Toon Boom Tour

26th July -4th August 2010

Following the success of our last year's event, Touchvision are 
hosting another exciting evening with Toon Boom in July/August.

Who must attend:
Flash animators, Storyboard artists, Advertising agencies, Students,
Educators, Post Production studios.

What is on the agenda:
Education and students workshop from 16:00 - 18:00pm
Professionals Presentation  18:00 - 20:00pm

In addition to a presentation on new products and Customer
showcases we will be hosting a talk with Alan Munro of ARF Studio
who will be taking us through ToonBoom's exciting alternative to
Flash animation.

Come along for fun, food and drinks with fellow animators!

Dates:

Durban
Monday 26th July
Location: CFAD. Centre for Fine Art, Animation and Design,201 Salbany House, 50 Albany GroveAs part of the "The Art of Animation"Workshop at the Durban Film Festival
10h00-12h00 Basics of animation. Drawing and painting for animation. Led by NandaSoobben and Zayne Nakamura.Also Featuring Toonboom's Animate with Alan Munro and Harry Ravelomanantsoa
12h00-13h45 Panel discussion based on the first session.
14h00-15h30 Screening of DIFF short animations Great Exceptions (Romania),
Dreaming a Whole Life (Spain) together with CFAD student and lecturer animations

Johannesburg
Wednesday July 28
Location: Refinery Building, Block C, Wedgewood Office Park,
Muswell Road South, Johannesburg.
4-6 pm (educators and students)
6-8 pm (professionals)

Cape Town
Wednesday August 4
Location: 3rd Floor Hill House, 43 Somerset road, De Waterkant,
Cape Town.
4-6 pm (educators and students)
6-8 pm (professionals)

RSVP to This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it

Legacy promotion

Valid till July 15th 2010, a 30 % discount on the following Autodesk qualified software.

ToonBoom Animate Pro

Recently released, Toon Boom Animate Pro combines state-of-the-art vector technology, real-time animation tools and nodal compositing to simplify the conception of complex effects. With its easy-to-use interface, non-destructive and resolution independent workflow, featuring a new and unique 3D space environment Animate Pro delivers incredible power at an economical price.

Contact  This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it for a quote or to purchase a bundle at this amazing price !!! 

Xena LHI from AJA released

The highly anticipated XENA LHi has now started shipping.

The XENA LHi is R15,340.00 inc vat, and its convenient and popular KLHi-BOX breakout box is R3,580.00 inc vat.
XENA LHi is a powerful PCIe card for SD and HD I/O on Windows, supporting the newest Adobe CS4 applications and workflows, as well as eyeon Fusion, and Autodesk Combustion. XENA LHi offers the highest quality analog and digital interfaces, including 10-bit HDMI 1.3, 3G/HD/SD SDI, component analog and much more. With this powerful connectivity, plus our 10-bit realtime up/down/cross-conversion, XENA LHi bridges your multi-format workflows on Windows XP and Vista.

Autodesk Product Suites

Autodesk Crossgrade Suite promotions now on..click here for pricing.

The Autodesk product Suites gives artists, production facilities and educators access to more creative tools at a cost savings of more than 35 percent*, when compared to purchasing each product license separately. Used together, the products in these Suites help artists increase creative capability and optimize productivity.

―Autodesk is introducing affordable Suites of its popular 3D tools to better help artists create innovative entertainment in today’s tough economic conditions,‖ said Stig Gruman, vice president, Autodesk Digital Entertainment Group.
―The Suites significantly expand artists’ capabilities by providing them with an amazing range of creative tools – from highly-detailed modeling and sculpting to advanced real-time animation – so that they can tackle creative problems in new ways.
Autodesk is introducing the Autodesk Entertainment Creation Suites and the Autodesk Real-Time Animation Suites for commercial use.

The company has also launched the Autodesk Education Suite for Entertainment Creation for postsecondary educators, and Autodesk Animation Academy 2010 for secondary schools.

Autodesk Entertainment Creation Suites
The flagship Autodesk Entertainment Creation Suites offer customers a choice of either Autodesk Maya 2010 or Autodesk 3ds Max 2010 software, together with both Autodesk Mudbox 2010 and Autodesk MotionBuilder 2010 software. Mudbox helps artists to sculpt highly detailed models more quickly and intuitively. MotionBuilder provides artists with a real-time animation engine for more interactive creative feedback and efficient handling of large amounts of animation data. With Autodesk FBX 2010 data exchange technology, the Suites provide a cohesive, efficient pipeline. The complementary toolsets enable artists to better handle tough production challenges and achieve higher-quality results, more efficiently and cost-effectively. For more information, visit Entertainment Creation Suites.

Autodesk Real-Time Animation Suites
The Autodesk Real-Time Animation Suites are designed for animation-intensive productions. These Suites also offer a choice of either Maya 2010 or 3ds Max 2010 software, in addition to MotionBuilder 2010 software. MotionBuilder provides animators with a real-time 3D engine and specialized animation toolset to more quickly and efficiently create, manipulate and process large amounts of animation data. For more information, visit Realtime Animation Suites

Smoke OSX

Smoke 2011 -Now on the Mac.


Dont just edit..Finish

How many times have you had to outsource part of a project because you didn’t have the tools or time to finish a challenging composite or solve a technical problem? Maybe the schedule was too tight for your existing workflow; maybe you weren’t able to work fast enough; or perhaps your tools just didn’t have the creative capability you needed.

Meeting these challenges is what Autodesk® Smoke® software was designed for – and now it’s available on the Mac® computer.

Smoke 2011 for the Mac OS® X platform helps you keep entire creative projects in house with an end-to-end creative workflow that delivers the speed and interactivity you need to finish faster. With Smoke, you gain the advantage of an integrated finishing suite that lets you move easily between conform, visual effects, and color correction in a single application. And by adding Smoke to your existing creative cut workflow, you can unleash your creative potential and grow your business organically.

From award-winning keying to intuitive color correction to true 3D compositing – Smoke provides the tools you need to own the creative of any project that comes through your door.

Turtle 5.1 for Maya 2010

Illuminate Labs today proudly presents the release of the brand new Turtle 5.1

Gothenburg, Sweden – January 12th, 2010 – Illuminate Labs™, creators of world leading lighting solutions for the games industry, today announced the release of the new Turtle™ 5.1 version for Autodesk Maya 2010.

Read more: Turtle 5.1 for Maya 2010

VRay Service packs

Chaos Group announce the availability of the new V-Ray for Maya 1.50 SP1: the first Service Pack after release with significant improvements and modifications, including support for V-Ray Fur and Maya Hair, also the V-Ray Light Dome texture and environment textures are now visible in Maya's viewport.
V-Ray for Maya now supports reflection occlusion in V-Ray Dirt texture. V-Ray for Maya 1.50 SP1 is compatible with Autodesk Maya 2011 and all current V-Ray for Maya users may upgrade to new Service Pack for FREE.

Service pack 2 of V-Ray RT 1.5 for 3ds Max is available for download . It is fully compatible with the new Autodesk 3ds Max 2011 as well as with our most recent release of V-Ray for 3ds Max, 1.5 SP5

New features included in this newest service pack:

• Options to turn on/off rendering of proxy objects, X-Ref scenes and particles!
• Support for stereoscopic rendering with different preview types (anaglyph, interlaced, checker, dual-window)!
• Adaptive sampling support with the ability to stop the RT once noise has cleared to some level!

For more features and to arrange a demo please click here

Announcing Autodesk 2011 product releases

New 2011 Autodesk Product  Releases

See how the upcoming Autodesk Digital Entertainment Creation (DEC) releases can help you raise the creative bar and improve production efficiency.

Autodesk 3ds Max 2011: Breaking the Rendering Barrier

3ds Max 2011 features a powerful new node-based material editor, the feature most requested by 3ds Max users, and a high-quality hardware renderer that provides near production quality results 10 times faster than traditional rendering techniques on common graphics cards. It also offers a tightly integrated full-featured high dynamic range compositing system, based on Autodesk Toxik technology, as well as enhanced tools and workflows for creating and texturing models, animating characters and viewing high-quality images interactively, which help to significantly increase productivity.

Autodesk Maya 2011: One Maya. More Value.

On the heels of the Maya 2010 makeover last summer, Maya 2011 software offers several breakthrough capabilities. It features an invigorated customizable user interface, enhanced tools for character animation including non-destructive live retargeting, high-performance display of large scenes in the viewport, new 3D editorial capabilities for pre-visualization and virtual production workflows, integrated color management, asset structures for pipeline connectivity and improved rotoscoping. Also, Maya 2011 is now available for Snow Leopard, the 64-bit Mac OS X operating system.

Autodesk Softimage 2011: High-Quality Characters and Effects in Less Time

Softimage 2011 introduces innovative new rendering and animation tools that help artists create more complex, high-quality characters and effects in less time. The software offers a new advanced shading architecture and editing environment, an innovative rigging paradigm with support for kinematics in ICE (Interactive Creative Environment), and automated lip-synching in the Face Robot facial animation toolset.

Autodesk MotionBuilder 2011: Now More Easily Integrated into Production Pipelines

Offering significantly improved interoperability with Maya 2011 and 3ds Max 2011, MotionBuilder 2011 now integrates more smoothly and reliably into production pipelines. Skinning and blendshape deformations are now calculated on the graphics processing unit (GPU) for improved performance. The in-viewport experience is significantly more interactive, and playback is many times faster, further enhancing the software’s capabilities as a real-time virtual production system.

Autodesk Mudbox 2011: Powerful New Tools and Workflows

Mudbox 2011 delivers new tools for helping deform and pose models. It also offers new image adjustment brushes and blend modes for paint layers, Vector Displacement map extraction, the ability to create higher-quality turntables, and enhanced file transfer with Maya and Adobe Photoshop.

Autodesk HumanIK 4.5 Middleware: Technology for believable characters

Autodesk HumanIK animation middleware is a run-time solution for full-body inverse kinematics and retargeting that enhances existing animation systems, allowing characters to interact dynamically and realistically with their environments. Autodesk HumanIK 4.5 improves ease of use with an artist friendly integration into the Unreal Engine and a Characterization plug-in for creating and validating characters in Maya.

Autodesk Kynapse 7 Middleware: Put the Brain in your Game

Autodesk Kynapse middleware is a world leading, production-proven artificial intelligence solution that has been used in over 100 games. This high-performance AI engine supports complex dynamic 3D pathfinding, spatial reasoning, team co-ordination, and automatic data generation. Kynapse 7 is easier to use, with new pathdata generation, improved tuning and profiling, simplified integration and configuration, as well as off-the-shelf behaviors

Autodesk FBX 2011: Offering a Better Way to Connect

Autodesk FBX 2011 asset exchange technology helps facilitate higher-fidelity data exchange between Autodesk software and certain third-party applications. The open format provides new support for additional third-party and proprietary applications. In addition, games developers using Epic Games’ Unreal Engine 3 will be able to import FBX files directly into the Unreal Editor. Developers can now use the Python programming language to integrate FBX technology into pipelines not based on C++.

GDC Event

Check out the “on-demand” material from Games Development Conference. Autodesk have recorded 2011 product demos, presentations from extremely talented and valued guests, and lots more content from the show. http://area.autodesk.com/gdc#ondemand

Community

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V-Ray in South Africa