Energie!

Prof. Dr. Dr. Charlowski gelingt ein unerwarteter Durchbruch bei seinen Experimenten zur Hundeteleportation.

Mein erster und letzter Beitrag zu Guttenberg

Der Springer-Verlag, seit jeher nicht immer ein Meister subtiler Propaganda, verliert die Kontrolle...

mehr: taz, text und text, Spiegelfechter

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YtQ4yOoX7bM

“Niemand hätte sich vorstellen können, mit welcher Dreistigkeit hier ein Plagiat eingereicht wird”. Tja, Uni Bayreuth. Vielleicht etwas Sehschwäche eingebüßt, in Anbetracht der Summen, die Guttenberg jährlich an euch überwiesen hat?

Es sind wirklich Sizilianische Verhältnisse, wie ein Kommentar in der Frankfurter Rundschau es beschreibt.

Soviel dazu.

Lightning Plugin for Fusion?

David Bowie as Nikola Tesla in "The Prestige" © Touchstone Pictures and Warner Bros.

Watched some lightning strike reference footage and then found this lightning code for Flash. I think I’ll implement the algorithm for my next Fuse plugin after the lens flares. Stay tuned 🙂

Update: Plugin released. See this blog post for details.

Geplante Obsoleszenz

Glühbirnen, Nylonstrümpfe, Drucker, Mobiltelefone — bei den meisten dieser Produkte ist das Abnutzungsdatum bereits geplant. Die Verbraucher sollen veranlasst werden, lieber einen neuen Artikel zu kaufen, als den defekten reparieren zu lassen. Die bewusste Verkürzung der Lebensdauer eines Industrieerzeugnisses, um die Wirtschaft in Schwung zu halten, nennt man “geplante Obsoleszenz”.

Kaufen für die Müllhalde. Eine ARTE-Doku die wie so oft zum Nachdenken anregt:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=77UwTx2Sou4

Lens Flares for Fusion

Over the past few weeks I have written some Fusion plugins to draw lens flares. They are to a large degree a coding exercise, but they helped me out in one case already and every time you don’t have to switch to After Effects or Fusion’s 32bit version to use plugins like Knoll or Video Copilot’s Optical Flares for simple stuff is a productivity gain. This is an example that I recreated from a reference photograph (search for ‘lens flare’ on google images to find it).

There are three Fuses that are meant to be combined:

FlareCircle draws a single reflection of a lens flare. It’s designed after Nuke’s flare node so you can use it to really mimic an existing flare in your plate with chromatic aberration. It also provides additional position and angle outputs that you can use to track in your own lens artifacts.	FlareStar draws the center of lens flares or star-shaped glints that can be positioned anywhere in your picture.	FlareMulti draws multiple circles with random radius, hue  and brightness. Instead of fading when the light source leaves the frame, the circles will vanish one after another. No need for tedious hand animation.

All three Fuses support an occlusion mask to hide the whole thing as well as multiple merge modes (additive, screen, max/lighten). Get them on Vfxpedia! If you find them useful or have suggestions, drop me a line.

Update August 2012: The Fuses now fully support DoD.

Hereafter

Freelancing at Scaline VFX until summer. They have received the Outstanding Supporting VFX award of the Visual Effects Society for their work on Hereafter by the way. Watch their amazing breakdown reel:

HEREAFTER Featurette: Visual Effects Shot Breakdowns Reel from ScanlineVFX on Vimeo.

Tron

Saw TRON Legacy yesterday. Really nice production design and CGI. But I almost fell asleep anyways. Too much father-son talk for an action movie.

What are the programs that populate ‘The Grid’ doing anyways? Even a cyberspace where everybody’s just crunching prime numbers should look more amazing, colorful and faceted than the world of TRON which looks like a city that’s 2 blocks wide and is populated by about 10 people. And why the hell are airplanes emitting smoke in a virtual world that has pixelized fireworks?

In a nutshell: a visual feast, the thin script that’s basically expected from these kinds of blockbusters and the feeling that the whole thing could have been better.