Wacom launches the Cintiq 12WX next month, a widescreen portable Cintiq, smaller and cheaper than its older brother - less than half the price.
Expect the Wacom Cintiq 12WX to be on the wishlist of most artists and designers this year. The 12-inch, 16:10 tablet has an LCD monitor underneath a pressure-sensitive layer that lets you actually draw right on the screen. And lest you think the 12WX is just a scaled down version of the larger 21UX, it also includes tilt and rotation sensitivity on input devices (not the screen), the better to emulate real-life pencils and brushes.

No batteries required—it's all powered over USB. A convertor unit bridges the USB with a DVI or VGA connection.

What's going to set this apart is the price—I think. There isn't a price listed yet on Wacom Europe's page, but if I had to take a wild stab at it, I'd say "less than one thousand dollars." The 12WX seems like Wacom's first step towards bringing the Cintiq line towards broad consumer adoption. More details should be forthcoming before its release next month.

Artists through the ages have been dreamers and creators of fantastic images but have always been constrained by the medium they work in. Liquid sculptures, fractal growths and knotted freeways, are all examples of amazing things that only exist in virtual reality.

This competition celebrates the very essence of the creativity that defines digital art – the ability to create artistically and technically excellent images of things that are impossible in the real world. Digital artists don’t have any barriers to realizing their wildest ideas. They can build whole virtual worlds and render them in a way that makes them almost tangible and embodied with life.
What we want.
Artists are challenged to create images of the most Amazing Creations. We want to see images that capture the essence of something that could only exist in a virtual world. This embodies the most powerful attraction of digital art – its ability to create truly amazing things that can not exist in the real world.

Specifically we want to see exciting new images, that are clearly a product of the digital world. However, we don't just want technically excellent renders that are lacking in artistic beauty. The whole point is to create images that are clearly creations of the digital world but retain the artistic beauty and composition of a traditional painting.

What we don't want.
Fantasy creatures, games characters etc. We feel these are too common in both digital and traditional fantasy art.

Deliverables - Submitting your entry
One image per entry must be uploaded prior to Jan 7th 2008.
Images must be 2560 x 1600 JPEG images – at least 90% JPEG quality.

Entrants must be members of CGTalk or CGSociety. The entry process will walk you through a free signup if you are not already registered.

We strongly encourage entrants to participate in the competition forum as they will benefit from feedback from the community.
Prizes:
Over $21,000 (USD) of prizes in total.
1st Prize: 2 x NVIDIA Quadro FX 5500 cards and 1 week ‘all inclusive' holiday valued at $10,000 (USD).
2nd Prize: NVIDIA Quadro FX 5500 and a $500 (USD) American Express Gift Card.
3rd Prize: NVIDIA Quadro FX 3500 and a $500 (USD) American Express Gift Card.
Visit www.nvidia.com to learn how to enter.

Autodesk 3ds Max 2008 is the latest release of the popular 3d program used in all areas of the entertainment industry. 3ds Max, technically now version 10, adds a lot of speed improvements and useful features, providing more flexibility and performance. With today’s productions demanding shorter schedules but still quality work, this version addresses workflow issues and slow interaction with complex scenes to help meet these goals. It’s out of the box feature set makes it a very versatile application for any production needs. 3ds Max 2008 is available for 32bit and 64bit systems, now also supporting Windows Vista and DirectX 10.

Check your rankings on 17 Google data centers at once
Currently Google has around 40 or so data centers. The Data centers can tell us a lot about how Google works such as giving us an indication of when they are doing an algorithm update or when they are updating their PR pagerank. If you are wondering how your website ranks among the data centers, feel free to use this free tool to search 17 data centers at once.
Click here to use this Google Data Center Tool

It may have started life as a 'figure reference tool for artists', but each new release has taken Poser far beyond that basic remit. The latest version brings a wealth of new features, including lip syncing, transferable poses, multiple undo, multi-threaded rendering and many other tweaks. The biggest news of all, however, is that Poser 7 is now fully Intel native and runs smoothly on new Macs.

No new version of Poser would be complete without a new set of figures, and the male, female and child models in Poser 7 don't disappoint. More realistic than ever, largely due to good polygon smoothing and high-quality photographic textures, the figures are endlessly customizable to produce a huge variety of forms. The male figure now has his genitals in a separate folder, as it were, to prevent them accidentally bursting through his clothing; they're not unloaded by default.

Also included is a variety of additional figures such as cartoon and manga characters, a realistic skeleton complete with optional muscle map, and a range of animals, including a T Rex skeleton for all those who want to recreate Night at the Museum.
Where previous versions of Poser tended towards a set of poses for each figure, version 7 introduces Universal Poses, which can be applied to any human figure. Motion, always a tricky animation element trick to get right, is eased by the new ability to copy and loop frames within an animation - and to save them to the library for reuse.

Lip syncing was previously available for Poser as a third-party product, and it's good to see this much-needed feature incorporated into the main application. Once a sound file is imported, the current Poser figure will move its mouth in time with the speech: the mouth shapes make a good stab at reproducing the sound of the phonemes. Users can drag a slider to control the strength of the enunciation - the degree to which the mouth opens and closes for each sound - as well as the rate of eye blinking. Automatic eye, eyebrow and head motion synchronized to the speech adds to the effect; and sliders for anger, disgust, fear, joy, sadness and surprise allow each speech to be further customized.

Last fortnight, Google reduced the Page Rank of Stanford Daily from 9 to 7 because that website was selling text link ads. It was later confirmed by Google that PageRank scores were being lowered for some sites that sell links.

Well, that may have picked up steam as Google PageRank values of several prominent sites have taken a hit during this week. Some examples:

Washingtonpost.com - from 7 to 5

Statcounter.com - from 10 to 8 (and 6 in some other Google data centers)

MasterNewMedia.org - from 7 to 6 (and 4 in some other Google data centers)

Problogger.net - from 7 to 4

Blogherald.com - from 6 to 4 is some Google data centers.

TechCrunch, BoingBoing, NYTimes and other popular web properties that do not sell text links have retained their Google PageRank score.

Note: Google PageRank can be different across different data centers as the new scores may not have been propagated to them.

If the PageRank of a site is lowered by Google, there may not be any visible dip in search engine traffic immediately but that could change in the long run. Use rel=”nofollow” if are to sell text links on a site and avoid getting penalized by Google.

Austrian artist Michael Sormann spent 10 years working in Vienna's computer gaming industry and has only just started his career as a freelance 3d artist and, judging from his success so far, it seems Michael has chosen the right path. Most recently he has worked on several TV advertisements in Germany and completed the short â?œTheme Planet: Bunny Situation for Autodesk presentation: Siggraph. In a recent interview Michael answered a few questions for us about creating his first short film.

IT'S ART: Can you please tell us more about your short "Theme Planet: Bunny Situation" How long have you been working on it?

Michael Sormann: All in all I've worked on this whole project for about 5 years now, and only in my sparetime of course. Not all of the scenes and characters I have created for "Theme Planet" are shown in this short film. I see "Theme Planet" as this huge world and I plan to continue building scenes and characters for it.

IA: What motivated you to work on such a huge project?

MS: I just wanted to create a big world as a concept and my long term goal is to create a TV series or a movie out of all of it. When Autodesk asked me if I wanted to create a short film to be shown at the Siggraph I agreed without hesitation and began making a story board using my existing characters and scenes and created this short film.

IA: What was the first idea you wanted to develop when you started to work on it?

MS: When I came up with the concept for "Theme Planet" about 5 years ago I only wanted to place cartoony characters in a huge, kind of surreal, roller coaster theme park. It is from this idea that I started to build sceneries and characters and began thinking about their place and function in this world. It is from this setting that I started to think about the short film.

IA: What was the most important thing you wanted to achieve through this short?

MS: I think it was a kind of a breakthrough for me to complete a short film from the beginning to the end.

Web design is an art form and something that should be considered one of the most important determinants for the way you will do business in the future. In our Tutorials section, you will find free video tutorials we are sure you'll enjoy designing and developing web sites with these simple tutorials and tips. From website design tips and ideas to the simple steps to take to use Macromedia Dreamweaver tutorials, Macromedia Flash tutorials, Adobe Photoshop tutorials, Adobe Illustrator tutorials, HTML, CSS, PHP, Java just to name a few. We will update our free tutorials section frequently so please visit us again.

Web design is the art of putting individual design pages to be displayed on the world wide web. Using tools such as HTML, Dreamweaver, Photoshop, Illustrator and Macromedia Flash to construct web pages, websites and web applications is as simple as learning to use the tools. Web design can be an art form where creative designers bring ideas, dimensions, navigations and the creative edge to grasp the attention of the world.

Although web design can be something every individual can accomplish by learning the right tools, it is still considered an art form and to construct a unique design, a powerful look and feel, one surely must have the creative edge for without creativity, the medium will perish.

This column is about Web design—really, it is—though it may at times seem a bit distant and distracted. In my opinion, any good discussion about design begins with the fundamentals. Almost by definition, the primary tenets around which any field is based are universal: they can be applied to a variety of disciplines in a variety of ways. This can cause some confusion as principle is put into practice within the unique constraints of a particular medium.

Web design is a relatively new profession compared to other forms of design, due to the youth of our medium. As with any design discipline, there are aspects of the Web design process that are unique to the medium, such as screen resolution, additive color spaces and image compression. But too often these more unique details override our sense of the bigger picture. We focus on the fact that it is Web design and push aside core design concepts—concepts that can that make any project stronger without interfering in the more technical considerations later on.

Tired of making web sites that work absolutely perfectly but just don’t, well, look very nice? Using The Principles of Beautiful Web Design, you’ll see just how easy it can be to create aesthetically pleasing and usable web site designs.

This gorgeous, full-color book will guide you through the complete design process from getting inspiration and sketching ideas out through to choosing a color scheme, designing the layout, and selecting effective imagery.

Throughout, the focus is on simple and practical techniques that anyone can use – you don’t need to have gone to art school or have artistic flair to create stunning designs using the methods outlined in this book.
You’ll follow along as author and design guru Jason Beaird creates a complete web site layout as the book unfolds using the techniques that you’ve learned.

The book’s full-color layout and large format (8” x 10”) make this book a pleasure to read.

Labels: web design