I’ve decided to hold off on the Blender stuff for a sec and try some other experiments regarding another passion of mine – animation. Ever since I was a kid I always dreamed of being an animator, and ever since I can remember I have been finding new ways to try and animate things from drawing in thick textbooks, stop motion with lego and eventually animating on a computer!

This is my latest experiment, learning how to do more action packed stuff like running and jumping.

Based on an old school genre of gaming that is long gone called “Adventure gaming” where you type in text to get your characters to do things. Does anyone remember Kings Quest?

Hope you enjoy it. Hoping to post about the animation side of things soon!

Continuing with my Blender experiments, I finally downloaded Blender 2.61 which has the fabled Cycles render engine in it. I was so excited I had to test it out for myself. You can see my experiment below:

It’s actually quite impressive how quickly this little render engine can kick out an image! I am super stoked to try a lot more with it in the future!!!

So as a completely serendipitous turn of events, what started out as an animation experiment suddenly turned out to be an unexpected hit amongst the vimeo community.

You can watch the video here:

What was fun about this project was that it was personal. No deadlines. No direction.
The only restrictions I had imposed on myself was

• It had to be completely done using the After Effects Shapes tool
• I had to use Duik ( a script allowing you to do IK rigs in After Effects. Frecklin Awesome)

I finished it at midnight a few days ago and thought it would be kind of fun to upload to the web and see if I could get a few giggles from my friends and showcase some of the new animation techniques. Within a few minutes of uploading I got some of the giggles I needed from some good friends and then went to bed.

Next morning I woke up to half a dozen emails notifying me of my film being added to various groups. One of which was the vimeo staff picks. For a second I was scratching my head. Was this THE Vimeo Staff picks? Or was there some other group with the same name. Sure enough I checked the staff picks group and mine had suddenly gotten to the top of the list! Surely this was a mistake…

Needless to say I was flippin out! What the frick!?! This video isn’t good enough to get on staff picks!!!

Anyways, I am humbled (humble bragging!) that anyone found this funny or at least shared in my sense of humour. And to everyone to enjoyed the vid, thanks for sharing the laughs with me.

Now for a sequel…

Check out the Duik site on how to do IK rigging in After Effects:

http://ik.duduf.com/

And this awesome tutorial on how to use it:

We finally had it! We had the bloody premiere! Although it came right in the middle of one of the most stressful weeks of my life, it was definitely all worth it.

Thanks to everyone who came out despite the crap weather, it seriously was a blast to have shown it in a theatre and a big thanks to the guys at Dendy Circular Quay for doing a ridiculously good job at looking after us.

You can read all about my film making experience over at Monica’s site if you’re interested.

I have currently entered the film into a few festivals to see if it goes anywhere. To be honest anything from here on in is a bonus and it’s nice to be able to finally get this film out in the world. I’ll let you know if it will be screened somewhere near you.

In the meantime here are some photos taken by Annette Sicari, the Production Supervisor of our film and an amazing director herself

So everyone has had the their run in with Steve Jobs in one form or another. You probably don’t realise it, but Steve Jobs has made more of an influence on technology and innovation which in my opinion is comparable to some of history’s greatest inventors and pioneers. He will forever be missed.

Although it would be difficult for me to pinpoint all of the things Steve has done over the years, I can definitely say there were a few things that he has done that directly affected me (and subsequently the course of my life).

1. My first computer – was an apple (or macintosh back in the day). Green and black screen, with a 5 1/2 floppy drive. It was my entry into the world of personal computing. I used to play this sick game called Aztec.

2. Editing on a computer – although technically I started editing on a PC (which was fine) , it wasn’t until I started editing on a mac that I saw how awesome editing could be.

It was stable.
It was clean.
It was good.

I mean I had no idea that the tools you could use to craft video were so powerful! And using the MAC OS for the first time was a dream. Didn’t crash hardly ever (it did crash, just not for stupid reasons like a PC) But I was still on Premiere 6.5 which I hated at the time.

3. Final Cut pro – Wow. Like wow! this changed everything! suddenly I was editing on a professional editing tool that allowed to do some things that only the high end suites could do. Suddenly video editing became affordable and accessible. This opened the floodgates wide open for amatuers everywhere who were looking into getting into professional video but couldn’t afford it or didn’t have the contacts. It’s very probable I’d still be working in a call centre if FCP didn’t get invented. Thank you.

There are countless other things that have changed the world (Pixar, the ipod, itunes, the ipad, iMacs to name a few), but even in this small section of my world, I can honestly say that if there wasn’t a Steve Jobs, my life would have looked very different.

So here’s to you Steve. You changed a world and generation of people. Your legacy will live on.

Well it’s been a bit of a whirlwind season settling into my new job and learning a whole lot about things I never thought I’d ever be interested in (render passes? Ambient Occlusion? Ray tracing? Topology? pffftt… please… they are things I will never have to learn).

In any case, if you would garner some wisdom from this asian man whilst I stroke my long whiskery beard,know this

Get busy living, or get busy dying ahem… I mean this:

If you’re not finding yourself getting better, you’re getting worse.

And that essentially is the cornerstone of everything I do.

So i have a movie I did a while back from which you can watch the trailer here:



I did it mostly because I wanted to stretch every ability of my being mentally, physically, creatively, logistically.
I did it cause I wanted to get better.
I did it cause I wanted to do something I’d never done before.

And now it is done! phew!! 4 years later! And I can tell you, I have learnt A LOT!!!

We’re about to attempt a premiere of it in front of all our friends in a few days.
Am I excited? yes!
Am I nervous? hell yes!!
But seriously, its gonna be fun and some photos will be coming soon!! stay tuned!

3D is very time consuming. I can see why people say spend as little time in the 3D app as you can and the rest in the compositor. But that being said, after a lot of weeks of experimentation, posting on forums and learning things, I came up with this little animation for all the fruits of my labour.

30 hours

for 30 seconds of animation…*groan*

30 hours of rendering in 30 secs from Nick Khoo on Vimeo.

In a lot of ways a resounding YES!

After using it for about 6 months I am finding i can achieve a heck of a lot more than I thought was originally possible. You only have to go and have a look at some of the stuff found online to see what can be achieved.

Here are some places I found really useful.

Blenderguru

Blendercookie

Blendtuts

There are A LOT of things that Blender can do that a lot of the commercial packages can do. As far as I know, the modelling side of things is practically the same. The modifiers all work on very much the same principles. And there are some things that I have been told are easier in Blender than say a $5000 package like Maya (so I have been told, I havent used Maya).

So why use Blender? Well it’s free and open source. That’s pretty much the crux of it. I think this program has definitely been written off because it is free, but I promise you, if you understand it, you can get a lot out of it.

Here are some examples of work I have been doing lately.

All this was done in Blender (with a few photoshop finesses but nothing much I promise).

Anyways give it a go. What have you got to lose?

I love Adobe products. I really do. I have been using them since the incarnation of Premiere 5! Their products are astounding. And now is probably the best time to buy with their “Switch” promotion they are doing to get ppl to switch Premiere from FCP (it’s 50% off)

But what has always got me was how much the markup was in Australia compared to the US. Sure I understand our dollar was weaker than the US at one stage, and hence the price exchange rate coupled with shipping costs + storage costs + distribution + tax all added to the markup.

But things have definitely changed since then.

Shipping costs are cheaper (I can order books and have them in 2 weeks and only pay a couple of dollars for shipping).
Our dollar is now sitting at $1.07USD, highest it’s ever been in our history.

So you’d think the price would have come down just a little right?

Wrong.

If you head over to the US site you’ll see that the price of the CS5 production premium suite is $1699 USD (which equates to $1583.92 AUD).

But if you head over to the Australian site, that same package is inflated to a whopping $3046 USD ($2840 AUD).

That’s a remarkable 79% markup from the US price.

79%!

I don’t know about you. But that is a huge markup just because we’re in a different country.

So the question is why?

Why are you we paying double the price in Australia?
What are the overheads exactly?
Do they hate people in Australia?
Didn’t they watch Oprah in Australia recently? (our country is awesome btw!)

What could possibly justify the price for it being this high?
The product is exactly the same, and shipping to Australia is pretty damn cheap (like $50 at most for a 2 week delivery).

It looks to me that adobe are just being greedy. And why not, there are a flood of users who are going to switch over to Premiere soon, but seriously, do you have to be this blatant.

So I say this with a hand on my heart and a tear from my eye…

Adobe, fix your damn pricing.

I sent Adobe a message to say I wasn’t happy about the pricing. They sent me a link to their customer service page if I had a problem with their pricing. This is where I ended up:

I have definitely been exploring a lot of new ways to do things in the last few months. Especially in regards to incorporating more 3D into my existing toolset. This one is no exception:



Oh and if you haven’t already bought the Magic Bullet Suite, maybe this video will convince you too: