Hasta La Motion!

Employers in the computer graphics (CG) industry are better positioned to attract future university leavers than industries such as financial services and sciences, as graduates boast realistic expectations when it comes to a career in CG.

With the AGR annual graduate recruitment survey indicating a fall in graduate hires for the first time since 2003, projecting a decrease of 5.4% in 2009, a new survey from Escape Studios reveals that CG students have strong employment opportunities in the industry. The research shows 58% of graduates expect to work between 50 and 60 hours a week, despite the fact that most professionals admit to only working a 40 hour week. This statistic demonstrates that the majority of CG graduates are happy to put in more hours than the industry standard.

Even when it comes to the issue of pay, the divide between graduate expectations and the average starting salary remains slim. 56% of graduates expect to earn up to £24,000, compared with 68% of professionals who earned up to £19,000 in their first role. Pay is definitely not a deciding factor for graduates wanting to take a career in CG: only 12% of students selected salary as a reason for entering the industry, compared with 89% who believed that the simple act of getting paid for doing something they loved was more important. Working with other creative individuals and being challenged at work emerged as the other main reasons that graduates chose to enter the world of CG.

Career fulfilment is important for both students and professionals alike. 44% of professionals are proud of the work they do, with creativity (77%) and learning new skills (65%) cited as the main attractions of the job. Despite job security being a concern amongst many professionals, the survey revealed that 55% still plan to be working in CG in twelve months time.

Dominic Davenport, CEO of Escape Studios, said “The computer graphics industry appears to be bucking the trend seen in many industries, where graduate recruitment has all but dried up. This can have a huge impact on the future success of those industries, which is why it’s so encouraging seeing new CG graduates bear realistic expectations of what it’s like to work in this field, and still want to pursue training and employment opportunities. Graduates are clued up when it comes to working hours and salaries as they place greater importance around career fulfilment. CG is one area where the UK really does lead the world and a constant flow of new talent will ensure this continues to be the case.”

Stephen Venning, 3D Executive Producer at The Mill, said “It’s clear that our industry benefits hugely from a pool of graduates who are hard working and extremely dedicated to their jobs. Their main motivation is not money; it’s more about doing something they love and working in a creative industry. Not every sector is privileged enough to enjoy this level of commitment and drive from new entrants into the industry – it is important that we as employers tap into this enthusiasm so the UK’s CG industry retains its creative edge globally.”

The CG industry includes everything from the creation of 3D computer graphics to special effects featured in television and films. Last year, Escape Studios, Europe’s leading school of computer graphics, successfully placed the vast majority of its VFX graduates in jobs within the film and broadcast industries, highlighting the wealth of employment opportunities open to job seekers.

The Escape Studios CG Survey questioned over 2,850 professionals, hobbyists, students and academics in October and November 2009.

About Escape Studios

Escape is one of the most successful and well-respected CG academies in the world. We’re the proving ground for a new generation of computer graphics stars breaking into film, TV, games and commercials. We’re a vibrant community of professional artists. We’re a unique outsourcing resource for leading CG studios. We’re a specialist creative recruitment agency for entertainment, advertising, architecture and manufacturing businesses. We’re an authority on all things CG, offering informed opinions on cutting-edge creative, commercial and political issues. We’re host of the acclaimed CG awards. We’re a specialist IT consultancy and technology store. We are all of these things. We are CG. We are Escape Studios.

For further information, please visit www.escapestudios.com

About The Mill

The Mill is a world-leading visual effects company with offices in three of the most important global advertising centres; London, New York and Los Angeles. For over 19 years The Mill has been providing pioneering effects solutions to the advertising, music and film industries. We craft commercials, music videos and generate compelling film and TV. We create characters and the worlds they inhabit, photo-real CG so convincing that you won’t be able to tell its animation. We build installations, projections, applications and create multi-media content and experiences. We have a global team of 400 plus made up of multi-national and home grown talent, and these passionate producers, artists and technicians use cutting edge technology to solve creative problems by delivering inspiring and award winning content to small and large screens around the world.
In addition to VFX, The Mill also provides solutions and concepts at the ideas and execution level. Our clients work collaboratively with our in-house directors, concept artists, animators and creative directors to define, direct and execute content for use across media.

For further information, please visit www.the-mill.com

We’re pleased to publish this first part interview with Andrew Orloff, Zoic Studios Creative Director and VFX Supervisor. We’re particularly excited to learn more about the work by Zoic on the hit television shows V (2009) and Flash Forward. In this first part interview, we focus on V.

Click to read the interview and learn more about the VFX in ‘V’

Hope it’s the right place for this post ….

"The initial branding concept was the idea of a box unfolding," says RIOT Atlanta’s Creative Director Jeff Doud. "We took that concept and turned it into a 3-dimensional theme. We brought the idea of social connectivity and the sense of community that Halogen is trying to build to the existing graphic elements.”

Lead animator Deron Hoffmeyer used Adobe Cinema 4D and After Effects packages to build out a 3D version of the connecting boxes and combine carefully selected images of people from a cross-section of ethnicities to demonstrate Halogen’s worldwide reach and the types of socially-conscious, community-oriented projects the network intends to highlight in its programming. All the material was file-based and delivered to the South Carolina-based client via ftp.

The rules of branding for the 18-34 demographic that Halogen is most interested in have changed drastically in recent years, Doud explains, because most viewers are surfing the net as they watch TV. "Traditionally, when somebody promotes a show," he says, "it starts with a promo and then at the end it has the call to action: ‘Tune in tonight at 9PM.’ We think of those things as roadblocks to the continuous streaming of content that this generation expects. They can basically bounce around and surf all media all the time, so why should TV be different? We don’t put anything up there that would interrupt the flow of the picture and the content itself so promos and bumpers always appear as lower-third devices on top of clips from shows.

"We realize that the traditional kind of promo where you stop the flow of content to give people information just won’t work with this generation," Doud concludes. "And we kept that in mind at every stage of building Halogen’s on-air branding."

We are looking for input in this relatively new field of voxel modeling, so please download and test your imagination with voxels!

http://www.voxelogic.comWelcome to the Voxelogic

A procedural modeler, Acropora combines volumetric modifiers with multi-octave 3D noise sampling to generate detailed surfaces in far less time than conventional surface modeling software. Acropora adopts a less deterministic approach to generating complex, organic shapes by applying sequences of modifiers on large voxelized meshes. The effect is to create an endless, seamless expanse of surface that undulates and changes in a natural way. The resulting meshes can contain caves, ridges, overhangs and other natural features that are not possible with height maps.

Just some of the features available:
•A variety of base shapes including sphere, plane, cylinder, torus and others.
•Compound shapes (heightmaps, pillars, caves, weaves)
•Terrain generation
•Caves and overhang controls
•Voxelisation of user imported models (.3DS, .FBX, COLLADA, .OBJ)
•Mesh export to .3DS, .FBX, COLLADA, .OBJ
•User-specified volume block and voxel dimensions.
•Over 50+ volume modifiers
•Automatic generation of up to 15 octaves of noise (volumetric, Perlin, fractal)
•Extensive voxel and noise editing tools
•Batch processing
•Multiple LOD support
•Seamless joining of adjacent meshes
•Mesh decimation, smoothing and tesselation.
•Mesh filtering and vertex blending tools
•Ambient occlusion
•Multithreaded CPU support and GPU acceleration (on supported cards)