Archive for the Category ‘Technology’
“TRADITIONAL” WORKFLOW UPDATE. GREEN? EFFICIENCY. ::
It’s been a long time in planning, but at last, our traditional animation department has received two Wacom Cintiq Interactive Pen Displays. Our Cintiq 21UX and 12WX are capable of real time visual input with utensils that emulate traditional tools such as the pen, smudge stick, and a variety of pencils. They have thousands of degrees of pressure sensitivity which get us as close to the tools with which we trained.
“The Cintiq family of interactive pen displays enables creative professionals to work naturally and intuitively, by using Wacom’s patented, professional pen technology directly on the surface of an LCD display.”
Limeade
I tend to cringe every time I see some corporation tout that they are “going green.” It seems so contrived and advertised. Let’s just say we’ve taken one more step in our process of being as eco friendly and material-efficient as possible. We love the planet and we love trees. Though we still see demand and appreciation for illustrations on paper, we believe that our latest upgrade will cut our use of paper by about 80%. Goodbye to [most of the] reams of punched animation paper and the storage that goes with it!
Collaboration
Typically, at the helm of the new technology will be Postage, Inc. Art Director Joseph Krzemienski and Production Artist Courtland Ellis. By having two Cintiq’s at Postage World HQ in addition to several Wacom Tablets including the Intuos 4 and Intuos 2, we have opened up a world of instantaneous collaboration between our artists. Conceptual work including storyboards and style frames can be generated in a flash and digitally passed to other members of the team. Finesse and finishing touches can be accomplished quickly. We can go from “pencil” to “pen” to “color” inter-artist with the greatest of ease. It’s also possible for us to generate vector images on the fly making our work infinitely scalable in a very simple manner.
Departure and Arrival
As mentioned before, the digital illustration upgrade will go far to reduce our dependency on paper and pencil, but we are still capable of and happy to produce your animation by using the traditional tools of Studio Ghibli, Hanna Barbera, Disney and so many others. As always, efficiencies we may pick up on are passed down to our clients. Our goal is to produce as much superior quality work as we can in the realm of visual effects, traditional animation, and other post production arts.
Tags: 12wx, 21UX, Airbrush, Animated Films, Animated Promotional Video, Animated Television Commercial, Animation Studio, Charcoal, Cintiq, Hayao Miyazaki, Illustration, Intuos, Sponsored, The Princess and the Frog, Traditional animation, Wacom
Posted in News, Technology
Pinball Massacre Fall Sale ::
Thanks to the overwhelming response to our first entry into the mobile games scene, were announcing a Fall Sale for Pinball Massacre. If you like pinball, and more importantly fun, Get It Now.
Posted in Games, Technology
Screen Shot Friday 110909 ::
Welcome to a huge Screen Shot Friday which hopefully makes up for our missed SSF series in the last few BUSY weeks. Thanks for visiting and thanks for your patience. Here’s some amazing jobs we’ve had the fortune of helping to produce or producing.
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- We couldn’t exactly film this government building for the upcoming NSVRC PSA… so we made it from scratch. :)
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- More 3D texturing from our upcoming second release of the Pinball Massacre series.
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- Though this cool illustrated treatment that might find it’s way to the cutting room floor, we thought it should have a light life in SSF.
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- Courtland is hard at work on the hilarious cutscenes for an upcoming mobile app that should find it’s way into hands across the nation before election day.
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- Rigging a blackhawk helicopter for the reflection in a window of a Volkswagen spot.
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- Here’s a test composite for the upcoming PSA for NSVRC. A weed grows from under the porch.
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- I love a gigantic timeline. This one was for a project with Ironbound Films.
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- Though it’s not a computer monitor/screen per-se, it was a fantastic shoot with amazing talent and crew. Deserves some pre-play.
Tags: 3d, Advanced Compositing, After Effects CS5.5, Animation, Center, CGI, Commercial, compositing, maya, Mental Ray, Modeling, National, Non-Profit, Post Production, Production, PSA, r3d, Resource, Rigging, Sexual, Television, Violence, Visual effects, Xfrog
Posted in Games, Screen Shot Friday, Technology
Screen Shot Firday 110903 ::
Joe has been busy texturing 3D models for the next release of Pinball Massacre!
Posted in Screen Shot Friday, Technology
INTRODUCING POSTAGE 3.1 ::
How we’ve improved.
- It’s been an honor to work with fantastic people on projects for Verdatum, Penske, The Cope Company Salt, the NSVRC and many more VERY recently.
- We now make games and other interactive applications using rich graphics, animation and other media content. Created for Android, OSX, and iOS.
- Over the past month, we’ve been creating all kinds of animated and specialty content for trade shows, films, and educational videos.
- We have some fantastic new tools including physics engines, growth simulators and more. The possibilities are endless!
- We are approaching the culmination of our work with the NSVRC, a fantastic and significant non-profit organization promoting education and prevention of Sexual Violence.
- We’ve made a few improvements to the office including the addition of a new workstation, and a few nice pieces of furniture to cozy up the place.
“Serving” ALL:
We are very excited to have installed a new OSX Lion server which will help in-office and in-the-field integration with our mobile devices, calendars, and contact methods. The new server will integrate with our current animation system allowing our artists to work more fluently together and providing server software and space to facilitate our render farms and other network processing.
Helping us with this endeavor has been Ron Grembowiec of Arcshop, a local, seasoned independent who has years of experience outfitting companies like ours with the tools we need to efficiently service our clientele. Learn more about Arcshop here: http://arcshoponline.com Big thanks and HUGE recommendation if you are in the Central PA area.
The recent upgrades should lower our project management costs which we pass on to the client as well as make the moving of large data easy and safely redundant. It will be apparent in the coming months how some new client interactivity makes it’s way into your Postage, Inc. experience.
Tags: AFS, Arcshop, File Server, Gigabit Ethernet, Lion Server, Mac Pro, NAS, NFS, Traditional animation
Posted in News, Technology
