now we need to throw that onto our, uh, into our base color.

Chad Ashley: 22:27 And there we have it. Now, I probably didn’t, I probably could have built this in a way that would give me more control. Uh, but I feel like this is all right. Let’s bring the SAC back to a hundred and notice that the, uh, that the noise itself is a little bit tiny, which I’m not really vibing. So I might actually go ahead and jump into this noise, grab these two nodes, copy them, and delete this, this nose noise here that’s referenced and I’m copying in a completely new C4D noise just so I can adjust the, uh, the scale and let’s bring that scale up to like 40. There we go. I don’t, otherwise I don’t really see it. I don’t really feel it in there.

Chad Ashley: 23:18 Cool. I do think that our background is probably a bit too, too bright. So I’m going to just knock this down a little bit. There we go. And I might want a little bit more dirt in our, in our, uh, grunge there. So I’m gonna just pull this down. Try to get more grunge in there. Okay, cool. Jumping up back into my engine. Uh, making sure that everything is set up properly here. Let’s jump check our base color. Yep. Basis. Good base color is going to be here, so yeah. All right, that’s good. I’m going to actually bring that base color up a little bit. Something more like that. Okay. All right, now we’re getting somewhere. Let’s go ahead and initialize our cutting a cube that has the clip geo on it. And let’s address what we’ve got going on in here. Uh, okay. First thing I need to do is make sure that this cube is not casting shadows.

Chad Ashley: 24:25 Uh, so let’s go ahead and added C4D to a tag on there. Shadows, self shadow. Okay. That helps down in this area. So that’s looking good. Now, uh, and I might want to control the inside with a completely different tune. Shader. Uh, the other thing to note is now we’ve got some artifacting happening here off in the side and I’m just going to get rid of that by extending the size of this cutting object. All right, that’s looking pretty good. Okay, so let’s jump into our clip geo and think about what we want to do here. We could completely build a new Toon shader that would exist on the inside here, uh, which could work. We could do a new tune shader and pop that in and toss that into our intersection. And we could even change the line color to something like red.

Chad Ashley: 25:20 And that’s kind of interesting, but it’s not really what I want. Um, but I might want to change, uh, the, the thickness of that line or maybe the how it’s, you know, the sh the angle threshold and where it decides to draw tune line. But I’m not gonna do that because this tutorial’s already going kind of long and probably want to wrap it up here in a minute. Okay. So that’s looking pretty good. Now let’s grab our cube and let’s find like a cool spot to uh, let it go there. And maybe we don’t, maybe we want to even thicken up the line overall a little bit more. Actually now that’s looking pretty good. Uh, I do want to experiment maybe with rotating the engine 180 degrees. So I’m just going to rotate and you could see the cutting object still works, which is great. It’s looks so cool. Oh wow. That looks actually pretty sweet. Did I get that right? Let me check. Yup. Wow. Dang. Okay, so let me just take this cube now I’m going to play with it a little bit and try to find a cool spot.

Chad Ashley: 26:27 Maybe we even make it like super skinny and like put it right in the middle. Oh man, that looks cool. Those pipes on them on the back look so cool. Yeah, you can just instantly create like some crazy details with the clip geo effect, especially with Toon shading. Let’s maybe take it like right here and then you could have it like, you know, reveal back or maybe you just want to like show off like a small piece. Like maybe you’re just wanting to show like a cross section of like what’s happening inside of these tubes or something. And you could kind of like, like bring that back and like reveal some cool stuff.

Chad Ashley: 27:15 Okay, cool. So, um, I did promise that I was going to show, uh, off, like what happens, the cool effects that happen when you have multiple cutting objects. And I’m going to go ahead and save before I do that because I don’t know, this might might all just fall apart. So I’m just going to save this as a and okay. So there we go. So I’m just gonna hold down control and drag and just kind of create some copies of this cut, cut geo and instantly it kinda creates this really cool echo looking effect and I’m just gonna try to find a spot. Yeah, that looks pretty sweet. Maybe this one is going to be super thin, really long, so you can kind of create really interesting echo effects by, by a sort of breaking the clip geo effect a little bit by having it overlap, which is kind of fun.

Chad Ashley: 28:17 Um, that about wraps up what I wanted to show in this tutorial. Hopefully, uh, you got a few nuggets out of it that were useful to you. Uh, if you’ve got any questions, hit me up in the comments or check us out over on the GSG connect Slack. Uh, I’m always hanging out in there, so if you have any questions, hit me up there. Hope you enjoyed the video and I will see you in the next one.

Chad Ashley: 28:37 Hey, welcome back. Thanks for watching. Remember to check out Greyscalegorilla Plus four tons more Arnold content. If you’re new to this channel, please consider subscribing. And if you’d like what we’re doing, give us a thumbs up, drop a comment below. Hit me with a question. All right, until next time I’ll see you around. What do you think? Good tutorial. Good video, huh? Giving me the side eye.

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Zark unveils social gaming app for Android and iPhone users

Zark announced today the launch of their social gaming app on Apple’s App Store and Google’s Play Store.

Zark is a social gaming app that allows users to invite their friends to play private competitive challenge matches and tournaments. Users invite friends to play their favorite games by issuing custom challenges and win credits that can be redeemed for rewards.

Gamers are in full control to create custom challenges for their favorite games including Fortnite, Halo, Call of Duty, Rocket League, and many others. Zark users choose the game, set the winning criteria, and who they want to invite. Winners earn bragging rights and credits that can be redeemed in-app for a variety of digital gift cards. Some of the most popular digital gift cards include Xbox, PlayStation, App Store, Google Play, and GameStop.

The Zark social gaming app is designed to connect gamers with their friends and provide a safe, unique and competitive community. Zark is especially ideal for younger gamers because it offers a secure environment for them to enjoy the games they love with their friends.

Zark is available for free on Apple’s App Store and Google’s Play Center.

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NODWIN Gaming partners with MTV India to launch Esports Mania

Indian esports company NODWIN Gaming and MTV India have partnered to bring quality esports content to the audience through Esports Mania .

Nodwin Gaming founder and CEO Akshat Rathee, said on this association, “We are delighted that esports has found a fitting destination on Indian television with MTV joining hands with us. With our property Esports Mania, we believe we can showcase the best of esports to the television audience. TV goes a long way in furthering the consumer connect of our nascent sport and our approach of curated programming for the MTV viewer is directed to make esports mainstream in India. In MTV, we at Nodwin Gaming have a partner which is the de-facto destination for youth in India.”

The move by NODWIN Gaming and MTV comes in to target mainstreaming esports and taking it to the general audience.

The recent boom in the number of esports players and professional tournaments in the country have served as the perfect setup for this monumental partnership. MTV India’s latest offering Esports Mania encompasses a variety of shows that will go on air this December.

Viacom18  head,youth, music and english entertainment Ferzad Palia, said: “At MTV we are always looking for new offerings for the young Indian and esports as a category has been gaining popularity with our audiences. In NODWIN Gaming, we have found partners who are already doing ground-breaking work in the space of gaming and we are glad to bring in the next wave of growth for esports in India.”

The Esports Mania line-up includes:

  • Match of the Week- The best esports matches with the most thrilling moments handpicked from tournaments in the country and around the world. Tune in every Thursday at 10 p.m. starting 12 December .
  • Esports 360–Weekly dose of latest esports news and updates, starting 17 December, tune in every Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday at 4.55 p.m.
  • World of Esports – A general informative and fun show around esports with conversations with pro players, insights on new developments in the industry, memes and lot more. Tune in every Friday at 10.30 p.m. starting 20December.
  • Documentary Series– Documentaries and stories surrounding esports players and big tournaments. Frames showcases the lesser known side of some of the individuals, their hardships and their path to success. Tune in every Saturday at 9.30 p.m. starting 21 December.

Viewers can also enjoy the Esports Mania on OTT platform VOOT.

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Indian digital gaming platform WinZO unveils console for global game developers

To ease out the publishing hassel Winzo has launched a console especially for game developers to connect and publish their games on WinZO App, a vernacular arcade gaming platform.It provides developers  globally a real-time access to a micro-payments backed WinZO Platform that comes with a promise of an immediate 100X uptake in the revenue generated from games in India.

WinZO Games co-founder, Paavan Nanda said: “The mobile gaming ecosystem in India is transforming rapidly but monetization remains the biggest roadblock. We are offering a unique and stable approach through the game developers’ console, a breakthrough to redefine the gaming ecosystem in India.”

WinZO is a digital gaming platform that offers over 30 games like Bubble Shooter, Space Warrior, Carrom, and more to ardent players. All of these games are available in 10 vernacular languages including Bangla, Tamil, Telugu, Punjabi, Bhojpuri, and so on.

With the console, WinZO aims to support the game developer community by providing an alternative monetization method for their existing games directly and help them earn 100x from the moment the game gets approved on the platform.

Nanda further added:“It was interesting to learn that India leads the world in mobile game downloads followed by the United States and Brazil, according to App Annie. However, there is dismal growth in consumer spend on games. This indicates the need for a stable monetization model in India for game developers to support and promote quality gaming content.”

This comes only a few months after WinZO announced its fund of $1.5MM that was set up to support the gaming community globally.

The game developers will be able to unlock a host of features provided by WinZO Games for higher retention, increased outreach, premium user acquisition and branding.

 

 

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China based Jiela E-sports opens their first esports store in Bangalore

Jiela E-sports a China based internet company integrating brand chain, software development, e-sports events, game value-added, and member services have announced to open their first  esports store in Bangalore, India  today.

The official facebook post reads, “On December 19, 2019, Jiela E-sports’ first store in India will open grandly! We look forward to your experience! Free games, free games, free games! Important things to say three times! Dear friends! Top configuration, intimate service, comfortable environment, play any game you want! The ultimate pursuit, the ultimate experience! Let’s pass this love of esports games to everyone around us!”

The purpose of brand is to create a multiplayer game space and create a perfect entertainment game experience for customers.

As of December 2019, the number of effective global members of Jiela Internet Cafe has exceeded 8 million, and the service has gone out in other countries and regions and now they have opened their first store in India. 700 stores worldwide and serves more than 20 million people annually

Usually, with its stylish and simple decoration style, intimate human services, high-end gaming equipment, strong game atmosphere, multi-person social space and other advantages, it has won the love of the majority of gamers, and is a favorite gathering place for players around the world. Will it be same for India?

For the same we have approached the brand for further information and will keep you updated in future.

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These hard hitting comics force us to think about our treatment towards women over generations

With the increasing violence and injustice against women, many outrages can be seen in the entire country. Protests, riots, rallies are just the outcome of the inbuilt anger. While every person has his/her way of protesting, Vaanarsena Studios Senapati Vivek Ram and his team planned to put out their feelings through the best known medium- illustrated comics!

Most of Vaanarsena’s work has been to educate the audience about our Indian stories. “There has been a lot of sugar coating and omissions over the years in the stories to show things in just black and white. This has also led to people forgetting about so called heroes and everything that they have done,” said Ram.

In the current environment of hate and violence, Ram’s team felt it was necessary to explain  and bring to light some older and forgotten stories. The comic shows few scenes from our epics, Mahabharata and Ramayana, where the consent or respect of women didn’t matter. The comic says, “Will our stories be forgotten so that history repeats itself?” But that is the situation today. The stories are indeed forgotten.

In history, patriarchy has always been prevalent. In ancient stories, one can see women being addressed or showcased as commodities and passed around for needs of power and prestige is what Ram feels. Overtime, many speculations and stories got omitted due to the restrictions on content shown on television and in plays. This is largely the reason we don’t seem to move forward on these issues and even today women have to fight for basic rights of equality and respect.

History tends to repeat itself and what’s happening today has happened many time before in the earlier times. And if we forget our stories and choose not to learn from them, this will continue repeating. Ram usually does animation and illustrations, but for this topic, he thought of doing a comic which can be elaborated upon.”Nuances tend to get missed in an illustration, and this was a subject that still needed explaining,”  added he.

“We focused purely on the war, and heroics and forgot that our stories were also trying to tell us a lot more about human behavior. The more stories we forget, the more we will stick to a conservative culture from the last 100 years, and forget the lessons from 3000 years ago,” Ram concluded.

Vaanarsena’s illustrations and animations have been telling stories of Indian culture. India as a country has so many stories which are relevant even in today’s era and hopefully will be in the coming future. We either learn or destroy ourselves in the process!

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“We have counselled many parents regarding the opportunities in the games industry”: Backstage Pass founder Surya P

With the number of gaming studios in the country rising by the day, the requirement for dev talent is also following suit. With multiple facets to the growing industry, more individuals are taking up gaming as a full fledged career option.

While there were only a handful of training centres earlier, that number have also seen a spike to meet the demand. Says Backstage Pass founder and President Surya P, “A decade ago, there were as few as two to three colleges that offered additional gaming courses while now, there are at least 20 to 30 colleges that offer such courses. The games industry is multiplying swiftly; there were around 20 to 30 game companies a decade ago, and now, there are more than 300 companies. All ranges of companies are present from start-ups with a ten-member team to multinational companies with over a thousand employees. There is a massive demand for talented game developers in this industry which will only grow with the coming years as the number of game companies will only increase.”

According to the FICCI EY report real-money gaming — fantasy and esports — and casual gaming were on the rise in the country, pushed by a 52 percent growth in total gamers which stood at 278 million. Even international giants like Ubitsoft expanded their footprints in the country with their studio in Mumbai and looped in a number of Indian talent for their development team.

While gaming in India is majorly looked at as a hobby still, the scenario is changing now. Contributing to that can be the rise of mobile-led gaming and esports. Titles like PUBG Mobile has made the hyper-casual players think a little more about gaming. Another factor is the rise of smartphone availability and cheap data. With this comes a tad more seriousness about taking up a a career in gaming in the country.

The same was resonated by the Backstage Pass founder, “The rapid growth in the games industry because of the support of government policies and the gaming ecosystem is a noteworthy change in the games industry. Another remarkable change is the slow but steady liberalisation of parents’ mindset, and they now view it as a legitimate career choice. There is a lot more awareness about the games industry and the promise it holds for the future generation.”


Taking the example of the aforementioned institute itself, it was founded in 2009
 has over the past few years branched out to Pune and Bangalore as the organisation sees Hyderabad, Pune and Bangalore as the “major gaming hubs in India”. There are numerous gaming companies in these three cities and hence the demand for talented game developers which institutes are catering to.

However, in the Indian market, convincing parents about gaming being a viable career option can still be tough, says Surya, “There are many students with a passion for games and many ideas that they would like to implement but are held back due to the lack of parental support. It is often observed that parents view gaming as a hobby but not a serious life choice. Backstage Pass has counselled many parents regarding the opportunities and resources of the games industry and has given real-world examples of the growth in this field.”

Where are we headed in the next five years?
In the next five years, there will most probably be a drastic increase in the number of game companies, there will be more and more skilled game developers and a number of AAA games will rise. Augmented reality and virtual reality (AR and VR) games will be the future of the games industry. AR & VR games are quickly becoming popular with the next generation and have great potential in terms of enhanced technology. The quality of AAA games and the skillset of future game developers will be much greater than it is now.” concludes Surya.

While the industry is showing signs of life and recognition in the country, there is still a long way to go before it becomes mainstream. As brands and organisation become more aware and leverage the potential that gaming brings to the table in terms of revenue and engagement, the industry is likely to adopt the medium completely. However, given the rate of growth at which the industry is pacing, we might get there quicker than we expect.

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The secret of DNEG’s winning streak

DNEG has been the Oscar’s favourite child for the past five consecutive years. Having bagged multiple awards for the VFX category, DNEG has washed over the filmscape of visual effects with its wizardry. While the mammoth Oscar ceremony is just around the corner, DNEG has already bagged an award at the 24 FPS annual award recently held in India.

For the unversed, 24FPS is an annual event of MAAC, and is touted as the most prestigious Awards function for the animation & visual effects segment across the Indian sub-continent and beyond. Men in Black: International regaled the audience tremendously and DNEG had headed the team of visual effects artists.

AnimationXpress had published a detailed review of the movie Men in Black International, where the CG aliens accounted for the major portion of it.

A VFX-spectacle you can’t neuralyse for a long time plays host to a number of aliens species that come in all shapes and sizes. Action Sequences are also equally stunning with the way in which MIB agents try to protect Jababian friend Vungus from the onslaught of Dyads with their high-end weaponry.

We recently caught up with DNEG’s Creative Director and General Manager Merzin Tavaria over a quick cuppa.

Excerpts 

Which movie did you receive the award for?

Men In Black: International

How was your experience at the 24 FPS award show?

24 FPS has grown over the years in terms of Network and Audience, 17th edition was no different. 

DNEG’s VFX seems to be bagging many awards across the globe. Be it Oscars, Emmy’s or 24 FPS, tell us about the secret of DNEG’s brilliance?

The secret lies in DNEG’s commitment to facilitate the maker’s vision in the most effective manner. This also leads us to take risks in the process and we have been fortunate that they have been acknowledged and rewarded.


Since the movie is nominated for Oscars this year, it would prove to be a formidable contender for the golden statuette! We will soon find out!

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Facebook acquires gaming firm PlayGiga to push cloud gaming

To set the foundation in cloud-based game streaming market, Facebook has acquired Spanish video gaming firm PlayGiga.

A Facebook spokesperson confirmed the deal to CNBC, after Spanish business newspaper Cinco Dias reported late last week that the acquisition was coming and that the price was approximately 70 million euros (about $78 million).

“We’re thrilled to welcome PlayGiga to the Facebook Gaming team,” said a Facebook spokesperson.

Facebook has been expanding its efforts in gaming in recent years as it looks to expand in markets outside of online advertising.

“We are excited to announce that the PlayGiga team is moving on to something new,” the company says on the main page of its website. “We are continuing our work in cloud gaming, now with a new mission. We want to thank all of our partners and customers for their support over the years.”

The arrival of Cloud-based game streaming services like Apple Arcade, Google Stadia and the upcoming Microsoft xCloud is all set to change the way people play games, threatening the very survival of traditional gaming industry ruled by consoles like Microsoft Xbox and Sony PlayStation

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