If you have not seen this video, you have been hiding under a rock for the past few months. I am not going to talk about the artistic side of his video because there is a great article on Motionographer with interviews from Patrick and some screen grabs of his storyboards and general creative workflow.
What I am going to talk about is how you can make an effect like that,  using voxels. A voxel (volumetric pixel) is a volume element, representing a value on a  regular grid in three dimensional space (Wikipedia). There is a preset out on the interwebs for c4d written by Robert Leger that lets you break apart a model into voxels while maintaining the shape of the model. The original pixels animation used a script written in c++ and animated in Maya.

you can download the preset [here]

read Robert Leger’s blog post about his pluging [here]

view a tutorial about the plugin [here]

Original Pixels Animation if you did infact spend the last few weeks  under a rock.

New York invasion by 8-bits creatures !
PIXELS is Patrick Jean’ latest short film, shot on location in New York.

Written, directed by : Patrick Jean
Director of Photograhy : Matias Boucard
SFX by Patrick Jean and guests
Produced by One More Production

www.onemoreprod.com

a couple of months back i ran across a web based image processing tool like Photoshop i posted about it here. Today i am here to let you know that that small be it cool website has been outdone a thousand fold and this pro tool set in my opinion is going to change the way we work on the fly and on machines that are not really ours the Aviary Tool set is a free web based app suite that contains 7 apps : image , color , effect , vector , screen cap , image mocap and sound. These 7 free web apps encompass what i believe all the needs of a visual artist of many talents.

I am going to break down every App and tell you what i like about it and such and hope as always this information will be useful in your daily work flow.

Effect Editor – Peacock

I am starting with this App first because I am so amazed with what Peacock is. Peacock is a Node Based Effects Editor for the common man, AND IT IS FREE. A while back the great flocks at dvGarage brought the power of node based image editing to Photoshop in the form of a plug-in called conduit, today The great people of Aviary gave us Peacock.

Image Editor – Phoenix

Phoenix is basically a online version of Photoshop nothing much to tell all the standard futures all thou one thing in particular  my attention and that was the fact that you could make a peacock layer in phoenix kind of like dynamic link layers in after effect and Photoshop orPremier

Audio Editor – Myna

Myna is my second Favorite after Peacock its a fully functional audio editor. You can record tracks right into the web app you can save sessions and even export wave mixdowns. The interface reminds me of audacity a bit but it has functional short cut keys and space bar is play and stop like mostly common in this type of app

There is a lot more that the Aviary Tool set can offer you They have a Color suite similar to Adobe kuler and a Vector App and a simple version of there image app. Go and Check them out you wont regret it

www.aviary.com

Matt Silverman, Creative Director of Bonfire Labs,particularly known as being a roto expert in addition to a motion graphics and visual effects artist. Several years ago, he took it upon himself to enlist some of the best users in the field to construct a set of timeless, concept-based, software-agnostic visual effects training videos.

The links for Series 2 (covering compositing, keying, tracking, paint, and rotoscoping presented by Ron Brinkmann, Stu Maschwitz, and Scott Stewart) are below; watch them while you can:

Masters of Visual Effects 2.1 – Compositing Concepts 1 from Matt Silverman on Vimeo.

Masters of Visual Effects 2.2 – Composting Concepts 2 from Matt Silverman on Vimeo.

Masters of Visual Effects 2.3 – Keying from Matt Silverman on Vimeo.

Masters of Visual Effects 2.4 – Tracking from Matt Silverman on Vimeo.

Masters of Visual Effects 2.5 – Paint from Matt Silverman on Vimeo.

Masters of Visual Effects 2.6 – Rotoscoping from Matt Silverman on Vimeo.

from VideoPro Coalition

Hello,

First let me apologize for not posting in a while,

<usual excuses> work has been crazy, no time , moving , packing and my building got hit by a meteor</usual excuses>.

Now that’s done with here is what’s new. I just wrapped up an animation project that was quite long, no mere 30 seconds or 1 min but a full 3min:40sec of motion graphics. Now in our Mograph world that is a lot, (too much in fact) and i noticed something very interesting; my animation is all the same. I don’t mean the look of my animation, i mean the way small background things behave, like having clouds animate in the background and using “wiggle.expression” to animate them instead of using  keyframes. Or when i animate fractal noise to drive a texture i just go in quick and dirty with a “time*45.expression” and leave . Now don’t get me wrong, these ways of animating have their place but here is where i came across my problem: when you have 30 seconds of sky and you throw a wiggle.expression on there and move on it works, but when you are looking at 4 min of sky all of the sudden you see the impersonal machine behavior of expressions. I started seeing  noticeable patterns for all my animations. All the little things i stopped doing like animating evaluation values or complexity and substituting it by the exact same time*15.expression.

Now it may very well be that i don’t know any other expressions so all of them look the same but i figured a computer has a set number of rules it works by and no matter how you dress it up it will end up using the same set of rules to apply it. So i set out to modify my project from machine driven monotone animation to something with a bit of personality, and let me tell you it was hard going from  this :

expression from Motionscript.com

to this:

But it was well worth it. My animation took on character and a life of its own. Which made me feel more accomplished (and much cooler).

I did not go to traditional animation school however and the core principals of the art was something i needed to understand well before i could apply them to my animation. Here are some of the resources i found and used to make a learning curve a bit less curvy (?), than it could have been.

A great 3 part article from fuelyourmotionography.com about everything that i just discussed, only written by some one much more experienced than i am.

Part 1, Part 2 , Part 3

Then i came across a very  interesting video by Nick Campbell form Grayscale Gorilla about how not to let your computer animate you.

The Death of the Keyframe – How expressions are making everything look the same from Nick Campbell on Vimeo.

And finally here is a beautiful sample of how manually key-framing your animation can give you 100 times better results

CRAZY ENOUGH – Title Sequence from Jr.canest on Vimeo.

Here are some of the keyframes on that video.

So the underlying point I’m trying to make is – sure you can go ahead and use the built in preset. We all can! But if you really want to stand out from the crowd it’s best to put in the effort to keyframe your animations. After all, nothing that looks awesome was easy to do

That’s all for this time folks. As always i hope that at least one person finds this useful in some way. If you like it, hate it or find it stupid please comment.

Cheers

Free Photoshop Plugins:

Virtual Photographer

Xpose

B/W Conversion

Contrast Mask

View Full List [here]

We all use Photoshop on a daily basis, but I bet there’s at least one tip in this post that will give you the old ‘Why didn’t I know of this before’ moment! It’s tips like these that make the most common of tasks quicker and easier than ever to help speed up your Photoshop workflow.

view full articale at SpoonGraphics

I Stumbled across this on the weekend by accident and i think its the most amazing thing i found all month. By all accounts its a fully functional version of Photoshop that is completely server based there are no installs no drivers no serial numbers and no price tags, a completely free tool for the creative mind. It Futures a wide array of tools like Histogramas and Levels adjustments as well as cropping scaling and much more  a complete list of futures can be found on there site

not only is this great web app free it is supported by a massive online community that helps and shares work , tips and knowledge. a How to Tutorials Section On using the software can be found here.

Here is some Amazing Art work Created in Sumo Paint hope you enjoy this as much as i did

I often find that i absorb allot of very useful information by subscribing to video and audio podcast on the web, not just news but useful tips and tricks as well as valuable resources that make my work easier and more fluid. Be it inspiration or extremely useful tips on work-flow or just the stat of the industry i am in. Even if you are are not into VFX id recommend finding pod-casts for you respective professions and subscribing its easy on the go listing on your ipod or iphone or even while you are at work instead of music listen to 30 min of useful information trust me you wont regret it

1. The Creative Cow Aftereffects Podcast :

This is a Video Podcast with After Effects Tutorials and Tips by all the Cow Gurus

Click [here] to subscribe with itunes

2. The Creative Cow Photoshop Podcast

This is a Video Podcast with Photoshop Tutorials and Tips by all the Cow Gurus

Click [here] to subscribe with itunes

3. fxguide and fxphd podcasts

i cant say how epic the fx podcasts are the most usfuel soruce of industry information i know i listen to these podcast multipule times everday

Subscribe with itunes

Subscribe with itunes

Subscribe with itunes

Subscribe with itunes

4.The VFX Show Podcast

Subscribe with itunes

This application contains a database of all of the keyboard shortcuts for all of the applications in Creative Suite 4. I came across it randomly and think it is a very good productivity tool and will help you improve your workflow

This application has a search future as well as as Mac and PC divisions

you can get Adobe Air [here]

Hey, if you are like me your are bound to hop form system to system on daily basis i use OSX at work and sometimes Linux and at home i use Windows XP and managing files is a bit difficult but i get by that is until yesterday i needed to get some screen caps form a PC and make something nice out of them naturally thinking Aftereffects opens Avi’s on my PC with no problem at all i loaded up AE and tried importing the Files. 20 minutes later i realized it was hopeless because AE uses 3d party Plug-ins to load media and when its installed on windows it uses things like Divx and the standard Avi libraries that Windows comes with, and those don’t exist on a mac. well 2 days and some googling later here is what i came up with there are 2 or 3 OpenSource Plugins i found that extend the native abilities of Quicktime that let you not only run avis on your mac but play them in QuickTime which i found extremely useful since i can now open them in AE and do what i wanted to do.

so to play any Avi on your Mac without any editing needs you can download VLC player or Mplayer which are both OpenSouce and support playback of windows media on a mac

or if you needed the coded itself so you could edit Windows Media and import it into AE or Premiere of FCP here are some of those

Perian – Quicktime plugin that will guarantee to play almost any codec within an AVI

3ivx -  A free version of this MPEG4 codec is available for Mac

AC3 – This codec is very useful for viewing .avi files encoded with AC3 audio.

Divx for Mac – A free version is available for watching DivX movies Mac Version

Flip4Mac – A free solution, offering playback of AVI, ASF, ASX and non-DRM

protected WMA and WMV files.