Quba HQ

Computer Arts: October 2011 (#193)

I just got the word that my reel is featured in the latest issue of Computer Arts magazine (#193, October 2011). It is a great opportunity for all those of you who are too busy (or lazy) to click a link, to be finally able to view this fine piece of edit.

Simply head out of your home, go to the nearest kiosk, newsstand or bookstore, purchase the new issue, go back home and view the reel from the DVD that comes with the mag. If you happen to be living outside of Europe, you may need to do a special order or travel a few thousand miles, too :) Alternatively, you can always get the digital edition, available for Adobe AIR, iOS, Android and Windows 7 phone – though I am not sure if these include the DVD contents.

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Spin by ASD

Ever since my first Commodore 64, I have been an avid follower of the demoscene. For many years groups like Fairlight, Kewlers, The Black Lotus, Orange, Farbrausch and more recently ASD (Andromeda Software Development) have been pushing the art of realtime graphics into new extremes.

While entertaining to watch however, demos usually had a tendency to lack in the art direction department. The would excel in cool visual effects, pumping more and more graphics at better framerates and higher resolutions – but being primarily created by coders, not artists, the majority were more of a technical showcase rather than an artistic pursuit. In the recent years, the new breed of demos started emerging – one where art and code truly go hand in hand. One that can easily rival the amazing vfx and motion design pieces from the world renown motion design directors.

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Tim Minchin: Storm

Over a year ago I posted a trailer for a fantastic animated short entitled Storm. The film was to be written and performed by Tim Minchin and directed by DC Turner and scheduled for release in 2010. They year has gone and passed and I assumed the film was cancelled. Apparently I haven’t followed it closely enough. The film was released in festivals in 2010 – and in April 2011 it premiered on YouTube.

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Mona Lisa Revisions

I found this one on a Turkish t-shirt site geyikadam.com. It is so spot-on, that I decided to translate it into English and share with you all.

If you have ever worked on a commercial design project, you should get a good laugh out of it.

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Convert time and dates using Wolfram Alpha

Often times I find myself in a need of converting time and date from the US time zones to my local ones. Today I was trying to figure out the net broadcast times for the E3 conferences. The schedule for the first one read Mon 6/14 10:30am PST and I was way too lazy to calculate the time offset for all six events manually.

There are a whole bunch of sites that deal with time conversion, but they are either painfully ugly to look at or week on functionality. Google, as of yet, does not do any time conversions. I decided to try Wolfram|Alpha – the awesome “scientist in a box” from the authors of Mathematica. The result it returned was nothing short of perfect.

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Symphony of Science

While posts on QubaHQ usually revolve around motion graphics, design and gaming, I could not pass an opportunity to promote this fantastic music project I have been listening to pretty much exclusively for the past few days.

Symphony of Science is a project oriented towards bringing the scientific knowledge and philosophy to the public through the medium of music. Lead by musician and producer, John Boswell, SoS remixes quotes from famous scientists and science enthusiasts into electronic music, probably best classified as IDM. The songs are then released in multitude of audio and video formats, from FLAC to MP3, from WMV to YouTube videos.

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Portal for Mac: Free until May 24th

Hello Mac people! It is not too late to still grab your free copy of Portal – probably one of the best games ever made, now available for OSX.

To celebrate the launch of Steam platform for Mac, Valve software made Portal free to all the Mac users until May 24th. They also produced this cute little infographic announcement animation, promoting the… promotion.

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DAN the MAN

If you ever played classic 8-bit platformers, you know the drill. The hero fights monsters, defeats the boss and saves the princess. But what’s next? In video games you simply get a congratulatory message (“The Winner Is You”), but you never get to see how does “Happily Ever After” look like.

Well, thanks to Australian studio JOHO, now we can all learn. Their hilarious animation DAN the MAN is one of the best takes on the 8-bit gaming I’ve seen in a while. And, according to the YouTube comments, the sequel one is on its way! Video after the break.

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Adobe Creative Suite 5 Reveal

So it is done. Adobe officially introduced the world to their Creative Suite 5 today. You can watch the unveiling show at http://cs5launch.adobe.com/.

There are quite a few interesting features in this release, from the impressive content-aware tools in Photoshop to all the new stuff in After Effects. While all these new functionalities are welcome, CS5′s greatest improvement over the previous versions will definitely be the performance boost in many key applications.

Personally, as a motion designer, I feel web and content management (again) received too much attention as opposed to the video tools, but hell, just the fact that AE will now use all of my system memory makes it a worthy release. There is no point in me outlining all the new features and improvements in Creative Suite 5 when all the information is available on Adobe’s site. Head over to http://www.adobe.com/products/creativesuite/ to learn all about it.

Adobe Creative Suite 5 in English is expected to ship mid-May 2010. Other localizations to follow.

After Effects CS5: What’s New

The official unveiling of Adobe’s Creative Suite 5 is still several hours away, but it seems some websites already jumped the gun and released a whole bunch of details regarding this highly anticipated release. Here’s what we know so far.

It’s been a public knowledge that AE CS5 is going to be a 64 bit application only, so no news here. 64bit architecture is going to allow After Effects to use all of the system’s memory resulting in longer cached preview sizes as well as improved handling of high resolution animations (no more crashes when blurring huge layers). In addition, the AE engine had to be rewritten for the new architecture and the new one supposedly gained up to 200% performance increase.

But you already knew all that. Juicy fresh stuff after the break.

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