Saturday, June 30, 2007

I’m calling baloney on this…

Wired.com runs a fluff piece (or should I say “recycles a press release”) about a brand new ‘invention’: Toon Shading in Maya.

A quote…

“Maakie-Mation is a new kind of animation that I invented to convey Tony’s vision,” said director and co-writer Eric Kaplan, who is also a writer for Futurama and honcho of CG animation production studio Mirari Films. “It uses the flexibility and power of CGI, but renders everything in 2-D so it looks like Tony’s strip. No one has done it before.”

I love that they even branded it- “Maakie-Mation”. Behold the genius at work…


YouTube Direkt

(Part of the pilot episode is on YouTube as well. Definitely not for the kiddos.)

Wow. We’ve never seen anything like that before. Nevermind that free toon shaders for Maya have been publicly available on HighEnd3d.com for the last 7 years. And never mind that Maya itself has had built in toon shading solutions for the last 2 and a half years. Now, I admit that the cross hatch ink lines in the texture maps are a nice touch, but they’re hardly ground breaking.

As for the show itself, seems like your typical Adult Swim fare- not really my cup o’ tea.

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