Hasta La Motion!

ADELAIDE, SOUTH AUSTRALIA— Rising Sun Pictures, Australia’s specialist feature film visual effects production house, has been contracted by Warner Bros. to provide visual effects services for “Green Lantern.” Directed by Martin Campbell (“Casino Royale”) and starring Ryan Reynolds, Blake Lively and Peter Sarsgaard, the film is scheduled for a summer 2011 release.
Working alongside major vendor Sony Pictures Imageworks, Rising Sun will deliver key CG sequences in the film. “Once again the quality the work done here in South Australia has resulted in a tent-pole picture choosing Rising Sun from a field of international competitors” said CEO Michael Taylor. “Our ability to deliver complex, photo-real effects work on tight turnarounds continues to place Rising Sun as one of the most sought after vendors in the industry”.
The production will benefit from a reduction in the 15% Post, Digital and Visual Effects Rebate threshold, but Company Director Tony Clark says the Australian Government still needs to do more to ensure the local industry can remain competitive on a larger scale. “The sustained strength of the Australian dollar is not helping attract lucrative, longer term contracts to our shores. Rising Sun is pleased to have brought a fraction of the Green Lantern spend back to Australia, however a sliding rebate scale locked in step with the dollar up to a maximum of 30% would once again position Australia as a true competitor on the international stage”.
Rising Sun’s recent expansion further increases the company’s ability to cater for the needs of multiple blockbuster productions, simultaneously delivering large volume, highly complex visual effects & character shots. Rising Sun is also working on “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part II” and the Digital Intermediate for local film “Red Dog”.

About Rising Sun Pictures
Rising Sun Pictures is a passionate team of producers, artists and technicians, known for providing complex digital visual effects and cg character work to feature film clients all around the world. With the infrastructure to deliver a full spectrum of services from Design through to Digital Intermediate, Rising Sun has recently worked on films such as Terminator Salvation, the Harry Potter series [The Goblet of Fire, The Order of the Phoenix, The Half-Blood Prince, The Deathly Hallows], X-Men Origins: Wolverine and Watchmen. For more information, visit www.rsp.com.au

— Senior Smoke artist contributes to ad campaigns for Nike and Old Navy —

Los Angeles, CA – Visual effects company Method has hired senior Smoke artist Aidan Thomas to its Creative Finishing division. Thomas joins Method from the UK’s Golden Square Post and The Mill, where he worked on commercial campaigns for Intel, Levi’s and Reebok, among others. Recent projects from Thomas at Method include the Nike “MVPuppets” campaign and the Nike “Goodbye Baseball” spot with Ken Griffey Jr. for Wieden+Kennedy. Thomas is currently at work on the ongoing Old Navy campaign from Crispin Porter.

Aidan Thomas, Senior Smoke Artist, Method

“We’re thrilled to have Aidan join the team,” said Method’s Creative Finishing executive producer Robert Owens. “He is amazingly adept as a finishing artist–fast, great with clients and a creative thinker, but it’s his savvy eye and compositing sensibilities that set him apart from other Smoke artists. Aidan’s made an immediate impression with clients and has grown a strong client base very quickly. It can take years to build a client base for a talent in a new city, and with Aidan it’s happened almost instantaneously.”

A talented Smoke artist with a passion for moving images, and a native of England, Thomas spent two years at Golden Square Post Production in London, following positions at The Mill London/New York and the UK’s Moving Picture Company. While at The Mill, Thomas headed up the Smoke department, serving as lead artist on worldwide campaigns for Intel, the celebrated “Straight” campaign for Levi’s featuring spots by Gorgeous directors Tom Carty and Frank Budgen and the Martini campaign by Michael Haussman featuring George Clooney, as well as projects for Aflac, Adidas, Nike, Reebok, ESPN, Snickers, Verizon/Sprint, Nikon, Virgin Mobile, Capitol One, Burger King, Mastercard, Volvo, Cheerios, LG and Panasonic, among others.

“Aidan has been an enormous asset to the Creative Finishing division and is an integral and very positive part of the team,” said creative director Claus Hansen. “In addition to his standout work with clients, he has already been instrumental in organizing our job directory structure and some of our working systems.”

As a senior Smoke artist on Method’s Creative Finishing team, Thomas joins senior Smoke artist Jason Frank and newly hired junior Smoke Artist Aaron Neitz, as well as Flame artists Kelly Bumbarger, Wensen Ho and Claus Hansen, who also serves as the division’s creative director.

“It’s really exciting to be part of such a creative and collaborative environment and join such a skilled team of artists,” Thomas said. “Method has a really clean technical infrastructure and top-notch producers, which makes it extremely easy for us to focus on delivering exactly what the clients need.”

About Method Studios
Based in Los Angeles, with locations in New York and London, Method Studios is a leading post production facility providing a full range of visual effects services including conceptual design, look development, 3D animation/CGI, matte painting, compositing and finishing. Method Studios also provides an array of services to stereoscopic film productions, including the creation of stereo 3D content. Method’s sister company, Company 3, maintains a full stereoscopic color-grading suite in the same building as Method’s Los Angeles facility, most recently used for Tim Burton’s "Alice in Wonderland." www.methodstudios.com

Acropora is a procedural voxel modeler for creating complex, organic mesh topologies that are useful for all types of 3D modeling applications. This new release brings voxel modeling to a whole new level, with animation of modifiers and primitives.

Features include:

• -A variety of base shapes and compound shapes as primary surfaces
• -User-defined surfaces
• -Splines, lofts, grooves, extrusions, chisels
• -Full animation of base objects and modifiers
• -Path objects
• -MAX 2008 plug-in (more loaders on the way)
• -Voxelisation of user imported models
• -Over 60+ volume modifiers (filter, terrain, geometric, warp)
• -Generation of up to 15 octaves of three-dimensional noise (volumetric, Perlin and fractal)
• -Extensive voxel and noise editing tools
• -Extensive post-processing of meshes (tesselation, smoothing, simplification,…)
• -Batch processing
• -Multiple LOD support
• -Export to multiple mesh formats (FBX, OBJ, 3DS, DXF, DAE), DDS volume textures, and raw voxel data (full and RLE)

Download Acropora 1.2.0121 Beta here.

For all of you who have eagerly expected the professional sequence player to run on Mac and Linux we are happy to announce its immediate availability. The new features and system support are FREE to all current Pdplayer users and accessible for download from the Chaos Group website.

Easy to integrate with different applications such as Nuke, After Effects, Lightwave, V-Ray and others it delivers short viewing times and exceptional flexibility in terms of communicating and applying changes directly while discussing them with customer. Pdplayer supports most industry standard file formats including EXR, HDR, DPX, CIN, R3D, TGA, SGI, IFF, PIC and VRIMG and is capable to meet the most demanding needs of the artist.

The full list of features, functions and limitations is listed at the official webpage of Pdplayer, so do not hesitate to click and read details.

Greetings,
Chaos Group Team

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Rocketbox Libraries’ latest release now provides developers and studios with an easier implementation of AAA quality characters into their products.

Rocketbox Studios GmbH, specialized in 3D characters and animations, has just released Complete Characters HD – this 3D model library is a collection of highly realistic animated human characters. A key feature of these new generation character models is their facial bone rig, making them much more lifelike and believable than competing stock models on the market. A wide collection of facial expressions including emotions and phonemes for lip-synced speech are already included.

All characters are pre-rigged, ready to use, and available for integration in a wide range of projects. The libraries can save companies lots of time, effort and money while boosting graphic quality of the resulting product.

Some hard facts in short form:

• 40 new and completely unique characters with 500 animations
• Available as individual characters or in various bundles
• Rigs include face bones for lip sync and expressions
• Less than 10,000 polys per character
• The assets are available in 3ds Max file format, Maya and FBX versions will be released on Sept 30th, 2010
• High res pictures of the new characters can be downloaded here: http://www.rocketbox-libraries.com/m…acter_pics.zip

The Rocketbox Libraries 3D model online shop can be found here:
www.rocketbox-libraries.com