There are a lot of fans of the classics here at Airtight so sometimes someone will whip up a fun little bit of mock art - even our composer. So, seeing as yesterday was April Fool's Day, Capcom took the opportunity to share this stuff with the rest of you. Follow the link for more 8-bit artwork and an awesome remix of the theme music by Dark Void's composer: Dark Void's New Look
The past year or so at Airtight Games has been amazing. I love it here and Airtight has expressed interest in keeping me around, but for personal reasons it's time to move home to Ontario. I will be here until the end of April then... we'll see.
If you are an Ontario studio seeking an animator for film, broadcast, or games please contact me for a copy of my current demo reel: timsormin*at*gmail*dot*com
[UPDATE]: My wife and I have decided to put off our return to Ontario and stay here in Redmond for a while. Looks like I'll be here for another summer of ultimate frisbee with the Airtight gang!
In the midst of depressing news like Microsoft laying of 5,000 people and EA cutting 1,000 jobs it great to hear that someone is taking a different approach to relieving financial pressure:
Blue Sky has moved it's studio from New York all the way, um, next door to Connecticut to take advantage of the "Hollywood East" tax breaks offered there. The best part is that instead of huge layoffs, they're actually expanding and hiring more people. Now I realize this plan was initiated long before the whole US economy collapse thing became big news, but it looks as if some smart planning may have saved some people their jobs, and that's always a good thing.
The local newspaper stopped by to take a look around and give a bit of a profile of us last week. If you're curious, there's some interesting info about our studio that I don't think has been made public before. Obviously, with the game still in progress no one can give it a glowing review, but it seems like most people are impressed with it so far and are looking forward to seeing the finished product. This guy doesn't seem to offer much of an opinion, however, opting to mostly give quotes from people who work here. (Click the title or the picture to read the article)
Looks fun, that's all I care about... Well that, and that it makes lots of money so animators can still have jobs.
Chop Socky Chooks may not be the best animated series on television, but it's the best one from Canada. Congrats to the rest of my old Starz colleagues and the new guard over at C.O.R.E. Toons. The writers and creators always get all of the credit. It's too bad the studios and artists that actually MAKE these things remain completely unknown to the public.
I'm still using trusty old Maya 7.0 at work, but I must say that for the first time I'm actually excited about a new release of Maya. Maya 2009 will include animation layers, a la Motionbuilder, which is something I've wanted since I started animating for games. Just think, if they decide to change a character's idle pose you can simply slap that pose on a new layer in every other animation that needs to conform to that pose and you've got a non-destructively modified animation. Nice. Also helpful if you want to make several variations of similar moves. Other features include improvements to unwrapping UVs and easily rendering in stereoscopic 3D. Go to the Autodesk website to read more about it and watch some demo videos.
Independant R&D company Kickstand has some really impressive and useful deformation tools for Maya coming in the near future that will change the way people model and rig. Too bad you'll have to shell out more cash for these. Hopefully Autodesk can integrate these features in a later release, but it seems to take them a long time to integrate tools that users have generated a long time ago.
I'm still waiting for Reflex to be released to the public.
Then, after you've seen it, fire up iTunes and buy Presto, the short film that screened before Wall-E. I can't remember the last time I laughed so hard at a cartoon, but what's even cooler is when you step through it frame-by-frame in Quicktime: crazy distortions, smear frames, extra limbs! Finally, CG that cheats just as well as the old 2D days!
Posts
All Comments
