3 Dimensions

Commentary on Phil Nolan's work as a 3D artist

Tuesday, December 25, 2007

Happy Holidays

Merry Christmas and happy assorted other holidays everyone.

posted by Phil Nolan # 3:08 PM 0 Comments

Monday, December 17, 2007

RSS feed

I've added a feed for this blog, so you can now subscribe if you like. Find the link in the upper right corner of this page.

posted by Phil Nolan # 6:19 AM 0 Comments

Thursday, December 13, 2007

Addys

I talked to Kevin Fanning at Shooters about the NCAA project that we both worked on and asked about the Addy award. He didn't go to the event this year, but apparently it was submitted to Baltimore where it won the gold and also Philadelphia where it won two silvers.

posted by Phil Nolan # 3:56 AM 0 Comments

Saturday, December 08, 2007

Addy Awards

I just came across another article about the Addy award Shooters won for the NCAA basketball spot I worked on. The spot is described in the second paragraph with a comment from Kris Magyarits, the creative director I worked with. In addition this article informed me of something, the Addy award that spot won was gold, not silver.

http://forums.creativecow.net/readpost/105/857805

posted by Phil Nolan # 9:48 PM 0 Comments

Thursday, December 06, 2007

Asile FX

My studio just picked up a copy of the Asile FX Vue xStream / Lightwave Integration video tutorials. They cost $50 for the download version. Which is a little high, even for good quality videos. Which brings me to my point. I have gone through the first few videos and am little disappointed.

Firstly the videos are very highly compressed, so they don't look very good and the audio sounds distorted. The thing is, they compressed it so much , but not enough to fit on a CD. They are slightly larger at 750MB, so I have to use a DVD and waste all that space, which could've been used for higher quality videos.

Next is the teacher, Nicholas Pellegrino. Perhaps it's partly due to the nature of xStream and the fact that it doesn't work very well, but in some parts it feels like he really doen't know what he's doing. Like he'll try something and say, "no that didn't work, let's try this... Ah that did it.". Unless this is just his teaching style and it's not obvious enough, I feel like a teacher should really have planned out what he intends to teach and know what will work and what will not before he starts the lesson. Another problem is that he says something, then repeats it several times with different words. A good example is a scene with a transparent object and two objects behind it. and he says something to the effect of "after adjusting that setting you can see through the object. You can see this object behind it, and you can also see this other object behind it". That was a short and simple example, but it gets my point across. He does offer some good information when he gets around to saying it.

Frankly at those prices for this quality I don't think I would buy any videos from AsileFX.

posted by Phil Nolan # 12:33 AM 0 Comments