Kunfu Fu Panda, CGSociety article

Kung Fu Panda is the new Dreamworks 3d animation movie (in theaters june 6, 2008).

CG Society publish an intersting article about Kung Fu Panda production focus (article by Renee Dunlop).
The article starts:
"A journey of a billion frames begins with talent, characters and a whole lot of effort by the team at DreamWorks."...

"A wash with color and technical complexities, DreamWorks brings us their next animated film, Kung Fu Panda. In production since 2003, the film introduces a cast of clothed and furry or feathery animals that never completely sit still, languishing, dreaming, learning, and battling throughout a collection of expansive environments." ...

Continue reading this article about Kung Fu Panda

Other links:

CG Society

Kung Fu Panda official website

Dreamworks website

Explore Disneyworld in 3d with Google Earth

Google Earth adds new 3d models to have a fantastic virtual journey to Disney World in Orlando (Florida).


Here a Youtube video taken from Google Earth Blog:

Asus EEE TV soon

After the great success with its Eee PCs, Asus is working to create other products with the Eee brand.
Recently - at Computex 2008 - Asus presented its Eee TV, a 42 inches HD television, with linux SO embedded.
If ASUS will keep prices as low as Eee PC series, we can have a new great product Eee branded...

Travel Guides Vienna Euro 2008

Your mobile city guide for Vienna, Euro 2008 edition!

Vienna city guide for mobile phone with Flashlite 2.x (or better).
This city guide is ready for EURO 2008, UEFA European Football Championship.
Contains city maps, underground map, dozens of sightseeings and points of interest with descriptions and many other useful features.

No Internet or GPS connections required.
Available in english language.

Just for EUR 2.99 !

More info about Travel Guides Vienna Euro 2008 >

Street Fighter IV for Ps3, Xbox360 and PC

Capcom is working for a sequel of one of most played coin-op: Street Fighter IV
Graphics will be completely revised and made in 3d: above you can see a screenshot with Ryu... really not bad! :)
Street Fighter IV will be available for Playstation 3 and Xbox 360.
Below an interesting Street Fighter IV video:




Other resources:

Official Sites:
Street Fighter IV (Japanese) - http://www.capcom.co.jp/sf4/
Street Fighter IV (American) - http://streetfighterworld.com/

Screenshots:
The orginal 8 plus Crimson Viper revealed (Japanese Text)
http://www.famitsu.com/game/news/1213478_1124.html


VIDEOS

http://www.gametrailers.com/game/5667.html
http://www.youtube.com/Arxinal

NewTek Announces Free LightWave 3D Trial Edition Available for Download

Great News from Newtek!

NewTek Announces Free LightWave 3D Trial Edition Available for Download.

New LightWave Trial Edition features 24 hours of free online training


The software is fully functional with no restrictions or watermarks for a full 30-day period and has 24 hours of video training on many topics to enable quick use of LightWave's powerful tools.

In addition, the complete manuals in PDF format are available for download, allowing users to reference tools and features. 130 MB of royalty-free content is also provided, which can continue to be loaded and studied even after the 30-day trial period is over.

Pricing and Availability

The LightWave Trial Edition is available for free download immediately. LightWave® v9 is available now at suggested retail price of $895US. LightWave v9.5 will be available as a free update to registered LightWave v9 owners. Registered owners of LightWave 3D® [8] or earlier are eligible to purchase an upgrade to LightWave v9 for $395US.
For more information or to purchase, please visit www.lightwave3d.com or call NewTek Sales at 1-800-368-5441, for international inquiries dial +1-210-370-8000.

Iphone games: Namco for hire

In these weeks Apple presented its Iphone SDK, now finally companies can develop applications and games for this device.
People can be interested seeing that some companies are searching developers for hiring to increase their team knowledge about iphone development: via Gamasutra, I found this open positions into Namco : full time iPhone Games Engineers for Namco in San Jose (CA, USA).
Finally something is moving into the Iphone games industry... :)

Soul of Chogokin Kotetsu Shin Jeeg

After many rumors, Bandai has officially presented its new Soul of Chogokin: Kotetsu Shin Jeeg. This model will be available on september 2008.
Now i'm awaiting (and hoping) for a Revoltech Kotetsu Shin Jeeg by Kaiyodo... :P

Some links for more info and photos:

http://www.japanrobot.it/Articoli.htm
http://www.zonahobby.com/ita/flash_news.asp

Isometric games : 3d character animation test

In the past week I produced a simple animation to test with an isometric style game. My goal is replace my static characters in Metalwarriors with those that includes animations.
But I'm not really sure to do this mainly with for these reasons...
- creating animations for each character means spending lot of time: and how many actions I will do animate? Only a simple walk, or other actions, as fight, death, and so on? Creating each action means create "n" frames for 4 different directions.
- how many Kb these animations will take? This can be really slow downloading times...

However, some descriptions about this simple animation...
I created this animation with Lightwave 3d starting from a 3d character, created as described in my 3d Tutorial: Modeling your first Anime Robot in 3d (italian translation here), then I animated with a simple walk cycle, rendered as separated frames in BMP file format. For a better result, I choose a 17 frames sequence (see preview).
Creating characters in 3d also for 2d bitmap based games has a great advantage: after created animation cycles for a single character, I can create the same cycles for all other characters, simply substituing the 3d models. Additionally, I can create separate animation frames and, by saving in 32bit color depth, I can have each single frame with a transparent background. This can be an advantage for test purposes, to check the optimal size of my bitmaps frames, to have good animations but not a wasting movieclips sizes...

After this process, I can import my bitmap sequences directly into Adobe Flash (name each frame as "animationCyle_001.bmp", "animationCyle_002.bmp"): Flash converts the frame sequence directly into the timeline, each bitmap into a separate frame.
So I can create a single movieclip for my character, and naming each first frame of each sequence into Flash timeline, I can access and play my animation cycles via actionscript.

FPrime updated to version 3.2

via Flay: FPrime, an external rendering engine for Lightwave 3d, has been updated to version 3.2. A number of fixes and updates are in there including better LW 9.3.1 compatability, reversed motion blur, voxel support and a host of others improvements.