Archive for August, 2008

Oxford Distance Learning. Otherwise known as Oxford College.

Yup. A short, sweet (? – Paul doesn’t know much about “sweet”!! eesb.), and pretty much to the point tv commercial brought to EESB for creation, by Koala TV.

The brief was to create a friendly, simplistic line animation to match the voice over – with a few added criteria to meet…. such as the flower in a vase and the dog; within a fairly tight budget and timeframe.

An enjoyable and swift project to work on – and even if I do say so myself; a very pleasant outcome.

More soon, keep well all.

The community that surrounds and supports Newtek, the makers of our main 3D package [LightWave] here at EESB, have come up with a nifty activity over the previous weeks….. Speed Modelling.

Each week, a subject will be chosen, and a finite time limit set [60 mins / 90 mins... etc] for the creation of a model to fit the brief. Interpretation of the subject is down to the user, as is honesty of modelling time taken for the result.

Time for materials, textures, set-up and render [the whole 'beautification' thing] is not included in the time limit.

We thought it would be a good idea to enter these mini-challenges where workload and time permit, so as we get the chance to create something for any of these tasks, we’ll post them here.

This time round, the subject matter was “kitchen / cooking aids”.

Taking inspiration from the surroundings in which our Paul spends a *ahem* – ‘not insignificant’ amount of his life [the Sea Bass Studio... ], he decided to re-create two of the Sea Bass’ favourite stainless steel culinary helpers.
One cup / mug tree, and one fruit bowl.

All of the geometry you see in this scene was – in keeping with the challenge rules – created within a one hour time limit. I recall Paul listening to some rolling drum & bass to help keep the required pace!

Here you can sample the wireframe of the scene. Due to the time limit involved, those amongst you with knowledge of, or an eye for 3D will notice that the geometry may not be the most ‘topologically efficient’ [oh so far from it, if I'm brutal! ~ Paul], but it does mean that recognisable shapes get created quickly.

For the CG geeks among you, you may like to know that this scene was lit using two area lights, one HDR image, and a cloned set of luminous polygons. Raytraced shadows, raytraced reflections and raytraced occlusion were all on, with a ray recursion limit of 8 in place. The image was rendered using Monte Carlo radiosity.

More soon,
keep well all.

Producers! Listen up Y’all…!

You may be interested to know that we gave our HD editing system a little update. This tweak means the workstation has now been extended to be capable of real-time HD editing of the new Sony XDCAM HD422 .mxf and Sony XDCAM EX .mp4 clips. Excellent news, as you hopefully already know that filming with these formats gives you much better colour fidelity than regular XDCAM HD and its SD brethren.

So, this means our real-time HD editing workstation can now handle the following formats natively:

Standard definition (SD) resolutions and frame rates

• 486i at 29.97 (NTSC)
• 576i at 25 fps (PAL)
• 486p at 23.98, 29.97 fps
• 576p at 25 fps

SD codecs

• DV
• DVCAM
• DVCPRO
• DVCPRO50
• IMX (MXF only)
• MPEG-2 I-frame
• Uncompressed 8-bit
• Uncompressed 10-bit
• M-JPEG playback
• XDCAM

The MPEG-2 I-frame SD and uncompressed SD codecs are also available as 32-bit AVI with alpha.

High definition (HD) resolutions and frame rates

• 1080i at 25, 29.97 fps
• 1080p at 23.98, 24, 25 fps
• 720p at 23.98, 25, 29.97, 50, 59.94 fps
• HDV 1080i (1440 x 1080) at 25, 29.97 fps

HD codecs

• MPEG-2 I-frame HD codec – online quality
• Uncompressed 8-bit
• Uncompressed 10-bit
• HDV
• DVCPRO HD
• MPEG HD (MXF only)
• XDCAM HD, XDCAM HD422 .mxf, Sony XDCAM EX

The MPEG-2 I-frame HD and uncompressed HD codecs are also available as 32-bit AVI with alpha.

So, that’s nice.

Now, as was discussed a couple of posts below, our man Dominic entered a competition, with some last minute animation help from colleague Paul.

At around midnight on Tuesday night, Dominic received communication from the hosts of the competition… and somewhat crazily, he had WON!

So, as a result, his work (along with other competition entries) is being shown at Siggraph, and have also been put together in a showreel of the software too. Oh, and there’s some ace prizes that will be received as well.

Take a look at both the competition results announcement and also now the homepage of the software which currently also shows part of the animation in the video banner.

All very exciting. Well done to Dom and much credit to Paul for his help too. Who would have thought a small company called Eight Eyed Sea Bass, in the heart of Birmingham (cue Londoners querying “where?”) would have some animation shown at such a major event!

Awesome.

Until next time….

Well, last night was the Ads on Walls event – organised again by one David Luke Allen of The Animation Forum West Midlands (try saying that with a mouth full of buttered crumpet…)

Hello All!

Just wanted to make a quick post to show a 3D animation we’ve done – just for the love of it…

We found at the end of June, an announcement of a competition being run by the makers of some of the 3D software we use. I had an internal calling to enter, though this was new territory for me, because I’ve never entered such a competition before in my life, and because I personally have only been using our 3D software seriously (studying it on evenings and weekends) since around March.

So with some slight nervousness, I cracked on in earnest, really enjoying solving any issues that arose, and generally learning stuff.

I had a nice little storyline to cover the 15 second brief. However, in the end the first two parts had to be put on hold so that we could complete the third and final section of the animation.

I say ‘we’ because my good colleague Paul was on hand to give me input on modelling, and to massively help with the character animation when the deadline was nigh. Nice one, Duder.

Anyway, I got the finished sequences rendered out in high definition and in a high dynamic range format to give me most control with the post-production work – including some very film-like transitions which are so lovely they really make transitions in video look so dull.

Needless to say, I got the entry in to the competition with around half an hour to spare in the end. Winners are announced at this year’s SIGGRAPH in L.A. I don’t expect to have won anything, but I just feel really pleased that I rose to the challenge after such a relatively short time of using the 3D tools – to complete my own first project.

That said, we do intend to continue working on this and get the full story version finished in the near future. So look out for that too sometime!

Keep well everyone,
Dom