Autodesk Educational VFX Package

I am one of those strange people who was able to teach themselves Maya and ZBrush.  It can be done, but it is not easy (admittedly, ZBrush was FAR easier to learn than Maya, but that's beside the point).  That being said, if you are a student (or an employee or affiliate of an educational institution) and would like to learn about 3D modeling, animation and/or video compositing Autodesk has a GREAT deal going on right now: For $200, you can get a 14-month educational license of Maya 2009.  But that's not all!  Act now (actually, I think this deal will be around for a while, so don't impulsively blow money) and you will also receive: Mudbox (a 3D digital sculpting program that is awesome), Toxik (a node-based compositing program that is awesome), Motion Builder (a 3D character animation program that is awesome) and Cleaner XL (which comes with Autodesk everything, whether you want it or not)!  If you weren't able to gather from this paragraph, this is awesome!  Several months ago, it would have cost me more than $300 just to upgrade to Maya 2008.  With the exception of Motion Builder, I have other software that will do much of what these other programs do.  This deal, however, might be too good to pass up.

My favorite place to get educational software is Torcomp.  You can find this deal on other sites such as Academic Superstore.  The license is a few dollars cheaper and a couple months longer at Torcomp/Studica...

http://www.torcomp.com/products/product_detail.cfm?productid=57961

If you're not a student, I'm not sure if there is a bundle like this.  I honestly haven't looked into it because I'm not yet really making money on any of this software so I have no need to have a full license.  Some day, though.  Some day...

ch-ch-ch-changes!

I'm giving The Cutting Room Floor a much-needed makeover. While the "Darkwater" theme that comes as a plugin with WordPress was very nice, I didn't really think that it visually represented me as accurately as it could. I feel that this new imagery does a much better job. The background image is something I made in Maya. I took great care to be as accurate as I could. I measured out a typical piece of 35mm film, complete with Dolby, SDDS and optical soundtracks, accurately measured out the sprocket holes, aspect ratio, etc. For the texturing (which involves the colors, images, and actual "texture"), I made as detailed a reproduction as I could in Photoshop and then applied it to my filmstrips. I then mapped the color channel into the transparency channel and set a slight bump map to accurately portray the ridges of the film emulsion. I rendered the whole thing with mental ray. That was a whole lot of technical! If you understood it, cool. If not, just check out the images and marvel at their accuracy and coolness. :) I've been working on it for a while and just got the time to render it recently. Below- the Photoshop reference image :

Compare that to this image from wikipedia. The most interesting part to make was the soundtrack. The "static" shapes between the sprocket holes contains the information for the Dolby Digital soundtrack (see the little "DD" symbol? that's really there!), the two blueish strips of "noise" on the edges contain the information for the SDDS track and the black and white sine wave patterns are the optical soundtrack, read by a lightbulb in the projector.

Pretty cool, eh? I stuck some countdown leader in the middle of the frames and then deformed the strips and added some cool glowey light and some metallic sphere thingies in a sort of "orbit" around the light (just going back to the astronomy interests). I'd love to hear feedback on it- especially if you find it detrimental to the blog reading experience. I tried to be kind to the eyes and I'm still working on the page layout...