Visual Artist

There are only two things that can make any motion graphic artist flinch and that's rotoscoping and chroma keying. Why? Mainly because both processes are time consuming and arm numbing. However despite all these, rotoscoping and chroma keying still remains to be very important in the industry we move in. Which is why, lately, software companies are launching new products that aim to lessen the pain in rotoscoping.

Here we will talk about the Top 5 best rotoscoping softwares currently available that deliver accurate and fast mattes.

1. Silhouette FX

Silhouette Roto is a matte power house since its designed only for the matte creation process and uses spline-based tools to cut mattes. Essentially, it's a standalone "rotospline" tool that can work on its own or as a plug-in to other applications such as Adobe After Effects and Apple Final Cut Pro. The standalone app, which is also available for Linux, can load a wide range of file formats, including Cineon and OpenEXR, then export bitmap mattes or splines to other applications including Adobe After Effects, Apple Shake, and Discreet fire, flame, flint, inferno, and smoke. Mattes are automatically applied to the layer in the host app after rotoscoping.

Silhouette Roto gives you the ability to work with an unlimited number of both Bezier splines and b-splines. This rotoscoping tool provides a nice layering palette added with several fantastic tools that lets you create and edit your splines, which definitely lessens the pain rotoscoping. Silhouette Roto also allows you to add feathering anywhere, not just from preexisting control points. It also provides an automatic, accurate motion blur based on the speed and direction the spline moves.

Silhouette Roto is really a “lean mean roto machine”, as described by Silhouette FX LLC in their first press release. I love the rotoscoping tools it offers and its interactivity. Although, I would have to give Silhouette an 8. Why not 10? This matte powerhouse lacks Mocha's plannar tracker. If Silhouette can integrate this feature into its system then this power roto tool would definitely be a 10.

2. Imagineer's Mocha

Mocha is a software dedicated for rotoscoping which uses a planar tracker to help position, rotate, scale, shear and perspective-shift roto-splines. It has several spline tools available, all designed to make rotoscoping a faster and easier task.

Mocha has full spline controls to manipulate the created masks. The tracking date are used to create the tween frames, which helps in minimizing the too many keyframes in the animation however mocha doesn't have the ability to copy the keyframes which proves to be one of its limitation. When the roto is finished you can export the masks and shapes to other compositing programs such as Inferno, Flame, Flint, Smoke, Combustion, Avid DS, Quantel generationQ, After Effects, Shake and Fusion.

Although the software has some few bugs such as its unstability and it crashes most of the time, I would still give mocha a 7, with 10 being the perfect score. Since this software is an infant compared to Silhouette, I do believe that the coming versions are promising.

3. Adobe After Effects CS3

AE has been known to be the industry standard in the motion graphics realm. AE CS3 promises to deliver the needed speed, precision and powerful tools to aid you in producing innovative motion graphics and VFX for film.

AE is primarily known for its friendly VFX arsenal. The new AE is packed with several rotoscoping tools that has significantly made rotoscoping easier. You can use RotoBeizer to simplify repetitve tasks through the reduction of control points. AE also has the ability to import photoshop and illustrator paths as masks. You can also turn channels, including alpha channels into vector-based masks wherein you can quickly create animated mask. The smart interpolation roto feature lets you replicate natural motion by taking control of mask transitions. The only limitation of AE is its inability to view mattes directly unlike in Mocha and Silhouette which is why I am giving it an 8.

4. Autodesk's Combustion

For serious VFX designers Combustion is a great tool for your arsenal. Combustion is jam-packed with powerful creative tools such as an in-context access to motion graphics, 3D compositing, color correction, image stabilization, vector paint and roto, text effects, short-form editing, expressions, Flash output, and much more. Since this article's main focus is on rotoscoping we will be discussing Combustion's rotoscoping capability.

Combustion has very nice set of rotoscoping tools. The ease in Combustion's roto tools lie in its point tracking and shape control capability. You can create a shape using B-splines that allow for control point animation, you also have the added weight control, as to the shape and its distance, using handles from the control point. B-Splines work with the edge gradients in combustion which allow you to have independent control over the softness and fall-off of any shape whether it is a shape, mask or selection. This can also be animated and keyframed. The point tracking feature is called, “Point Grouping”. With this, you can group control points together and access the group for easy repetitive task such masking.

Over-all I would have to give Combution a 7 out of 10.

5. Eyeon Digital Fusion

Digital Fusion is a full-featured, node-based compositing system with built-in backend tools via a powerful scripting engine with ODBC support. Fusion has a real 3D environment with camera/lights support for leading 3D packages, it also has a powerful and intuitive 3D particle systems on the market. Packed with hardware-accelerated 3D capabilities, you can migrate from pre-vis to finals within the same application.

Fusion is a synergy of 2d and 3d tools for ultimate and hardcore compositing. Its rotoscoping tools areas great as its other compositing tools since it works in a node-based environment. Mask inputs on a tile are generally drawn as blue arrows, though other colors may be used for pre-masks and garbage mattes.

Fusion also has the ability to create edge softness per point by supporting polylines with non uniform softness through the use of double polylines. Double polylines is a new type of polyline that describes variable softness along the edge of a curve using inner and outer polyline curves. A simple polyline can now be converted to a double polyline. Polylines in Fusion can be made of the 'normal' bezier curves, or b-splines. They can have a single shape, or inner/outer shapes. You can convert a single edged polyline into an inner/outer polyline curves. You can even have different numbers of points on the inner polyline than on the outer, or have one as a b-spline and the other as a bezier spline. Over-all I would give Fusion a 7.

There are a lot of rotoscoping tools available and most are really equipped to handle the nasty frame-by-frame rotoscoping chore. However. despite the varied rotoscoping software available the principle or goal of rotoscoping is still the same. I do believe that the software comes next after the principles. Understand and digest the principles of rotoscoping and any roto software will work out for you. Of course, for practicality one would choose a rotoscoping software that makes the work faster, easier and more efficient. But, at the end of the day there is only rule in rotoscoping and that's producing precise articulated mattes.

You can find the original article here .

Photo portals like Flickr and image galleries have seen a revival in the last years which can be largely attributed to the market gain of digital cameras. Everyone seems to have at least one digital camera or mobile phone with a camera and many are looking for ways to easily publish their pictures on their own website.

Most users prefer an automatic solution where they only have to select the images that they want to include. The whole coding would be done by the application which has the advantage that it’s faster and more convenient.

Introducing Moba Photo provides such a solution for the photo enthusiast. The photo software provides four functions: Batch photo resizing, batch picture editing, batch picture renamer and finally the digital gallery creator. The first three are useful for editing the photos before the gallery is created. Each of the three image manipulation sections provides a user friendly interface.

Check it out and try it yourself :-) for more information about this software click here

Some of LazyAnimation sample 3d architectural renderings:



LazyAnimation is a Scandinavian 3d company with specialties in architectural rendering and walk through animation. We house talented 3d artists in the Philippines which is why we can offer quality rendering services at a much lower price.

Here are the prices.

• 1 rendering costs 220 Euro

• 4 renderings costs 340 Euro

For one project, our usual turn around time is 3 - 4 days including client revisions. Every rendering request will include a high resolution photo realistic image and your right to make the necessary revisions. For more information on our company please visit www.lazyanimation.com.

LazyMovie is a visual effects facility that specializes in rotoscoping and chroma keying, otherwise known by the industry pros as the “routine dirty work” of video editing. Since rotoscoping and chroma keying are our specialty, you can bank on a fast turn-around time and first-rate quality.

LazyMovie does frame by frame rotoscoping and chroma keying jobs. The company delivers first-rate 2D digital post production work, like cleaning up dirt and wires in high-kick and high -flying martial arts films, using the rotoscoping and chroma keying techniques. The production team is composed of highly skilled Filipino visual effects designers with professional experience. The company is run by a Scandinavian management team, thus minimizing cultural and linguistic misunderstandings - an otherwise possible downside to outsourcing.

Interested clients can have their one sec. video clip rotoscoped and chroma keyed for free so they can asses the quality of the work delivered by LazyMovie.

Do you believe that workplace can motivate people in their work? As an employee, yes I think so. Especially if your company is all about arts and design but not just that people that would have to deal with creativity, unique ideas, artistic individual. I found a very cool and wonderful pictures of workplace. I'm hoping to be apart of the company whoever owns these company.

Here it is:

Women are dying to look perfect.

Literally. Last year's toll included a music promoter who expired on the operating table while undergoing cosmetic surgery, and a couple of fashion models who starved themselves to death. High profile enough to have made headlines, these women may represent just a fast glimpse of the beauty industry's dark lining. But they have no one but themselves to blame for the risky lifestyle choices they made in pursuit of looking good. Or do they? read more...

I find this alarming when I read the article, I never think that digital manipulated or retouched photos would affect people's life particularly women. I mean as a woman yes! I'm attracted to beautifully enhanced photos in most many magazine but I never thought of me doing it. Pretty contented with my physical looks though.

 

Yesterday, I had the chance to see the movie "The forbidden kingdom". And I'm telling you, it was indeed a great movie. I don't know if Jackie Chan and Jet Li had a movie together before but actually this is my first time I saw them together in a movie like this. Both of them are superstars and putting them together in one film is such a great idea.

The movie follows the story of Jason (Michael Angarano), a die-hard kungfu fan and his concussion-induced journey back in time to a mythical China. Jason must return a golden staff to the Monkey King (Jet Li), who is imprisoned in stone under the evil gaze of the immortal Jade Warlord (Deshun Wang). Jason meets a silent monk (Jet Li), drunken master Lu Yan (Jackie Chan), and musical assassin Golden Sparrow (Yifei Liu) who all have a vested interest in the Monkey King or the demise of the Jade Warlord. They accompany Jason on his quest and give him the skills he needs to repel his foes.

Forbidden Kingdom makes up for this in a good dose of fight scenes. This has some of the best story-to-action ratios of any martial arts movie, hearkening back to the heyday of kung fu, where the story is minimized to make room for more action. Forbidden Kingdom has all of the good components of a classic action film.

Anyway I would never forget the scene when they were in the dessert and Jacky Chan wanted to rain, made his ritual but in the end Jet Li pee on him it was really funny I can't forget how I laugh so loud in the cinema(hahaha).So though I really enjoyed this movie and I don't care if they had negative criticism.

Some of the few interesting advertisement, I've seen over the net. Very much inspirational right?

The hotly anticipated film, "Wanted" which has filmed in Chicago casted by Angelina Jolie, James McAvoy and Morgan Freeman would soon be release this summer of 2008. This is actually the first English-language film helmed by Russian director Timur Bekmambetov, is based upon Mark Millar's explosive graphic novel series.




Plot:

Wesley Gibson (James McAvoy) is offered the opportunity to seek revenge in the murder of his father, who was a super-villainous assassin. Gibson is invited by his father’s partner, Sloan (Morgan Freeman), to follow in his father’s footsteps. Sloan’s second-in-command (Angelina Jolie) mentors Gibson. Wesley Gibson follows the death orders issued by the Fates, weavers who read individuals’ destinies in fabrics produced by mystical looms.

Since June has less rivalry by number of films, pretty sure this movie would soon become a big hit this summer. This slick new summer action movie looks cool. Great casting and cinematography, can't wait to watch it.

My friend introduced this pretty cool site called Simpsonize. At first I was having a hard time creating my simpson look, might be with the kind of picture I uploaded. Though I keep on trying and luckily I did finished my simpson look. Yepey!
What's interesting with this, is that you can print it in a mug, t-shirt, cap, or any item available in the website. You can customize and have your own design as you like.