Image compositing is a common practice in digital art and advertising. But often the crazy extent of it is completely invisible. Like the image above, which is made of a few dozen separate pictures. This GIF—posted to Reddit—peels back the layers of one meticulously crafted scene.
Here is a great addition for your man cave/game room; OpenPool. This new interactive device will make one of the oldest non-tech games out there extremely high tech and you will have the most talked about game rooms in town. OpenPool takes an otherwise normal pool table and turns it into a hot bed of visual effects. An example of this is shown on their website is called the “Pond” effect, it makes the table look as thought you are playing on water rather than felt.
How this works is through two Kinects, a projector, pocket detectors , and collision detector. The Kinects follow the ball movement, the projector displays the visual effects on the table, the pocket detectors detect when a ball is made into each pocket and displays visual effects, and the collision detector uses a microphone to detect when balls collide to provide a certain visual effect for that as well.
Another really cool thing they have done is made this open source. They have made you the visual effects coordinator for your own game. So sit down, write some code and you have bragging rights to all your friends.
They have started a Kickstarter campaign where you can get one of the full systems for a $5000 donation. Or for a $1000 donation you can get what they are calling a DIY kit which is the software and projector mount. If you have the bucks to spend on this system and are looking for an addition to you game room, this is the thing to have.
via Technabob
Pool tables come in hundreds of different styles, but if you really want to make your setup unique, check out OpenPool. It’s an augmented reality system that lets you project visual effects on the bed that react to the motion of the balls.
OpenPool is an open source program that uses a Kinect sensor to track the balls on the table, then feeds the visual effects to a projector mounted above the table. OpenPool also has an optional complementary device that triggers additional visual effects when a ball sinks into a pocket.
OpenPool isn’t for small time players though. You have to pledge at least $5,000 (USD) on Kickstarter to get a full OpenPool kit, which includes a PC, a Kinect and a projector – and that doesn’t include the pool table. You can also get a DIY kit – basically just the software and a mount for the projector – by pledging at least $1,000. Masse your browser to the OpenPool website to see additional information as well as more demo videos.
[via Gadgetify]
Ironically enough, in 2013 the studio responsible for the crazy CGI tiger in Life of Pi won the Oscar for best visual effects just 11 days after declaring bankruptcy. Its story—seen in the short doc above—is indicative of a larger problem in the suffering VFX industry. Adding to that, the artists and animators behind The Desolation of Smaug are picketing the Academy Awards tonight.
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It’s been like this for some time now but nothing is ever real in movies anymore, it’s just all special effects. Even that wall of that building that’s out of focus in the background and completely forgettable was generated with a computer. That’s why it’s almost way more interesting to see the behind the scenes computer work—the VFX reel—of movies than to actually see the movie. Like this.
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If you watched Thor: The Dark World, you surely remember the epic sequence that kicked off the movie. The opening battle did a great job in setting the tone and looked absolutely incredible. Blur Studios, the shop who did the visual effects for the prologue, lifts the curtain a bit to reveal how they made it in this video. You see green screens and nothingness turn into geometric shapes and layers which turn into a thrilling movie. What a ride.
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If you watched Pacific Rim, you’d know how incredible the giant mechs looked and how unforgettably beautiful the prologue that provided the backstory for the movie was. And though ILM did most of the VFX in the film, Guillermo del Toro’s Mirada studio was the team responsible for the effects in the prologue. Here’s how they created that magnificent world. Yeah, let’s watch the movie again. [Mirada Studios]
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