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Mathias Poujol-Rost ✅ · Sunday, 15 January - 12:23
How Did District 9's #VFX Look SO GOOD?
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Light, shadow, reflections, and terror: How a scary game does scary lighting
news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica · Tuesday, 22 November - 17:05 · 1 minute
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Unity purchases Weta Digital’s visual-effects tool suite for $1.65 billion
Kyle Orland · news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica · Wednesday, 10 November, 2021 - 16:53
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It’s a wonderful afterlife: smart, funny Upload is a sheer delight
Jennifer Ouellette · news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica · Saturday, 2 May, 2020 - 18:20 · 1 minute
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Mathias Poujol-Rost ✅ · Saturday, 26 January, 2019 - 16:10
Directed by Sean Dacanay. Produced by Justin Wolfson. Edited by Jeremy Smolnik, with Billy Ward. Click here for transcript . (video link)
A couple of weeks back, we joined up with Glen Schofield of Striking Distance Studios to have him walk us through some behind-the-scenes previews of his studio's upcoming game, The Callisto Protocol . In our series so far, we've explored Callisto's gameplay and its audio design , and this week we're continuing our sneak peek with a look at the look of the game—the lighting and visuals.
Humans are primarily visual creatures, and clever game designers take advantage of that by using a game's visuals as not just a way to show the player what's happening, but also as an opportunity to extend and express the game's style—games, like so many other forms of art, can communicate themes and emotions to a player through constrained use of color or through the emphasis of specific imagery or through the use of light and shadow to emphasize and hide aspects of a scene. And Glen and his crew at Striking Distance—folks like art director Demetrius Leal and lighting director and Dead Space veteran Atsushi Seo—are definitely clever game designers. During the preproduction phase of the game, the team deluged Glen with images showing both visual examples of how they wanted the game's architecture and monsters to look, and also of interesting and effective lighting techniques.
Enlarge / A preciousssss deal for all involved.
Unity, the company best known for its line of popular video game engines , has announced plans to purchase the tech division of the Peter Jackson-led, New Zealand-based visual-effects studio Weta Digital for $1.625 billion in cash and stock.
The acquisition means that Weta's suite of visual-effects tools, popularized in movies like Lord of the Rings , Avatar , and Wonder Woman , will eventually be integrated into Unity's cloud-based workflow and made available to millions of users, the company said in a press release announcing the move . Unity will also acquire the 275 engineers that build Weta's technology and "a library of thousands of incredible assets."
The Weta visual-effects team itself will remain as a standalone entity known as WetaFX, which will still be majority-owned by Jackson. Unity expects that entity to "become Unity’s largest customer in the Media and Entertainment space." Weta Workshop , which focuses on practical effects and props, will also remain separate.
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Enlarge / Nathan (Robbie Amell) is impressed with the digital afterlife service so far on Upload , now streaming on Amazon Prime. (credit: YouTube/Amazon Studios)
A cocky tech-bro discovers that living forever in a digital afterlife isn't quite the paradise he'd envisioned in Upload , a new comedy series from Amazon Prime Video. When the trailer first dropped in March, I pointed out the strong The Good Place vibes, which set a very high bar for any new comedy dealing with the afterlife. Fortunately, Upload is a sheer delight in its own right: smart, funny, warm-hearted, and perfectly paced, trading in The Good Place 's witty takes on moral philosophy for more of an emphasis on class-based social hierarchies.
(Some spoilers below.)
Series creator Greg Daniels—best known for his work on The Office, Parks and Recreatio n, and King of the Hill —purportedly came up with the concept many years ago while working as a staff writer on Saturday Night Live , although Amazon didn't green-light the pilot until 2017, ordering a full ten-episode series the following year. It's definitely got something of that Parks and Recreation vibe. Per the official premise: "In the near future, people who are near death can be 'uploaded' into virtual reality environments. Cash-strapped Nora works customer service for the luxurious 'Lakeview' digital afterlife. When party-boy/coder Nathan's car crashes, his girlfriend uploads him into Nora's VR world."
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