CGSociety :: Special Feature
20 January 2010 by Paul Hellard
While in 2009 the CG industry was active and progressive in many ways, last year saw the demise of many studios working in games and motion pictures. In many ways, 2009 was a watershed year.
The community has now given their view on the year and the burgeoning technologies.
Other suggestions were products, mergers, movies, games, shorts and even influential people. If they pulled enough votes, they made it onto the list. Let's cut to the chase. CGSociety presents the public-voted Top 20 CG happenings of 2009.
Last year was full of predictions of the sweet new technology sweeping into cinemas. The battle lines were drawn a long time ago. For the last few years, the technology has moved into mainstream with studios ramping up production of 3D content. 'Up', 'AVATAR', 'Cloudy with a chance of Meatballs', 'Ice Age 3', 'Toy Story 3', 'A Christmas Carol' and many, many more.
A new job title of stereographer has taken on its true meaning. Hardware manufacturers are also bringing new 3D display technologies to market. The Stereoscopic revolution, whether you like it or not, is steaming ahead. On the home theater side of things, the world's first mass produced full HD 3D-capable monitors are also being released.
Autodesk's Mudbox 2010 has moved closer to the simple digital sculpting space the development team has always wanted to be in. CGSociety reviewed the predecessor to 2010, finding the app a joy to muck around in, just like that lump of clay.
Since bringing in Mudbox and its creators from Skymatter in 2007, Autodesk seems to have allowed them to expand in the areas they wanted it to go in. Which makes me wonder why more people didn't push Mudbox further up this list than it is. We all know there are more players out there doing the same things. Read on.
Batman: Arkham Asylum knocked a lot of people's capes off.
Rocksteady Games used an amazing array of reference for the prison in Arkham from Alcatraz in San Francisco Bay. The Arkham Botanical Gardens are inspired by the Palm House at Kew Gardens in South London.
The game play and spectacular environments in the final game pushed Arkham Asylum to be a standout success game for the year. The Rocksteady crew also used the Unreal Engine for creating the levels and they swear it allowed a level of freedom to experiment without code assistance. "In particular the material editor is very powerful, and the node based system has a huge amount of scope," commented Lead Character Artist Andrew Coombe.
Back at E3 of 2005 Sony announced that Guerrilla Games was busy working on Killzone 2 for the Playstation3. [This was before the PS3 was available.]
Sony also promised that Killzone 2 would radically surpass the graphical face of any Next-Gen title on either the PS3 or the Xbox 360 and a trailer shown at the show was proof. Guerrilla Games and Killzone 2 have been large on our radar this year here at CGSociety. We reported on the game and the amazing work done at Guerrilla.
Then in Ballistic's 'd'artiste: Character Modeling 3', Jan-Bart van Beek of Guerrilla Games takes readers behind the scenes of creating characters for 'Killzone 2' with tutorials on workflows for creating character heads and the creation of the Helghast Sniper character class. If you can, buy the game and the book.
CGSociety devoured the 'Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs' story with relish. This is a comedy inspired by the perennially popular children's book of the same name by Judi Barrett and Ron Barrett, set in the little town of Chewandswallow.
The place is transformed into the ultimate food fight when a young inventor's attempts to turn water into food, works. A bizarre story, doubly so because it is dealt out in delicious 3D.
If you get a chance, go see it in stereo. I'm going for seconds.
