All I want for Chrismas...

At long last, the first teaser trailer of James Cameron's Avatar is released on apple.com . For those not in the know, there has been a lot of anticipation for Cameron's upcoming masterpiece. Judging from the reaction of those lucky enough to attend a screening of a short clip some few weeks ago, for good reason too.

Inferring from the tidbits of information found on the Internet, and from the teaser trailer, the story is about a crippled soldier (Sam Worthington) who has his consciousness transferred to a blue alien being, or an avatar. As to why they did that I'm not sure, but like Titanic there is suppose to be an epic love story with another female alien amidst a war between the aliens and the humans.

The film was shot in 3D (As in stereoscopic), though I'm not sure I want to watch it with some thick, heavy polarized glasses after the less than pleasing experience with another 3D film.

Anyway, you can watch the trailer here, or just look at the screenshots below.

Spaceships and mechs, whats not to like?


Feeling a bit blue, are we?


cue snarling, angry alien


Just from the trailer, this must be the most emotionally convincing animated crying scene I have ever seen.

You jump, I jump?

Needless to say, I'll be looking forward to watch this on the big screen come this Chrismas.

Durian, durian

The Durian Project, another open movie project by the Blender Foundation, is now opened for pre-orders.

Considering the significant quality jump between their previous open movie projects: Elephants Dream (The Orange Project) and Big Buck Bunny (The Peach Project), I'll be eagerly following this new endeavor. Looks like this time around they will be going for a action-packed fantasy setting.

On a side note, Blender is shaping up to be a fantastic production tool.

On another side note, The working title is making me crave for durian.

Trees of life

Recently I came across a simple but cool little app called ngplant designer, an L-system implementation that is programmed specifically to generate 3D trees and plants.

The app is simple enough and it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure it out. Just spend a few minutes with it and you'll be churning out trees in record time.

The resulting mesh can be exported as an OBJ file to be imported to the 3D app of your choice. The UVs are readily laid out so all you have to do is slap on the texture images with some minor tweaks to further tailor it to your heart's content. While it is perfectly capable of modeling leaves as well, it does slow down dramatically when you reach a certain level of branching, yet the leaves density is still not quite there yet. So I imported the mesh and used the branchs' vertices to clone cardboard leaves , duplicating to achieve the desired density.

The trees above took around 10 minutes each from ngplant to rendering in Lightwave3D, complete with textures and leaves