Marc Pampols

ProMotion Studios has finished a new 3D short film called Lighthouse, Directed by Charlie Short & Ming Hsiung, created using 3dsMax and Blender, and made for the American insurance firm Liberty Mutual.

Its a short (3min) film with a great animation and rendering, the overall quality is very nice.

Lighthouse shot

They have also developed open source tools that will be released in the next versions of Blender, a software that is growing fast and it has been used in some very interesting and successfull projects like “Elephants Dream” and “Big Buck Bunny”

Click in the image below to watch the film (flash video)

Link: Original CG Talk thread anouncing the film

Link: Making of (Flash movie)

Have you ever heard something about the ”greeble” effect ?

“A greeble or nurnie is a small piece of detailing added to break up the surface of an object to add visual interest to a surface or object, particularly in movie special effects.” - Wikipedia

Here is a nice example of what does this effect:

Greeble example, Rendered by Gargaj / Conspiracy.

I discovered this effect some time ago with a plugin for 3dsMax called “Greeble”, a funny plugin that generates random detail in objects simply by adding a modifier, it was available since 3d Studio Max version 3.

Another great resource for greeble fans is Greebelicious: http://www.greebelicious.com, a forum-gallery where users post their artistic creations with various greeble tools available for 3d software.

Render by "pure render" from Greebelicious

If you like it and you want to start greebling, below is a list of plugins available for various 3d packages, and if you don’t have any, I recommend you starting with Autodesk 3dsMax (trial demo available), or if you like open source software, Blender is a good choice.

Greeble plugin for 3D Studio Max (from R3 to the actual 2009) - Tom Hudson website
Discombobulator, greeble script for Blender (working version is for 2.40, latest release of Blender is 2.46)
LW Greeble & Nurnies, script for Lightware - Download