Many of us at Zoom (correction: MOST) have been Apple fans for quite some time. The video tribute below was created by Transparent House and the animation was done using 3D’s Max and V-Ray Render. Shockingly enough, the entire process took no more than 10 days to complete. Without tooting our own horn too much, the tribute brings to mind our own Zoom Creates Reel, which is quite possibly why I find it so darn attractive.
On a side note, the presentation of the products is beautiful and shows the genius progression of a company started in a garage that has grown into an empire.
Yesterday our amazingly talented, patient, smart, nerdy, impatient, committed, ingenious, thoughtful, creative, resourceful and brilliant development team put the finishing touches on the Zoom Creates self-promo reel. These guys are absolutely unbelievable. We described our vision for the reel and they told us: “That’s impossible. You can’t do that. The technology doesn’t exist. You cannot change the laws of physics. We will need super-computers, expensive software, years to write code, more chips, salsa and milkshakes than you can afford.” Then, five minutes later (slight exaggeration) came back to us with a solution–an ingenious solution: open-source software. The only hitch was they had to teach themselves how to use it. And that they did. They figured out how to use Blender for the 3d animation and Kdenlive for the video post processing. Sprinkle in some Flash and great ideas of their own (watch the mouse pointer jump from one panel to the next and the animated atom) and there is no stopping these guys.
They even used math! Lots of math. That was the most mind-boggling thing I witnessed. I like math and all but if it were me putting this thing together, I think I would have approached it more organically, finding the music then individually timing and positioning the pieces. Not these guys. After the look and feel/animation comps were completed, they looked at the music, the number of pieces and the frame rate etc. and gave each piece a number and had it all laid out on a table with little pieces of paper. Independently, Kurtis worked on the music while Kris positioned all the pieces and when they put them both together, it was like magic. The animation synced up with the music almost perfectly. It was unbelievable. These guys know what they talking about. Well done, lads.
This entire project has been such a great team effort. Everyone here at Zoom Creates contributed. The countless hours of concepting, discussing, designing, scheduling, production, learning, listening, laughing and collaborating have truly produced a project to be proud of. Not only does it show off some of Zoom’s best work, it is a portfolio piece in itself.
Since I was a kid, I have always been a fan of Dutch graphic artist M.C. Escher‘s visual paradoxes. I am still very intrigued by his altering the logic of space and dimension. Emigre has just released Priori Acute, a typeface that takes its cues from some of his work. These characters are impossible drawings that rely on the brain’s insistence upon using visual clues to construct a three-dimensional object from a two-dimensional representation. This is the idea behind Roger Penrose’s impossible triangle.
This is just a display typeface that would be great for headlines, initial-caps or possibly logo design. FUN!
It seems everyone here insists on torturing me with holiday music. I don’t hate it, I just don’t really like it and I definitely do not need to listen to it every day for three weeks. I can block it out with my big headphones and my own heavy metal holiday meltdown mix including Black Sabbath’s Snow Blind and Judas Priest’s Evening Star and Slayer’s Jesus Saves. Festive, eh?
Anyway, I ran across this video of Mobile Mobile an interactive installation by James Theophane and it caused me take a break from my usual metal massacre, get inspired and actually enjoy a traditional holiday song.
Mobile Mobile is a large sculpture made of recycled mobile phones that hangs in the lobby of LBi, a marketing and technology agency in the UK. The sculpture plays Choir of the Bells when you tweet it. You can also play it live like a great big circular piano thing with your keyboard. Check it out!
That tree I posted a while ago wasn’t that cool. Here’s some more stuff so you can see just how good we are getting. The first video is one that I made for my lady friend. It’s pretty cute.
This next video is one that Kris did. Those diamonds sure are pretty.
These are still just some silly examples, but the more we mess with Blender, the more we like it.
Justin, with his Android phone, will shrug his Google-loving shoulders and say “who cares?”, but I’m excited. My iPhone just got a new App this morning called Robotvision, a piece of Augmented Reality technology that overlays real-time business and restaurant information, as well as other fun stuff, onto my phone’s 3GS camera view.
I hold my iPhone up, look for, say, Bars and Restaurants within a mile, and BAM! Flags showing the nearest options hover in front of me. Tap on a restaurant to get the address, driving directions through the map app, or to call with the oft-forgotten phone functionality that my gadget possesses. Tap to search bing and get a summary of their hours, ratings, photos of the place, etc. Lay the iPhone down and a map view appears, all of the tagged locations raining down in pin drop formation.
I can also see all of the nearest Tweets and Flickr photos with a click of a button. Less useful, but novel and fun.
This is a preview of the Augmented Reality of our future. Human vision? Bah! It’s time for Robotvision.
We here at Zoom Creates have been getting all kinds of interesting work lately. Some of this new work has led us down the path of animating in the third dimension. Naturally, we wanted to take a good look at some of the tools out there that could help us reach our goal.
First, because the dev team here is a mixed Linux/Windows environment, we took a look at the open source Blender project (www.blender.org). This is quite the powerhouse of software at our fingertips, but the UI is daunting to say the least. Kris tried out the 64 bit version on his Windows 7 machine, and ran into some serious road blocks with some of the different export file types. I downloaded version 2.49 from the Debian repositories and it worked without a single problem (nice going Linux). While Kris was struggling to get his environment up and running, I decided that I would follow some tutorials and make something.
I decided that something should be a tree. Trees are good for first time 3D modeling, as they have a lot of layers to them. You’ve got the bark, the leaves, the multiple layers of branches, etc. I made life easy on myself and downloaded and compiled ngPlant. It’s an open source program that helps you create the basic structure of a tree very easily. After building my tree, I imported it into Blender and added my textures. what you see to the left is my finished product. It’s far from perfect, it could use some smoothing, some better lighting and reflections, and could be filled out a bit better, but hey, it’s pretty cool for a few hours worth of work.
Meanwhile, Kris was still having trouble, so he decided that he should check out 3ds Max. He used this software a few version numbers ago, and is working with the trial version now to see if it’s the right tool for the job. We’ll see.
Let us know in the comments what your favorite 3D modeling program is.
Justin, with his Android phone, will shrug his Google-loving shoulders and say “who cares?”, but I’m excited. My iPhone just got a new App this morning called 
We here at Zoom Creates have been getting all kinds of interesting work lately. Some of this new work has led us down the path of animating in the third dimension. Naturally, we wanted to take a good look at some of the tools out there that could help us reach our goal.
