Airbag Productions, in Melbourne used Frankie for both interactive and independent reviews during the creation of a commercial for Vauxhall Insignia, which features creative CG images of metallic birds, bulls and dolphins that morph into each other and the car.
Continuing its expansion mode, Filmworkers has formed a new in-house creative unit, Churchill’s Studio, focused on visual effects and animation. Headed by visual effects director Rob Churchill, the new unit will provide services ranging from compositing and visual effects to full CG production.
Dragon Ball Z: Battle of Gods, the first Dragon Ball feature film in more than seventeen years, will play in movie theatres in August.
The Foundry is launching the first Foundry Sessions with a live transmission from its London headquarters on Thursday June 19 at 7pm British Summer Time. People who can’t participate in the live event will be able to access a recording on The Foundry’s website afterwards. The Session will be a one hour digital broadcast including live Q&A via #TFsessions enabling participants anywhere to interact with guest speakers and specialists from @TheFoundryTeam.
Cinedigm has acquired all North American rights to the animated feature film Bunyan and Babe: A Giant Adventure featuring the voice talent of John Goodman, Kelsey Grammer and Jeff Foxworthy.
Visualization house Proof provided extensive pre vis and post vis services to the new Marvel Entertainment motion picture Captain America: The Winter Soldier. Proof’s creative director/founder Ron Frankel made the announcement. The film was released by Walt Disney Studios last month and shows the benefits of using pre and post vis on a major effects-heavy film.
The Foundry has announced that DreamWorks Animation has adopted the FLIX software solution for use in the pre-production of animated features.
The Chaos Group has announced V-Ray 3.0 for Maya. Included in the initial round of enhancements will be a new Progressive Rendering Engine, support for several open source technologies, and up to 5x faster ray tracing and rendering performance.
Thinkbox Software has acquired code to bring its particle renderer, Krakatoa, into Maxon’s Cinema 4D modeling and animation software. Initial efforts to link the plug-in with Cinema 4D were led by Ugly Kids artist Daniel Hennies, who collaborated with a developer to program a bridge to the stand-alone version of Krakatoa. Leveraging the C++ API of Krakatoa SR, Hennies and a small team were able to fully integrate the particle renderer with Cinema 4D and first demoed the technology at SIGGRAPH 2013.
Thinkbox Software has released XMesh MY, a geometry caching plug-in for Autodesk Maya. Designed to streamline animation and visual effects production pipelines, XMesh is a set of tools for saving animated scene geometry in a condensed format that yields smaller files for faster loading, manipulation and sharing across facilities and applications. Also compatible with Autodesk 3ds Max, the robust and scalable multi-threaded solution allows artists to quickly open, share or receive computer generated assets from internal studio departments or external facilities.
