Friday, July 10, 2009
I’ve met tons of people - online and in-person - since getting into machinima and 3D moviemaking, and while they’ve almost all be simply fantastic people, very helpful, supportive and patient, they have mainly been guys. 
While I do love the fellas, I’m pretty excited that Angela Guenette, a fellow Canadian and a fellow ‘girl’, as been selected to do modeling, rigging, and animation for Durian, the new Blender open source movie project.
I’ve got a few audio and video interviews in the pike that I must get to, but I’m going to try and track down Angela before she leaves for Amsterdam, and get one with her too.
In the mean time, here’s her KICKASS demo reel:
With almost 150 entries, the competition for a place on the new Blender movie project was fierce, but the selection for the Durian team is now complete.
Angela Guenette of Canada (modeling, rigging, animation), Ben Dansie of Australia (3D generalist), Nathan Vegdahl of the USA (rigging, animation), Lee Salvemini of Australia (animation), Soenke Maeter of Germany (shading, light, compositing) join previously-discussed creatives and returning technical support staff, Brecht van Lommel and Campbell Barton.
Jan Morgenstern of Wavemage - a premium sponsor (10,000+ euro) - will be doing the music, sfx, sound edit and mix. Blender has also announced that DivX Inc. will be a major sponsor (2500+ euro). The DVD fund-raising pre-sale will start fairly soon, in a week or two.
The 3D animated film project is also still looking for: voice actors with “actors with international star quality” (attention Ricky, Phil & Sisch!)
concept art by David Revoy
Issue Description: Halloween is traditionally the time for spooky, scary fun, but ‘Things that go bump in the night’ happen all year round. So let’s have some fun with and explore things that give us those delightful creepy shivers.
Issue Content:
- Tutorial – Tracks Creator
- Tutorial – Fun with Texture Nodes (Here is the missing link for this tutorial)
- Tutorial – Water Tank
- Making – Arkor
- Making – Cute Clown
- Making – Cave Troll
- KnowHow – Great Educational Resource
- And Lot More…
Read online, download (PDF), download issue + files (torrent), other download options/mirrors, back issues (scroll as needed).
Blenderart magazine is a bi-monthly magazine released freely as a PDF document from blenderart.org. It is a community based effort and is released under Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 2.5 license.
Issue Description: Blender provides numerous tools and techniques for creating cool and unusual projects. So in this issue we take a look at how Blender artists make creative use of those tools to do things you just might not have thought of.
Issue Content:
- Articles/Tutorials on Using Blender to Animate Your Family Photos
- Editing a Music Video in Blender
- Product Visualization
- MAKING OF: Game Art for Project Aftershock
- MAKING OF: Cricket and Friends See a Comet!
- MAKING OF: Modeling and Rigging a Mechanical Model
- MAKING OF: Making of the Sun
- MAKING OF: Building Online Generators with Blender
- Mystery of The BLEND
- And Lot More…
Read online, download (PDF), download issue + files (torrent), other download options/mirrors, back issues (scroll as needed).
Blenderart magazine is a bi-monthly magazine released freely as a PDF document from blenderart.org. It is a community based effort and is released under Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 2.5 license.
Dead Rising 2 level design director Josh Bridge has reviewed a lot of student design reels, and after noticing a lot of the same problems in them, he’s now written an article called A Guide For Aspiring Level Designers to help aspiring level designers improve their portfolios before they show them off to educators and employers, or put them online for anyone to see.
At the recent GDC Canada I had the opportunity talk with lots of soon to be level design grads eager to get advice on getting into the industry. It was great to have the chance to chat with them, as I have been reviewing student reels and portfolios for some time now.
Each year student work continues to impress me. The tools and schooling available today helping students to demonstrate their potential eclipses what I ever had at my disposal when I was getting started in the industry.
Though even with all of these great building blocks, all is not rosy in the land of demo reels and portfolio work. Since I have had many a demo go by my desk for consideration, I thought that it would make sense to share some common pitfalls along with some advice.
About Dead Rising 2:
Dead Rising 2 is an upcoming video game described as a survival horror with action adventure and RPG elements. The game is the sequel to the 2006 video game, Dead Rising. It will be developed by Blue Castle Games and distributed by former developer Capcom.
The game is set a few years after the events of the original Dead Rising. The zombie virus that originated in Santa Cabeza has spread all over the United States. The game will take place in the fictional city of Fortune City, which is modeled after the real city of Reno, Nevada. The new protagonist and player character, Chuck Greene, is a former national motocross champion who is caught in the zombie attack on Fortune City.
The game will be released sometime in 2010 for the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and Microsoft Windows platforms. (source: Wikipedia)
