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.

More details of what else is included in this issue of CA can be found here: http://www.computerarts.co.uk/shop/magazines/computer-arts/october-2011-193. The page features the summary of all the main articles as well as the links to purchase both physical and digital edition.

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.

I would like to share with you one of such pieces: Spin by a Greek demo group Andromeda Software Development, a 1st place winner at Assembly 2011.

You may watch it below via YouTube, or download the code and run it yourself.

If you are new to the demoscene, but the video arose your interest, a good place to start would be the archives of scene.org. In there you will find years worth of demos as well as the information about the latest competitions (and their results). Another good starting point could be AssemblyTV – the official YouTube channel of possibly most well-known demo party (competition).

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.

Running at around 10 minutes, Storm is a fantastic example of witty writing, realized in superb art style and animation. Enjoy!

To learn more about the film, visit its official site at:
http://www.stormmovie.net/

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.

Mona Lisa Revisions

And now I gotta get back to my own project revisions.

Original design and t-shirt (in Turkish):
http://geyikadam.com/ajans-ortami-ve-tasarimcilar-icin-2-tisort-satista/

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.

Sample result by Wolfram|Alpha

Not only has Wolfram|Alpha recognize the string – it also figured out my current location using GeoIP and provided me with local time of the event. It also told me what is my time offset from Los Angeles (-10 hours) and how much time is left until the event. Purely awesome. It made scheduling my meetings around the web conferences a breeze.

If you need to convert time in the zones other than the one you are currently in, you can always use the following syntax: convert 10:30am PST to CET. It will give you all the info you need, but does not currently support dates.

So that does it for a QubaHQ tutorial of the week… just kidding. I will be most likely recording a new AE tutorial tomorrow.

You can use Wolfram|Alpha by going to the following address:
http://www.wolframalpha.com/

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.

Don’t be fooled by the word remix, though. While most of the remixes you may find on YouTube are poorly made, primitive techno tracks based on brain-numbing repetition, created for the purpose of cheap laughs, there is much more to the Symphony of Science. The musical arrangements are done with skill and passion, the samples used for lyrics are carefully chosen and processed, and the auto-tune/vocoder use can easily put artists like Kanye West to shame.

Most important of all – is the message. In this day and age when according to statistics over 65% of people living in the world’s most advanced nation believe that creationism should replace the theory of evolution in education curriculum, I think it is more important then ever to promote the scientific method and appreciate the work and ideas of countless scientists without whom we would not be where we are now.

To quote Richard Dawkins (from the sample used in one of the SoS songs):
There’s real poetry in the real world
Science is the poetry of reality

Symphony of Science: Carl Sagan “A Glorious Dawn” ft. Stephen Hawking (click to play)

At the moment of writing this post, the Symphony of Science project produced five songs/videos and quite a few remixes. According to twitter, the sixth song is ready and soon to be released.

You may visit the project at:
http://www.symphonyofscience.com/

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.

Free Portal for Mac: Trailer

So what are you waiting for? Head over to http://store.steampowered.com/, install Steam and get yourself some free cake game!

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.

DAN the MAN

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.

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.

Roto Brush
This new tool is a combination of Photoshop’s Quick Selection Tool and AE’s tracking. With just a few brush strokes the user can define the keep and drop regions, letting Roto Brush find edges of the object. Once the areas are defined, AE will then chew through the following frames creating the matte according to the set rules.

No tool, of course will replace a skilled rotoscoping artist, but Roto Brush will definitely provide a good starting point for more detailed animated mattes.

Mocha Shape
AE’s integration with the Mocha tracker grows stronger in vestion CS5 with the introduction of Mocha for After Effects v.2 and Mocha Shape Effect. It will now be much easier to import your Mocha tracks, as well as the traveling mattes (either as a layer alpha or animated matte layer).

FreeForm
DigiEffects FreeForm plugin is now bundled with After Effects CS5. For the uninitiated: FreeForm allows you to create 3D wraps of the layer using either control points or displacing it by another layer.

I really dig the native inclusion of most popular plugins in new versions of AE. How about Particluar for CS6?

Adobe Repoussé
Repoussé is Adobe’s new engine for creating basic 3D models: extrusions, bevels, twists, intlations etc. While this is a Photoshop feature, After Effects CS5 will support importing Photoshop’s 3D objects – 3D text, anyone?

Imported 3D objects will obey After Effects’ 3D camera, but will not respond to AE lights – render styles will be set in Photoshop. The video below outlines some of the new additions to Photoshop CS5, including the use of Adobe Repoussé.

Color Finesse 3, Color LUT and Color Management Improvements
After Effects CS5 continues to expand advanced color correction and profiling toolset with these new additions. With the new Color LUT (Look Up Table) feature, you will now be able to import and export color correction profiles (similarly to the way ICC profiles work).

In addition to these, there is a whole bunch of color management improvements, but to be honest with you I am not very good with these, so you will have to look up the changes yourselves :)

RED R3D Support
Similar to the Camera Raw import, only for RED footage. Nuff said.

New Effects and Blending Modes
A few new effects are introduced in CS5, mostly dealing with various methods of color correction. Vibrance will enhance the color saturation of your images, Black&White will turn them into grayscale using controls similar to the B&W effect in Photoshop, while Selective Color will let you do color correction in an old-school CMYK way.

Additionally, Levels got some revisions, bringing it closer to the latest version of its Photoshop counterpart.

The two new blending modes are Subtract and Divide. They are pretty much the polar opposites of Add and Multiply modes. Subtract will be most likely useful for overlaying darker elements on top of the footage with more vibrant results than Multiply but without the color wrapping of Difference. Divide will come in handy for removing color casts (yay!).

One-node 3D Camera
When creating a new camera layer, the user will now be able to decide whether to use old style two-node camera (position + point of interest) or a one-node one (orienting around itself). That should eliminate some headaches people were having with controlling 3D views.

Navigating 3D cameras has been simplified as well, now resembling the methods used in most 3D applications (control keys and different mouse button dragging).

Mask Display Settings
The way masks are displayed can be now modified, including the size of control points. Hopefully grabbing masks should now become much easier (no more constant selecting of wrong layers).

For a full list of changes, check out the Adobe’s What’s New article in the Sources or tune into the unveiling event later today.

Sources:

• After Effects CS5 by Chris and Trish Meyer
  http://provideocoalition.com/index.php/NABpost/story/after_effects_cs5/
• Adobe: What’s new in After Effects CS5
  http://help.adobe.com/en_US/AfterEffects/CS5/Using/WS8269FE00-C552-478b-9204-69AF1B4F3432a.html