Disney Animation Studio on the Amiga

Because it's often easy to forget how far we've come along in the past decade, today I'll show you how things were in 1990, back in the day when the Commodore Amiga was king in the graphics department. Although I was a big fan of Deluxe Paint, the following Disney Animation Studio video shows why so many people spent countless hours in front of their computer screens, animating still frames like there was no tomorrow.

Those were the days... :)

Multicore 3D Animation

Now that multicore CPUs with 4 and 8 cores are getting popular (and 16 and 32 cores will soon follow) its time we start using it to its full potential.

Intel has been hard at work trying to improve gamers experience. Why should your multicore CPU spend most of its time idling when it could be put to good use improving the scenery (for example)?

That what you can see in these Intel Demos (with full source-code.)

For instance, if you try their Horses demo in a dual-core CPU, you might get 235 horses running around the plains.

But if you run it in an 8 core i7, you'll see nearly 600 horses running around.

And the same thing can be done with particle systems as shown in this "Smoke" demo:

Amazing Stop-Motion Animation Video

Want something to do during your holidays?

How about taking 60,000 photos, 9,600 prints, a lot of creativity, and create a 1800 frames video like the one below?



Simply amazing!

(apparently it was inspired by this video, using the same concept, that popped up a few months earlier)

Real Time 3D Facial Animation and Capture

If you want to see what you can accomplish - today - in facial expression capture and rendering, check this out:


Mova Contour Reality Capture in Unreal Engine 3

This capture system, from Mova - here shown using the Unreal Engine 3 and two NVIDIA 8800 GTXs in SLI for real time rendering - uses a camera array to create a 3D model from someone's face with 100,000 polygons accurate to one tenth of a millimete, without requiring reflective markers like other motion capture systems.

Pretty impressive. We're definitely on the right track for lifelike computer models for videogames and CGI movies alike.

If they can do this in realtime right now, what should we expect from James Cameron's Avatar? :)

via [Joystiq]

Animated PNGs

As you're probably aware, the GIF image format is quite "old" - however, it's still widely used throughout the Internet because a very simple, yet valuable, feature: animated GIFs.

These animated GIFs are part of Internet's History (for both Good and Bad) and are used in millions of web pages. Just check any forum, and you'll find GIF avatars with feature-length duration weighing several megabytes.... but we'll leave that for another day.

Well, it time to move ahead. The PNG (Portable Network Graphics) was created to overcome GIFs shortcomings, offering better compression rates, higher color depth, and now... animation as well. Soon, APNG (Animated PNGs) will replace current animated GIFs.

For now, just a couple of browsers support APNGs, namely FireFox 3 and Gran Paradiso Alpha 7, but other should soon follow.

Check more info and examples at AnimatedPNG.