BREAKING NEWS
LATEST POSTS
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NVIDIA GauGAN360 – AI driven latlong HDRI creation tool
https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2022/08/09/neural-graphics-sdk-metaverse-content/
Unfortunately, png output only at the moment:
http://imaginaire.cc/gaugan360/
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Peter Timberlake – free high quality practice material for compositors
https://www.petertimberlake.com/practicematerial
“…a bunch of high quality practice material for compositors looking to build their reels. Contains all plates, roto, CG elements, matte paintings, and everything required to start compositing.”
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Amazon’s ‘The Lord of the Rings’ to Cost $465M for Just One Season
“The Hollywood Reporter has confirmed that Amazon will spend roughly NZ$650 million — $465 million in U.S. dollars — for just the first season of the show.”
“Amazon’s spending will trigger a tax rebate of NZ$160 million ($114 million U.S). This is somewhat controversial in New Zealand as the government could end up on the hook for hundreds of millions of dollars to help subsidize Amazon’s elves-and-hobbits drama series. Stuff reported that the country’s treasury has labeled the show a “significant fiscal risk” given there is no capped upside to how much Amazon — and therefore the government — might spend. ”
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Academy Software Foundation Siggraph 2022 – New Developments in MaterialX and OSL
https://www.materialx.org/assets/ASWF_OSD2022_MaterialX_OSL_Final.pdf
Local copy:
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StableDiffusion text-to-image applied to videos
#stablediffusion text-to-image checkpoints are now available for research purposes upon request at https://t.co/7SFUVKoUdl
Working on a more permissive release & inpainting checkpoints.
Soon™ coming to @runwayml for text-to-video-editing pic.twitter.com/7XVKydxTeD
— Patrick Esser (@pess_r) August 11, 2022
stablediffusion text-to-image checkpoints are now available for research purposes upon request at https://github.com/CompVis/stable-diffusion
https://github.com/CompVis/stable-diffusion
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Amazon makes AWS Thinkbox software available free
http://www.cgchannel.com/2022/08/amazon-makes-all-aws-thinkbox-software-available-free/
Amazon Web Services (AWS) has made its AWS Thinkbox software products – Deadline, Draft, Krakatoa, Frost, XMesh, Sequoia and Stoke – available for free.
Anyone with a free AWS account can download the software, with 50,000 one-year licences available for each. Users of Deadline and Krakatoa can also obtain Usage-Based Licensing (UBL) render time for free.
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‘Bullying is a problem’: visual effects artists speak out against Marvel
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2022/aug/03/marvel-disney-visual-effects-artists-speak-out
“The visual effects industry is filled with terrific people with lots of goodwill who really care but, at the end of the day, there’s nothing in place when their backs are up against the wall and Disney is making crazy demands,”
https://www.thegamer.com/marvel-mcu-vfx-artists-deadlines-crunch-stress/
“VFX artists are speaking out against Marvel, with many refusing to ever work with the entertainment giant again. This comes as artists share accounts of unworkable deadlines and immense pressure leading to stress and unsatisfactory final products. Many have requested to never be put on a Marvel project again, saying that the studio has the “worst VFX management out there”.
https://variety.com/2022/tv/news/she-hulk-cgi-marvel-vfx-artists-1235332644
“Maslany, Gao and Coiro had been asked by a journalist about their experiences with the “She-Hulk” VFX artists and “how you feel about the finished product,” noting that “there have been numerous accounts lately that VFX houses … they are feeling incredibly crushed by the studios in general and Marvel keeps getting called out.”
https://www.slashfilm.com/941931/why-so-many-vfx-artists-are-fed-up-with-marvel/
“The studio has a lot of power over the effects houses, just because it has so many blockbuster movies coming out one after the other. If you upset Marvel in any way, there’s a very high chance you’re not going to get those projects in the future. So the effects houses are trying to bend over backward to keep Marvel happy. […] One visual-effects house could not finish the number of shots and reshoots Marvel was asking for in time, so Marvel had to give my studio the work. Ever since, that house has effectively been blacklisted from getting Marvel work.”
https://gizmodo.com/disney-marvel-movies-vfx-industry-nightmare-1849385834
“There’s a joke in the visual effects industry that goes like this: Someone hears you work on films, so they ask you, “What movie made you cry?” The artist will respond, “In theaters or in the office?””
FEATURED POSTS
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Composition – These are the basic lighting techniques you need to know for photography and film
http://www.diyphotography.net/basic-lighting-techniques-need-know-photography-film/
Amongst the basic techniques, there’s…
1- Side lighting – Literally how it sounds, lighting a subject from the side when they’re faced toward you
2- Rembrandt lighting – Here the light is at around 45 degrees over from the front of the subject, raised and pointing down at 45 degrees
3- Back lighting – Again, how it sounds, lighting a subject from behind. This can help to add drama with silouettes
4- Rim lighting – This produces a light glowing outline around your subject
5- Key light – The main light source, and it’s not necessarily always the brightest light source
6- Fill light – This is used to fill in the shadows and provide detail that would otherwise be blackness
7- Cross lighting – Using two lights placed opposite from each other to light two subjects
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Luma AI releases Ray3 – 16bit HDR, reasoning video model
This is Ray3. The world’s first reasoning video model, and the first to generate studio-grade HDR. Now with an all-new Draft Mode for rapid iteration in creative workflows, and state of the art physics and consistency. Available now for free in Dream Machine.
Ray3’s native HDR delivers studio-grade fidelity. It generates video in 10, 12 & 16-bit high dynamic range with details in shadows and highlights in vivid color. Convert SDR to HDR, export EXR for seamless integration and unprecedented control in post-production workflows.
Reasoning enables Ray3 to understand nuanced directions, think in visuals and language tokens, and judge its generations to give you reliably better results. With Ray3 you can create more complex scenes, intricate multi-step motion, and do it all faster.
With reasoning, Ray3 can interpret visual annotations enabling creatives to now draw or scribble on images to direct performance, blocking, and camera movement. Refine motion, objects, and composition for precise visual control, all without prompting.
Draft Mode is a new way to iterate video ideas, fast. Explore ideas in a state of flow and get to your perfect shot. With Ray3’s new Hi-Fi diffusion pass, master your best shots into production-ready high-fidelity 4K HDR footage. 5x faster. 5x cheaper. 100x more fun.
Ray3 offers production-ready fidelity, high octane motion, preserved anatomy, physics simulations, world exploration, complex crowds, interactive lighting, caustics, motion blur, photorealism, and detail nuance, delivering visuals ready for high-end creative production pipelines.Ray3 is an intelligent video model designed to tell stories. Ray3 is capable of thinking and reasoning in visuals and offers state of the art physics and consistency. In a world’s first, Ray3 generates videos in 16bit High Dynamic Range color bringing generative video to pro studio pipelines.The all-new Draft Mode enables you to explore many more ideas, much faster and tell better stories than ever before.
