I went to the Jungfraujoch today. I went there for the first time in my life. It was very impressive. There’s a lot of technology involved in transporting that many people from 2061 m above sea level to 3471 m. Especially thinking of that the train track was built between 1896 and 1912 pretty much by hand. (Infos on the Junfraubahn)
It is very magical to be so close to the legendary tip of the Eiger but the FrenchFries smell in the air drops one back to the touristic grounds in no time…
The Postcard is done and goes to the print shop tomorrow.
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The website of the art exhibition that is organized by Vera Liechti and runs from the 2. of May until tha 16. of May 2009 at the Panoramastrasse 1 in Thun went live.
Full Frame Studios is involved as webmaster and exhibitor.
The re-design of the website for the professional gardener supply company gvz_rossat ag/sa goes online. The site uses a Adobe Flex Accordion as navigation and is bilangual.
Back in the day flash movies were really hype. Here’s the flash header that I created for this website.
Fallback or ‘alternate’ content goes here.
This content will only be visible if the SWF fails to load.
Here’s a little flash anim posted for historical reasons and sharing.
It’s explaining different operations that can be done in BurstMode.
Left Mouse Button = Object Manipulation
Middle Mouse Button = Camera Manipulation
Right Mouse Button = Burst Fly Mode
Check out the Flash below. Beware it loads for a while…
I wrote up an article one day because I am constantly getting annoyed by the ignorance of producers and animators towards the legacy of Godtfred Kirk Christiansen the son of the founder of the LEGO Group. To me the LEGO figure is molded with rigid plastic. Bringing those figures to live by deforming them destroys the look and feel. Read it here…
Now this Intro page to the upcoming LEGO 3D Digital Universe is probably the worst I have ever seen. Watch the mini figure in red dancing and bowing, errrmm… hitting his head to the floor. And mind the broken geometry on the arm when he’s waving…
Here’s a screencapture (1.8 MB QuickTime movie) of the LEGO Universe Intro (In case it changed…)
Here’s a more elaborate 3rd party article on the LEGO Universe followed by a very good comment written by a fellow co-worker at SPU Darwin and a dear friend of mine Christian Greuel. (NOTE: This is coming from the web archive website. Please be patient, it will load for a while.)
P.S. This text, nor any text on this web site are related, recognized or endorsed by/to the Company “LEGO® Group”. LEGO® is a trademark of the LEGO Group of companies.
Two of the biggest challenges in creating watch animations are that most likely if you get to animate a watch it means it doesn’t exist yet. So you got to cobble together the look of the real material in that particular shape and finish. The other challenge is the that most watches are only visible because they reflect their environment. Now to do that for still shots is somewhat easier than animations because, even in real life, reflections on such a small object can become erratic and you end up animating the environment which can make the 3D scene somewhat complex.
Here’s the three 3D animation we made as freelancers for MDI Production in Neuchatel/Switzerland in collaboration with two freelancer animators from France, Geoffrey Dupuy (Storyboards, 3D animation) and Nicolas Parreira (3D animation, Expression setup, materials, rendering). The AfterEffects work was done by Mathias Schmid who was in his last weeks of his apprenticeship as a media designer at MDI.
I was supervised the project for Franco. COnverted and prepared all the models from CAD to Maya. My main focus was on animating, texturing, lighting the Porsche Design Worldtimer and i was responsible for rendering all the animations on the 30 CPU render farm. I basically slept next to 8 PC’s setting the alarm clock every 2 hours. Yes, it was hot and noisy.
Watch Animation – 2007 – Porsche Design "WorldTimer" from Alex Furer on Vimeo.
Watch Animation – 2007 – Eterna "Vaughan Big Date" from Alex Furer on Vimeo.
Watch Animation – 2007 – Eterna "Vision" from Alex Furer on Vimeo.
Alpenlachs Rubigen GmbH is licensee of the Alpenlachs brand form Austria. Alpenlachs Rubigen GmbH aquierd a big fish farm inbetween Berne and Thun to be used as a example facilty and Alpenlachs Rubigen GmbH also acts as licensor of the brand for the Swiss territory.
I designed the company logo, creating the the web design and CI, flyers, lables and at the moment and I am also photographing and documenting the re-construction of the facilities in Rubigen.
I did the spaceship, the comets and the environment for this little game that was showed at Otronicon. The game was played with the head. The setup contained a stereo cam that created a zDepth image from which the face then was tracked.
Otronicon is a yearly four day event of Full Sail to “celebrate technology”, as they say. Full Sail is an university for digital media of all kinds in Orlando.
Check out the re-design of the FON TON web site. FON TON is an independent label in Switzerland producing and distributing music productions and kids tapes.
Vera Liechti an oil paintress from Thun. I photographed her paintings and created postcards and her website.
In collaboration with RainBat Solutions GmbH, Full Frame Studios started to work on 3D visualizations of drawer- and closet-handels by the company Peter Müller Polymechanik in Switzerland.
After doing the last watch animation in Lightwave I did a small test in Lightwave at home. I think Lightwave is a very good software. The main reson for me to get into Lightwave tho is that it has this very impressive plugin renderer that really blew my mind.
I tempted to underestimate anything else than Maya but I had to learn a lesson. Once you overcome the horrible interface you will meet a lot of stability, expandability and ease of use.
This is just a stupid test but the main thing for me was to do an outdoor scene using fPrime.
Two simple adds for MonkeyGames that went into the local newspaper “Thuner Tagblatt” announcing an open house day.
What if a website would be completly in 3D? I made the experiment and created this test using the X3D modeling package called Vizx3D. Media Machines (Tony Parisi) acquired Vizx3D and released later an application called Studio3D based on X3D.
You will need the newest installer to play this experiment. Get it here. Vivaty has taken over from Media Machines and has finally developed a plugin that also works in FireFox.
Note: If you install the “SetupFluxPlayerStudio2-1.exe” from this package it will install the Flux Studio 2.1 and the Flux Player. Flux Studio is an interactive X3D authoring tool.
Warning: Although the Flux Player install will crash and report that FireFox is open and the plugin cannot be installed, the player will be installed. You can find it in the start menu under “Media Machines, Inc”. I can confirm that it runs on Windows 7.
If you run it you can then open the URL: http://fullframestudios.ch/AREA/X3D/files/index_04.x3d to see the demo I did 8 years ago.
Be aware, this is completely experimental and I don’t take responsibility if it crashes your computer.
My basic idea was to transport the regular experience of browsing a website into 3D space plus add a little more excitement.
Logo design for MonkeyGames. MonkeyGames is a new card- and board-game shop in Thun, Switzerland.
Re-Design of the logo for a Thun’s soccer fan-club that will be used on business cards, merchandising and other purposes.
Moving an object around in 3D space can be a tedious and annoying process and is definitely not something a baby could do with todays versions of tools like Maya, 3DS or alike. But with the immersive tools from RoninWorks even a baby could animate a shaking rattle more dynamically.
Watch what happens when a baby discovers full 6D motion interaction.
(And yeah, after hearing this over and over again for 3 full days, exhibiting at Siggraph, we had a rather ballistic attitude towards crying babies…)
Full Frame Studios: from 3D to web, allways a step ahead.
Full Frame Studios is the label of Alex Furer. Originally trained as a photographer, Alex Furer now is an internationally recognized 2D/3D modeller and animator. He was one of the co-founders of Strategic Project Unit “Darwin” for Lego, an international multimedia think tank. Alex was a core developer in production of the award winning CD-ROM title “RubberDuck”. He worked for H5B5 Media AG, Munich, Germany, as an animator on the visual content for the two TV-Shows “Welt der Wunder” and “History”, both running on ProSieben, one of the leading private TV-Stations in Germany. After nine years of developing motioncapture solutions for the desktop and contracting for the Synthetic Reality Lab at the University of Central Florida (UCF), he moved back to Switzerland in 2012 and is now working as a freelancer from Berne, Switzerland, for several companies running his own animation and graphics design studio.
Your message is most important to me – Together we can communicate it the right way.
Alex Furer / Full Frame Studios can offer digital media from concept to content. We can work on whatever can be created, manipulated or simulated with a computer. Whether it is for your next web appearance, product presentation, architectural or multimedia presentation, your next TV show, film, animated or real. I am very flexible because I collaborate with other freelancers and can tailor a team to the projects need. I have very strong connections to qualified programmers, animators, graphics artists and scientists that can be brought on board as needed.
For over seven years Alex is also committed to bring motion capture work flow to the 3D animators desktop. The home of this venture creating a desktop 3D input device, respectively software plugIns to commercial 3D applications and VR developpers was Motion4U LLC situated in Orlando Florida.
Watch videos about motioncapture at your desktop
References
Full Frame Studios has worked for international companies like: LEGO (1994 Animagica “The LEGO Movie”), Welt der Wunder GmbH (1999 Dolphin Special), gvz_rossat ag/sa, Plus Orthopedics (Plus Orthopedics – PIGalielo Navigation System), MDI-Production, Breitling (2002 Breitling – Emergency) & (2004 Breitling – Bentley), Eterna (2007 Eterna 7630 “Vaughan Big Date” & Eterna 3800 “Vision”), Porsche Design (2007 Worldtimer) or Jaeger le Coultre (2005 Master Compressor Extreme World Chronograph).
Please check my 10 years gallery, browse my recent gallery, or write me to find out how I could be an asset on your next project.
This animation replaced the regular opening theme for one episode of the famous science tv-show “Welt der Wunder” hosted by Hendrik Hey. The special episode was entirely about dolphins. How they are built up, where they live and how they propagate as well as about the danger they live in. This animation was done in Alias Maya and composed in Adobe AfterEffects. I had the help of two interns at Welt der Wunder. One was taking care of the dolphin rigging and one took care of the dolphin textures while I was setting up the environment, the logo, the effects and created the main animation. Aside of the intro we made a few animations of the dolphins organism like the cooling of their blood in the tail.
In 1995 we started drafting a production plan for the first LEGO box that would come out with a CD-ROM. The main concept was to do 3D animated building instructions of the two main models. There were many more 3D animated building instructions and a lot of basic to advanced explanatory LEGO Technic concepts and much more In the final product. I would like to mention Claude Aebersold, Bjarne Tveskov and Christopher Yavelow, Michael Lawson and Juray Highdway, without them the 3D content would still be rendering 🙂 .
The production was finished right before Siggraph that year. The CD-ROM won the “Danish Design Centre “ID98″ Prize” and the “Best Scandinavian CD-ROM” Awards.
Here’s a very small excerpt of the building instructions for the Main model: The “Little Sub”.
LEGO – Little Sub Buildinginstructions from Alex Furer on Vimeo.
The Lego movie is the result of the hard work of 4 – 5 partially Swiss individuals that was sold to LEGO for an undisclosed amount of money and started a $6 million feasibility phase made out of six people at the LEGO corporation which later enabled a department of 168 employees from 11 nations with nearly $50 million of budget to create the first generation of digital LEGO toys…
Logbook, The captain, “Monday, 4am, finally the last frame of the 41 layer composit rendered to QuickTime no compression on our 64 MB ram, 33 Mhz Macintosh Quadrd 950 PowerHorse. We never thought it would take an end AND we didn’t miss Frodo’s birthday either.”
LEGO – The Movie from Alex Furer on Vimeo.
