Excellent Tron-style glowing vector 3D in the Iron Man end credits, courtesy of Danny Yount et al of Prologue in Venice, CA.

High-rez Quicktime:

(via Motionographer.)

Following on from the Clone Wars preview, here’s “The Cultural Adventures of Mister Otter” by Cappuccino Studio, featuring subtle gradient shading broken up by white rim light outlines, which flattens everything out and resembles watercolors on paper.

Perhaps not coincentally, loutre, the French for otter, is an apostrophe away from l’outre — French for “further” and commonly seen in the phrase l’outre-mer, “overseas” — as well as an additional accent ague away from outré: “outrageous.”

And this certainly is all of that. Everyone knows otters don’t use forks.

(Via Feed.)

So far, the new 3D Clone Wars tv series looks to be just as engaging and well-acted as the prequels. Too bad.

At least the character design is interesting…

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“Ode to Summer” creator Ron Hui worked on Thru the Moebius Strip, an animated feature film based on a story by Jean “Möbius” Giraud, who also did production design.

Too bad it came out looking like a really long NVidia demo.

The film premiered at Cannes in 2005 as the first full-length 3D CGI movie made in China; this AWN article has pre-production details from the beginnings of the project, back in 2000.

“Sigg Jones” isn’t a commercial, French art students just like sneakers.

Yes, it’s another French student piece, credited to Matthieu Bessudo, Douglas Lassance, and Jonathan Vuillemin of Supinfocom, and made in 3DS Max.

“Ode to Summer,” Ron Hui’s demo for his Chinese ink watercolor shader for Maya, from SIGGRAPH 2003.

(Via Drawn.)

French studio H5 directed this infographics-style video in 2002 for “Remind Me,” from Norwegian wistful-disco electro-pop duo Röyksopp’s first album.

I always liked this blatantly honest promotional video from Psyop in 2004.

The use of ambient occlusion to represent airbrush-style design, composited no doubt with some flat gradients, is a nice touch, and an excellent way to add another literal dimension to a classically flat design style.

I also appreciate an agency’s acknowledgment of the debt owed to Psychological Operations in general.

Here’s the trailer for Sprite Animation’s short film “Journey to the West.”

The film premiered at SIGGRAPH in 2005.

It’s too bad there isn’t a cleaner version available anywhere: I assume this is due to aspirational concerns. I noted that their Monster Samurai short is apparently “in production” as a series, which I believe means they hope someone will buy it. It seems to the be the old and hopefully-dying model of animation development: show only tiny slices of something you’ve already made, in hopes that someone will want to buy the rights.

There are a few clearer stills available on their site, as well as a slightly-higher-quality version of this trailer.

I am unable to detect any relationship to the classic Chinese novel of the same name.

“Monster Samurai,” a short CG piece directed by Moto Sakakibara, founder of Sprite Animation.

Sakakibara was co-director of the awful Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within. “Monster Samurai” is no Citizen Cane, but the designs are cute, and I like the swoosh effects.

SF-based Encyclopedia Pictura just released their long-awaited 3D video for Björk’s single “Wanderlust.” The 3D version will be released April 14, viewable with standard blue and red lenses, but for now the first two D’s will have to do.

[Update: They took down the full-length from YouTube for no apparent reason, now all we get is this 30-second preview… but you can still see the full-length High-res Quicktime. Dorks.]

Only the water and some set pieces are 3D; the rest is carefully-composited footage of real live objects, sculpted and built out of actual matter, and filmed in front of good old-fashioned screens of green. This making-of video shows a lot of sculpting and other hard-core stagecraft.

There’s also an awesome interview at studiodaily explaining all kinds of juicy technical details, including the methods used to shoot the video in 3D.

(via Cartoon Brew.)

This article summarizes the use of edge loops in mid-res polygonal facial modeling and related anatomical theory.

Waiting for Jell-O

Faces are weird objects. Mechanically, a face is a nylon sock full of pressurized Jell-O mugging a hydraulic cash register wrapped in sentient rubber bands. It stretches and puckers, slobbers and sloshes, and rattles all around, especially in flap-n-snaps.

Modeling such a thing in 3D so that it looks natural when it’s moving is tricky. There’s a technique known as an edge loop which is useful in this situation, but to use it successfully you must understand the theory behind it.

When modeling for animation, potential motion must be taken into account. Certain shapes allow for certain motions, and other shapes will fight attempts to be animated. In general, edges or boundaries between shapes act as hinges, allowing bending, and extra detail allows expansion without distortion, like the corrugations in a bendy straw.

If available memory and processor power were infinite, an infinite amount of edges and detail would allow for any motion, limited only by the rig — however, here in reality we must find a balance between the amount of detail in the model (aka its weight) and functionality.

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“Shut Up, Heart” by Dionysos, animated and directed by Frenchman Stéphane Berla.

(via Yannick Puig.)

“Krapooyo,” made by Yannick Puig, creator of I Lived on the Moon, in 2005.

There are a number of charts and graphs online showing relative populations of cities, metropolitan areas, urban agglomerations, and what have you — but those are vague, empty numbers that leave no impression of a city’s soul.

A bird’s-eye view of a city center gives me more useful information. In the myriad buildings and streets, I see pressures of geography and history coming to bear, thrusting buildings up from the very bedrock like towering, quivering stalagmites of willpower, money, and insatiable greed.

So I took a few screenshots and dropped them here: “City Comparisons.” See if your city’s in the roster — compare and contrast!

Calgary, Alberta, Canada, pop. 1.0m:

Houston, Texas, USA, pop. 2.1m: