On the morning of Super Bowl Sunday, there’s only one ball sport to be talking about, and that’s basketball They have had to wait eight years for the technology to catch up, but at the NBA’s 2024 All-Star weekend at the Lucas Oil Stadium in Indianapolis, the Celebrity Game (Friday 16 February) and the Saturday […]
The designers and engineers behind the Universal Scene Description (USD) framework, F. Sebastian Grassia, Alex Mohr, Sunya Boonyatera, Brett Levin, and Jeremy Cowles, have together won one of 2024’s Scientific and Technical Academy Awards. Some of 2024’s other Scientific and Technical Academy Award winners James Eggleton and Delwyn Holroyd “for the design, implementation and integration of the High-Density […]
This early attempt at computer-generated parametric facial animation, which was first uploaded to YouTube in 2010, is by acknowledged pioneer in the field Fred Parke, Fred started out in the US military in the Sixties, developing weapons simulation software. For his Ph.D. in computer science at the University of Utah (1972-1974) he conducted his facial […]
Tom Cruise is well-known for liking to do his own stunts where possible and has a list of mishaps behind him that remind us they don’t always go to plan, but how much of Top Gun: Maverick, and particularly the stuff that happened ‘up top’, was real and how much was CG? Actors in the […]
While creating 3D models, editing, compositing and colour grading are much easier and less expensive now, the process of inserting a CG character in a scene is still very complicated. You first create a model with textures and so on, then mess around with motion capture studio green screen. Then those motion primitives need to […]
The first line of the Wikipedia page for ‘uncanny valley’ describes it as “a hypothesized relationship between the degree of an object’s resemblance to a human being and the emotional response to such an object”. Even when they are painstakingly crafted, animated human characters in movies still don’t pass for human. But why? The uncanny […]