03.15.10
Posted in misc at 12:49 pm by Seith
Recently I’ve been playing Assassin’s Creed 2 for PC, and I have to say I enjoy it. The artistic direction is excellent, and sometimes (especially during some of the cut-scenes) the facial animation actually conveys some pretty good acting.
But the worst thing about the game is its protection against pirating. Ubisoft has effectively put itself in a position where they turned us (their customers) into little children and themselves into a parental authority figure. Think the analogy’s far-fetched?
1) They demand to know at any moment if we are playing or not. And they check on us every couple of minutes.
2) They make us ask for their consent before we are even allowed to play. Not just once, but each and every time.
3) They can turn off the game (and I mean that literally) at any instant, for whatever reason (out of our control), be it technical or temperamental.
I still can’t fathom how some people in charge at Ubisoft thought this could be a good idea. I’m sorry for stating the obvious, but blatantly invading your customers’ privacy is NOT a step in the right direction from treating them like thieves.
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01.31.10
Posted in 2d, misc, photoshop, update at 11:25 pm by Seith
One method to get a speech bubble in Photoshop is to draw an elliptic selection, add a tail to the bubble by using the polygonal lasso tool, then fill the selection with white. Finally, you add a black stroke effect around it all and hop, you’re done! Well, it actually becomes tedious after the third one… So I wrote this script for Photoshop; all you need to do is draw the ellipse and run the script (as an action). And voila! Instant speech bubble! 
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01.24.10
Posted in animation, misc, update at 5:28 pm by Seith
While digging on my hard drive I found an early development test for “Astroboy” (done quickly, mostly to try the arm rig). Now this particular test was done in pre-production and I haven’t seen the movie yet, but the model has obviously evolved; the proportions ended-up less child-like. Also, the hands don’t seem as huge anymore. I’ll try to post another test later on. By the way, the animation on the movie was directed by a friend of mine, Jakob Jensen. Anyway, enjoy!
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08.16.09
Posted in misc, update at 1:35 pm by Seith
For those of you who might be interested, the official HD trailer for “Despicable Me” (the movie I’m working on at the moment) has been released. I know I’ve tried to keep this site focused on my own personal work, but I thought “Oh well… what the heck”. Obviously, a big kudos to the crew at MacGuff; the guys are doing an excellent job! Here’s the YouTube link…
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04.26.09
Posted in misc, photoshop, update at 5:14 am by Seith
Here is seithSymetrize, a Photoshop script I wrote to facilitate the mirroring of a texture. Let’s say you’ve worked on one side of a texture and you want to mirror it across the vertical axis. You would normally have to first select precisely half of the layer, then copy and paste your selection and finally manually transform it (scale it, in fact) to the left or the right, depending on your needs. That can become tedious if you have to do this very often over a short period of time. So this script automatizes the whole process in one click. Enjoy!
(Instructions to install the script are on the Photoshop scripts page)
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04.06.09
Posted in crysis, misc, update at 12:33 am by Seith
Over the weekend I worked a bit on my Crysis mod “Ghost of a Tale”. I’ve been mostly creating textures and materials, and I feel I’m barely starting to get the hang of it. This is all very temporary but I’m having fun! Anyway, here’s a screenshot to give you an idea of the progress (with a torch flame hovering in mid-air!)…
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12.19.08
Posted in misc, production, update at 9:26 pm by Seith
I’m done with the teaser of the movie! Woohoo! 
It took me a long time as I had to learn much about the whole process. I was already familiar with animation of course, and I knew a bit about modeling and rigging, but I had to work hard to learn about surfacing, lighting and compositing. Well, at least the basics so I could develop a mini-pipeline to take the shots from 2d drawings to 3d animatic to final compositing without too much hassle. And boy was that hard! But it is definitely rewarding to see the scenes and characters coming to “life” which were for almost two years simple figments of my imagination…
The teaser is very short and the music is only a temp track. The real soundtrack you’ll hear in the movie is a beautiful choral piece composed by the very talented Thomas Hjort Jensen.
(Also, at the end it says “2009″, but I’m afraid it’s only wishful thinking!)
In other unrelated big news, I’m happy to announce that I’ll be directing the animation of a movie being produced by Universal in a French studio called Mac Guff Line (located in Paris). So I’ll be moving back to France in the month of January. Exciting times!
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