Storm FX Blog

VFX, animation and design studio Iloura showcased their creative talents for the film Ted directed by Family Guy-creator, Seth MacFarlane, using the full capabilities of Vray to bring the comically crude teddy bear to life.

Storm FX client, Iloura are highly regarded for their character animation work. Having worked on films such as Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance, Don't Be Afraid of the Dark and Charlotte's Web, the studio also produces outstanding results in matte painting, compositing, FX animation and motion design for the film, television and advertising industries.

For the film Ted, Iloura required a physically accurate renderer to capture lighting measurements (HDRI) to recreate the same lighting environment in 3D. This was crucial in helping light Ted convincingly. Vray not only met all these requirements, it also proved to be flexible, fast and easy to use.

Glenn Melenhorst, Visual Effects Supervisor at Iloura says, "We have new lighters arriving all the time and the common sense workflow in Vray yields good results from the get go as well as providing a not too steep learning curve for people new to the software."

V-Ray is the core development product of Chaos Group, which allows users to quickly and easily create realistic images while giving them full control over the 3D production process.

VRay and VRay RT were used in the movie Ted to create initial lighting setups quickly and easily, and also used to generate baked indirect lighting and GI that matched what was shot.

"In Vray, lighting and materials are easy to set up and it has become our go-to tool for our lighting pipe. " says Glenn.

"Being able to create separated render elements out of Vray means a lot of the image can be easily tweaked in compositing without having to re-render."

On a shot by shot basis, quality vs speed is very easy to adjust so render times can be controlled while keeping quality high.

For more on how Vray was essnetial for brining Ted to life check the video below.

Unity 4 Pro is now released with new Features and a new level of rendering power together with new tools to fine-tune your animations, new graphics, special effects and performance optimizations—all unleashed with the same ease, speed and control you love.

All new animation

Create awesome animation for any character or object with the new Mecanim animation system. Retarget animations to reduce production time and increase performance; set up state machines and blend trees for total creative control, and polish every detail of your animations with Pro-only IK rigs.

DirectX® 11 rendering

More beauty and great performance for your games. Unity 4 includes support for Windows DirectX 11 graphics API, to bring higher visual fidelity and faster rendering times to your professional PC games.

Updated Image Effects

Depth Of Field and Motion blur are optimized for DirectX 11, and key improvements made for Edge Detection, Bloom, Vignetting, Tonemapping, and Color correction using 3D texture lookups.

More for mobile games

Add more realism to your mobile games by casting Pro-only hard dynamic shadows from directional lights. And use dynamic fonts to efficiently render any character set at any resolution.

A fine-tuned Shuriken Particle System

Unity’s curve and gradient-driven modular particle system tool has been ramped up so you can create awesome explosions, collisions, weather storms and more on a tight performance budget. World collision functionality, Bent normals, automatic culling and external forces keep performance smooth while increasing the visual fidelity and dynamism of your particle systems.

More detail and control with your lightmapped scenes

Unity’s iterative lightmap baking gives you complete control of your lightmapping workflow. And now, you can easily add more detail and nuance to your lightmapped scenes with Pro-only lightmapping of normalmaps, and keep performance smooth with lower memory requirements for baking.

Refined profiling for mobile

Unity 4’s Pro-only Profiler now reports on GPU usage for games running on Android devices with Tegra chipsets. Turn on the Profiler while in play mode, and quickly pinpoint those performance-heavy areas in your game that will have the biggest impact on performance.

Multiplatform - New publishing platforms

Bring your game to two new global platforms. The new Unity add-on for Adobe Flash Player ports your game to a platform installed on over a billion PCs. Or create an awesome desktop game for the growing legions of Linux players, who are hungry and ready to pay for great content.

And many more new features including:

• Render efficiently any character set at any resolution with cross-platform dynamic fonts
• Configure a default cursor and change cursors on demand with new Hardware cursor API
• Quickly add components to objects with Add Component button
• Fast asset search and management with a new project browser
• Script access to the output from a skinned mesh renderer to cheaply render multiple instances of a mesh in the same pose

Make the move to the latest release of Autodesk commercial software before October 17, 2012 to benefit from a wide range of new features and enhancements, and save up to 15%.

Price changes are coming.

Upgrade now to help protect your software investment, and help maximize your return with the many benefits offered through Autodesk® Subscription and Autodesk® 360 cloud based services. Autodesk currently anticipates changes to its upgrade options next year, so take advantage of existing upgrade pricing and paths today to move to the current release – and you could additionally save up to 15% on selected upgrades when you act before October 17, 2012.

MTI Film has added Storm FX Distributions Pty Ltd, a Sydney, Australia-based distributer of design, modelling and finishing solutions, to its international network of value-added resellers. Storm FX will represent MTI Film's full product line, including its newly-introduced Cortex family of products, throughout Australia and New Zealand.

"We are very pleased to announce our new relationship with Storm FX," said MTI Film Director of International Business Development Belinda Merritt. "Storm FX is very highly regarded in the Australian film and television industry and has an excellent track record for introducing new technologies. They also share our commitment to customer service and support. They are an excellent representative and advocate for our products."

MTI Film debuted Cortex at NAB 2012 to great acclaim. The family of products is designed to address the migration of files from digital capture of production elements to editorial and post bringing coherence and portability to the process of managing digital assets from the set to the screen.

MTI Film currently offers three Cortex products, Cortex::Capture serves as a viewer that can playback camera files for any production, you can set your looks, add LUTs and preview what your material will look like when your post is done. Cortex::Convey, is a transcoding application for both on set and in the editorial room after assemblies are completed daily, and Cortex::ControlDailies the fully featured application that in addition to all the above, allows you to sync audio to picture, apply color, add metadata, and create all the deliverables you need for dailies.

The three Cortex products allow users to manage media from most popular cinema cameras, including those made by ARRI, Sony, RED, Canon and Panasonic. They support RAW, R3D, native DNx and ProRes recording , other high resolution imagery, as well as the latest color management workflows, and will include ACES support in the first release. Cortex also features an intuitive user interface that allows it to be operated with a minimum of technical expertise. Templates permit users to quickly encode formats required for editing and review.

About Storm FX

Storm FX are leaders in providing design, modelling and finishing solutions, including software, hardware and technical services, to the DCC and DEC markets. With an aim to help clients push the boundaries of creative possibilities, Storm FX's holistic approach means they can develop the right cost effective solution for clients, no matter where they are in the production pipeline.

For further information, please contact us online or call us on 1300 061 007

About MTI Film LLC

Since 1997 MTI Film has provided award winning software applications to the post-production industry with a focus on technology for digital film restoration and digital dailies. With strong ties to our customers and an in-house services arm providing real-world, real-time development experience, MTI Film offers the most advanced, efficient and user-friendly applications on the market. MTI Film products include Correct DRS™, Control Dailies and Convey, and introducing the Cortex family - a simple, powerful and coherent digital workflow solution from pre-production through post-production.

For more information visit http://www.mtifilm.com

Introducing Substance Designer 3

Substance Designer 3 includes new, dedicated and empowering features and tools such as a major batching system, letting you batch process numerous meshes and textures at the same time, or a powerful paint system freeing most of the artists' needs when it comes to basic image editing. All this in a non linear environment, making Substance Designer 3 the true only tool dedicated to texturing for game developers.

Main features for 3.0 are:

• Bitmap painting tools
• Batching tools
• 4K working environment
• New filter library

Multi Output

Today's textures are no longer one single image; the Substance description files are multi-output by definition, and can define and embed diffuse, specular, normal, height, AO, and as many maps as desired.

Real-time 3D Preview

See what the final material will look like, directly applied onto the mesh you are texturing, with the shader of your choice.

Compatible

Substance Designer seamlessly works with the real production pipelines: The Substance description files can be read by default in compatible game engines like Unity and DCC tools like 3ds Max and Maya.

Mesh extracted info

you are texturing a mesh, not a blank, square image: Substance Designer lets you extract automatically useful info from the mesh, like vector graphics UV Atlas, Ambient Occlusion, Curvature, World Space Normal and Position maps, that can be used to drive the texturing process.

Node-based Editor

The sine qua non method for rapid iterations, Substance Designer 3 is entirely non linear and non destructive ; rediscover the power of modern tools.

Batch Processing

Substance Designer is a parametric tool at its core, meaning you can replicate your most common operations and spend more time polishing your art ; this batch / scripting capabilities are truly unique in the industry.

Bitmap + Vector + Procedural

Use what is needed, whatever the situation and your preference, Substance Designer can handle it: the latest bitmap painting system completes the trio and will make you save hundreds of hours, just by not having to constantly go back and forth between different applications.

Texturing Painkillers

Substance Designer 3 comes with hundreds of predefined substances and filters to help you get there faster and with less pain.

Filter Design

Create your own tools and filters, never do twice the same task and save hundreds of ours by enhancing Substance Designer with your optimized, smart content and production tips and tricks.

Tweaking

Parameterize your textures easily and tweak them while in 3ds Max, Maya or Unity ; or even at run time!

For more information on this great deal contact us on the web or call us on 1300 061 007

Join David Zwierzchaczewski, ANZ Media & Entertainment Technical Specialist, for a live webinar and discover the new features in Autodesk Maya 2013 and some great workflow features to help you streamline your animations.

In 60-minutes, he will walk you through some tips and tricks surrounding animation retargeting, layers preferences and other Maya User Interface features you may not have stumbled across. No matter how long you've used Maya, you'll pick up a new trick or two from this webcast. You'll also get a close look at some of the latest workflows in this release and how they can help streamline your animation.

Register Here

Autodesk have launced a new series of Meet the Experts Webinars. The next four fridays hold an amazing opportunity to hear about how Autodesk Products are used by the experts to create top notch work.

On July 13 have your chance to see Stuart Holloway, Marc-Andre Ferguson and Ken LaRue give an experts view on the all new Smoke 2013. July 20th will have Saddington Baynes discussing how Maya was a critical element in his iconic ad campaigns. On July 27th Roland Reyer and Daniel Von Braun will explain the use of Maya in creating his short film Strangel. Lastly on the 3rd of August Daniel Tegeland and Jamie Gwilliam will explain their use of 3ds Max in Haymaker FX's Volvo commercial.

Each of these talks will be followed by a live discussion where you will be able to ask any questions you may have.

Storm FX is very excited to be sponsering these amazing talks. Click the image below to register for any of the talks on the Autodesk website.