Antics 3d Pre-vis Tool is Amazing

Generally, I try to title my blog entries with something clever – something that might not make sense till the entire entry has been read. This is a practice shunned by those trying to get the most readers possible. Rightfully too; people looking through the various feeds, and google searches, etc. – would have no idea what the heck "The Old Grind", "Itchy Fingers on Keyboard", or "Partial Reveal" are about. I don't care as I'm not obsessing about building a reader base or anything of the like. Not at the moment, at least. Ironically, the most frequent searches taking people to this blog are for the ME7ERG Ergohuman office chair (which is the incredibly great chair I'm sitting on now as I write this) and Miniwax Polyshades (awful product btw), which I described when I was building a DVD shelf.

I break my tradition of obscure blog titles because I DO want people to surf to this entry – to learn more about this product.

I'm currently pre-visualizing several scenes from the movie I'm in pre-production on (to be known from now on as The Diamond Chasers) and have to report – this is one of the coolest pieces of software I've used in a long time. I'm excited in the same way I was when I moved from tape to digital editing with audio so many years ago; the same feeling as going from a typewriter to a word processor. This is a radically important piece of software. It works and it works well. It not only makes it possible to visualize a movie before it's made, it enables one to really practice directing; honing visualizations or creating entirely new ones one that might never have been thought of on set - where the ever present knowledge of cash vanishing into the ether rightfully stifles the creative musings of a director in flux.

Incorporating ik (inverse kinetics), lighting, character movement – as well as gaming logarithms AND some AI, this stuff is nuts. It's a big program and it does bog down the computer after a while, but man o man… so cool. I am not a 3D person, as I previously wrote, but this software really allows people who don't do much with 3D to avoid the mind-numbing modeling and other work, and get right to the creative stuff – creating a scene.

I will be putting the actual pre-vis online when it is finished, but for the moment – I tease with twenty seconds of part of it. There's still geometry crashing through itself, lighting and shading is super basic and still in test mode, timing isn't right, I'm still playing with camera angles – and it's obviously silent – but it gives an idea of what can be done with this incredible program.