Top 3D Animation Software that Professionals Should Look At

In recent years 3D Animation has become popular with more and more professional animators opting to do 3D work, either in films or for short videos. It can be a great way to truly show off your talents as a digital artist. 3D animation is slowly, but surely becoming the norm with many of the leading production companies in the States and Europe, setting the bar high in terms of animation quality. We’ll be examining some of the more obvious choices for professional animators and exploring some of those applications.

Houdini

I would describe this tool as the mother of animation tools, it has been used in movies, games,commercials and personal projects by big and small companies alike.

Houdini has a very strong particle and smoke system due to its powerful animation and VFX tools and its lighting effects are also pretty decent. Companies such as Dreamworks Animation, Blue Sky Studios,Image Engine and Axis Animation use this tool.

http://vimeo.com/46444204
This wave animation by Daniel Sierra also used this tool.

3D Studio Max

3D Studio Max is another well recognized name within the industry. This software is commonly used in video game development, and has been used in the product of well-known games such as Grand Theft Auto and GameCube.

3D Studio Max is also starting to be used more and more in film productions, as it has powerful controls over dynamics and shading as well as realistic lighting.

Example of 3D Studio Max

http://vimeo.com/59110521
Rendered results  from cgcookie.com. (3D Studio Max,Photoshop and Blender)

Maya 3D

For the next level of users, Maya 3D is something that presents outstanding opportunities for animation work. A great deal of the work we see on our cinema and TV screens has been produced via Maya 3D including Spider-Man, Lord of the Rings to name but a few. Maya 3D is an extremely powerful software tool, and even top 3D animators continue to learn and progress their skills from using it.

Maya 3D will take you through the full 3D effects spectrum, from a world of paint affects, rendering and a plethora of animations. If you’re serious about 3D animation Maya 3D is a substantial investment at over £3,000, but you’re sure to get your money’s worth.

Example for Maya 3D

ARTIFICIAL PARADISE,INC. from JP Frenay on Vimeo.

Cinema 4D

MAXON Computer GmbH has introduced a revolutionary 3D software to the market. This product gives you options and resources for advanced character tools,physic engines,hair,eyes and an unlimited network for rendering.

It’s also capable of  procedural and polygonal/subd modeling, lighting,rendering, texturing, animating and other common features you’ll find in 3D modelling software.

Blender 3D

Blender 3D was released in 1995 by the Blender foundation. It was created for everyone and was released as a free software for animators. Their site is also full of resources for beginners and experts and the community is warm and friendly with a lot of great insight and tips.

Gallery of other Blender 3D renders
Movies, commercials and games uses the Blender 3D software. Spider-man 2, History Channel and more used this software in planning and animating certain scenes giving it a great start for an international foothold. The Blender foundation themselves also created open projects in animation and gaming. Our favorite 3D animation open project was “Big Buck Bunny” and the game “Yo Frankie” shows exactly what you can do with the game engine.
Blender’s has the following features:

• 3D modeling
• Rigging
• UV unwrapping
• Texturing
• Animating
• Skinning
• Particle simulation
• Smoke simulation
• Camera tracking
• Soft body simulation
• Fluid
• Built-in game engine
• Match moving
• Compositioning
• Video editing
• Rendering

Examples of Blender 3D Animation

Adobe Flash

Adobe Flash remains today one of the most popular animation software packages on the market, particularly when it comes to web animation and people who want to get started with animation design. For many years websites have chosen to integrate flash into their designs to add to the professional quality of the website.
Most browsers today fully support applications of Flash, however it can still remain problematic for people using Apple devices. Indeed, one of the cons of animators using Flash is the lack of compatibility with Apple devices, so more and more designers are looking to HTML 5 as an effective solution to this problem.

Examples of Flash Animation

Have a look at Animator vs. Animation series by Alan Becker, a well known flash animation.

So which 3D Animation Software should you start off with?

We recommend starting out using the simple to use animation applications such as Flash and then progressing upwards to more sophisticated software, e.g. Maya 3D, 3D Studio Max,Houdini to hone your skills and build up confidence. If you’re coming from a more traditional animation background, then it’s recommended you spend sometime using other creative software packages such as Photoshop, Illustrator etc. to get a feel for how such software can aid you in the design process. Carefully consider your budget and return on investment, if you purchase this software how long will it take before it pays for itself?

Tracker HTTPA

Technology that tells how your private data is being used online

WASHINGTON: MIT researchers have developed a new technology that tracks how your private data is used online.

Researchers in the Decentralized Information Group (DIG) at Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) are developing a protocol they call "HTTP with Accountability," or HTTPA, which will automatically monitor the transmission of private data and allow the data owner to examine how it's being used.

At the IEEE's Conference on Privacy, Security and Trust next month in Toronto, Oshani Seneviratne, an MIT graduate student in electrical engineering and computer science, and Lalana Kagal, a principal research scientist at CSAIL, will present a paper that gives an overview of HTTPA.

With HTTPA, each item of private data would be assigned its own uniform resource identifier (URI) that would convert the Web from, essentially, a collection of searchable text files into a giant database.

Remote access to a web server would be controlled much the way it is now, through passwords and encryption.

But every time the server transmitted a piece of sensitive data, it would also send a description of the restrictions on the data's use.

An HTTPA-compliant programme also incurs certain responsibilities if it reuses data supplied by another HTTPA-compliant source, researchers said.

Suppose, for instance, that a consulting specialist in a network of physicians wishes to access data created by a patient's primary-care physician, and suppose that she wishes to augment the data with her own notes.

Her system would then create its own record, with its own URI. But using standard Semantic Web techniques, it would mark that record as "derived" from the PCP's record and label it with the same usage restrictions.

The network of servers is where the heavy lifting happens. When the data owner requests an audit, the servers work through the chain of derivations, identifying all the people who have accessed the data, and what they've done with it.

Seneviratne uses a technology known as distributed hash tables — the technology at the heart of peer-to-peer networks like BitTorrent — to distribute the transaction logs among the servers.

To test the system, Seneviratne built a rudimentary health-care records system from scratch and filled it with data supplied by 25 volunteers.

She then simulated a set of transactions - pharmacy visits, referrals to specialists, use of anonymous data for research purposes, and the like — that the volunteers reported as having occurred over the course of a year.

Seneviratne used 300 servers on the experimental network PlanetLab to store the transaction logs; in experiments, the system efficiently tracked down data stored across the network and handled the chains of inference necessary to audit the propagation of data across multiple providers. 

New Computer Technology By HP

Hardware

With 'The Machine,' HP May Have Invented a New Kind of Computer

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If Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) founders Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard are spinning in their graves, they may be due for a break. Their namesake company is cooking up some awfully ambitious industrial-strength computing technology that, if and when it’s released, could replace a data center’s worth of equipment with a single refrigerator-size machine.

 Photograph by Richard Lewington/Hewlett-PackardHP CTO Martin Fink in the Photonics laboratory at HP LabsThat’s what they’re calling it at HP Labs: “the Machine.” It’s basically a brand-new type of computer architecture that HP’s engineers say will serve as a replacement for today’s designs, with a new operating system, a different type of memory, and superfast data transfer. The company says it will bring the Machine to market within the next few years or fall on its face trying. “We think we have no choice,” says Martin Fink, the chief technology officer and head of HP Labs, who is expected to unveil HP’s plans at a conference Wednesday.

A decade ago, it wouldn’t seem as outlandish as it now does for a company such as HP, IBM (IBM), or Sun Microsystems to build a new computer architecture from the ground up. The hardware powerhouses, known as systems companies, all made their own chips, networking technology, and custom OS. Then commodity components became more powerful, and better data center software began to make up for deficiencies in the cheaper hardware. Consumer Web companies such as Google, Amazon.com (AMZN), and Yahoo! (YHOO) advanced new data center designs that were quickly adopted by the mainstream, shrinking the market share of the systems companies.

HP Labs, the company’s R&D arm, was once revered throughout Silicon Valley as a steady source of new products that could open up new markets. It’s been far less inspiring in recent years, ginning up a mishmash of mobile software, printing services, and teleconferencing systems that haven’t made it to customers in a meaningful way. Amid budget cuts, a costly, complex new computer system would seem like a stretch.

Graphic: Seventy-Four Years of HP Ideas

The Machine started to take shape two years ago, after Fink was named director of HP Labs. Assessing the company’s projects, he says, made it clear that HP was developing the needed components to create a better computing system. Among its research projects: a new form of memory known as memristors; and silicon photonics, the transfer of data inside a computer using light instead of copper wires. And its researchers have worked on operating systems including Windows, Linux, HP-UX, Tru64, and NonStop.

Photograph by Richard Lewington/Hewlett-PackardA memristor characterization experiment at HP Labs
Fink and his colleagues decided to pitch HP Chief Executive Officer Meg Whitman on the idea of assembling all this technology to form the Machine. During a two-hour presentation held a year and a half ago, they laid out how the computer might work, its benefits, and the expectation that about 75 percent of HP Labs personnel would be dedicated to this one project. “At the end, Meg turned to [Chief Financial Officer] Cathie Lesjak and said, ‘Find them more money,’” says John Sontag, the vice president of systems research at HP, who attended the meeting and is in charge of bringing the Machine to life. “People in Labs see this as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.”

Memory represents perhaps the biggest opportunity for change. Computers have worked in a similar way for many years now. When a person wants to do something such as run Microsoft Word, the computer’s central processor will issue a command to copy the program and a document from the slow disk it had been sitting on and bring it temporarily into the high-speed memory known as DRAM that sits near the computer’s core, helping ensure that Word and the file you’re working on will run fast.

A problem with this architecture, according to computing experts, is that DRAM and the Flash memory used in computers seem unable to keep pace with the increase in data use. As the current memory technology hits its physical limits, dozens of companies continue to work on possible replacements. “Everyone on the planet who is paying any attention to this type of thing wants to see this new kind of fast, cheap, persistent memory,” says Greg Papadopoulos, a partner at the venture capital firm New Enterprise Associates. “If one of these things works, and one of them will, it will change computing architecture fundamentally.

The Future of Computers

The Future of Computers: From Tubes to Tablets

Recent innovations such as the iPad provide an exciting glimpse into the future of computers. Before looking forward toward future computer trends, let's take a quick look back to gain a better appreciation of the evolution thus far. Do you remember when the first primitive computing machines occupied entire buildings? The massive machines from the mid-20th century consisted of row upon row of vacuum tubes and wires. You had to use stacks of punch cards to program these beasts.

The Future of Computers: Home Computers

Steve Jobs and Bill Gates were both instrumental in bringing the computer down to size. With the introduction of the personal computer and its widespread acceptance, computers shrunk while processing power increased. Even the bulky CRT monitors got a makeover with flat LCD monitors now the norm. In addition, costs have fallen so much over the years that many households own several personal computers and wireless networks. Future technology won't necessarily render the home PC obsolete, but it will change it. For example, modern televisions and appliances are now Web-enabled. Expect future technology to blend appliances into the home network.

The Future of Computers: Laptops, Netbooks, and Ultrabooks

First there were laptops, then there were netbooks, and now there are "ultrabooks." These mobile devices share several characteristics including the integrated folding design and portability. Differences include size and storage (laptops use hard disks, netbooks rely more heavily on the cloud, and ultrabooks use Flash memory). Despite their similarities and differences, future computer trends point to a lesser reliance on keyboards which could potentially render this category obsolete.

The Future of Computers: Tablets

Apple's iPad has significantly influenced future computer trends. It was soon followed by a flood of tablets. With small sizes, simple designs, extreme portability, Internet access, thousands of apps, and loads of features, tablets can do just about anything a full-size desktop or laptop can do. They fall short in the keyboard arena, but again, that may be about to change.

Future Technology: Speech Recognition and Touchscreen Technology

While speech recognition is still imperfect, it has improved greatly in recent years. Windows 7 includes a built-in speech recognition program in its operating system while Nuance's Dragon Naturally Speaking software continues to gain acceptance.

Not only is the keyboard in danger, the mouse is too thanks to touchscreen technology. Tablets and smartphones currently make use of touchscreen technology and many "all in one" desktops now come with touchscreen LCDs. When Windows 8 comes out, it is expected to take the touchscreen into the mainstream.

The Future of Computers has Arrived – Are You Ready?

If history is to be any guide, some of the most powerful advances in the world of computers and computer technology are likely to be completely unforeseen. After all, some of the most powerful technologies of the past have taken us by surprise, so stay tuned for truly fascinating future computer trends. If you're ready to embrace the future of computers, consider getting certified or mastering the skills you need to succeed in today's IT world.

Visit on www.Youtube.com:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l4HBYzHMCXg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DN__D5ixme0

Test Your Personality Based On Your Facebook Posts

Test Your Personality Based On Your Facebook Posts

When you post to Facebook, you're not just sharing news of your most recent meal or weekend trip with your friends. You may unwittingly reveal a bit of your personality, too.

A start up called Five Labs has made a new online tool that it claims can analyze your Facebook posts in order to assess your personality. The site, which is based on a University of Pennsylvania study, looks at the language you use in order to determine different aspects of your personality. Specifically, the page looks at what are called the "Big Five" personality traits: extraversion, openness, neuroticism, conscientiousness and agreeableness.

Once the site has combed through all of the words used in your Facebook statuses -- 1,240 in my case -- it creates a fun little chart of your personality. When I did it, Five Labs said I am inventive, assertive, compassionate, sensitive and efficient.

The site also rates your extraversion, openness, neuroticism, conscientiousness and agreeableness on a percentage scale. Here's how mine broke down:

The tool may not be as good of a measure of personality as, say, a professionally administered personality test. But it's fun to get an idea of how others might see you on Facebook.

Even better, Five Labs lets you compare your own personality to those of your friends and celebrities. Of course, most public figures don't manage their own Facebook pages, so the comparisons have obvious limits. Still, it's fun.

Much to my delight, I am very similar to Facebook Oprah. In fact, we are an 89 percent match. Obviously, this algorithm doesn't take wealth into account.

Unfortunately, I'm nothing like Bill Gates. Sigh.

Maybe I'll take it again in a few years.

Why HR Pros will Turn to Video Conferencing in 2016

98 per cent of HR executives surveyed say video conferencing helps companies defy distance and break down cultural barriers to improve productivity.

HR executives who use video at work today say they will prefer video collaboration over email as their top method of business communication within three years, says a survey by Redshift Research and Polycom.

The majority of those respondents (56 per cent) indicated video would be their most preferred method of business communication, surpassing email (49 per cent) and voice conference calls (32 per cent).

Proving that the benefits of video for HR functions are well understood, the survey of business decision makers in 12 countries revealed that almost all (98 per cent) of the HR executives participating in the survey believe video conferencing removes distance barriers and improves productivity between teams in different cities and countries.

The survey also showed that video is becoming more pervasive for Human Resources teams across the globe. When asked to choose their preferred methods of business communication today, HR respondents ranked video conferencing as a top-three tool for communications, placing third (46 per cent) after email (88 per cent) and voice/conference calls (62 per cent).

Other methods of business communications these HR executives said they use included Web conferencing, instant messaging and social media.

The top three reasons identified for this growth in adoption were to reduce travel costs, shorten the time to hire and to reach geographically dispersed candidates “Advancements in technology and telecommunications are allowing organisations large and small to operate seamlessly from anywhere,” said Mollie Lombardi, Vice President and Principal Analyst, Human Capital Management, Aberdeen Group.

“HR leaders require a new understanding of how technology can help them bridge geographical boundaries and rethink their talent strategies to take full advantage of a broader talent pool.” Vanessa Mauree, HR Director of French retail chain Alain Afflelou is already seeing the benefits of using video during the recruitment process. “I interview candidates for positions all over the country. I cannot make a decision from a telephone interview; I need to see the person to make a good evaluation but flying all candidates to Parisis too costly. Video interviews are ideal, and allow me to see more candidates. A good video interview is as effective as an in-person interview,” said Mauree. Beyond recruitment, video is also enabling organisations to implement flexible work environments. 

This is proven to increase productivity, can reduce employee time spent commuting, and can increase staff satisfaction and loyalty by allowing employees to have more control over work-life balance. Voice, video and content collaboration is impacting many facets of the HR function, including retention, engagement, and training. Video conferencing, video recording and video asset management helps organisations overcome diminishing training budgets, minimise scheduling and travel conflicts, and prevent the loss of knowledge through attrition and retirement with easier, more frequent collaboration and on-demand access to training and knowledge. 

5 Ways to Secure Your Android Device

Quick Heal’s threat report for Windows and Android identifies five ways to secure Android device against malware, and the BYOD trend

With such rapid installation and activation of Android devices across the world, knowing how to secure these devices has become imperative. There are many tips that users can easily put into practice that will ensure the security of their smartphones. Such tips can be adopted by enterprise users who adhere to BYOD policies and to home users as well. The five ways include:

 1.      Stay aware about mobile risks

     The best way to ensure safety is to be aware of the various tricks that Android malware uses to infiltrate devices. Apps and programs are the single biggest source of malware, so users should always study the  permissions that an app is asking for upon installation. Moreover, it is highly advisable to refrain from downloading apps from unofficial third-party sources. Always install apps from Google Play only.

2.     Be wary of unsecured Wi-Fi networks
Free Wi-Fi available in public places is a great way to access the web on the move, but there are several ways in which such networks can prove vulnerable. Snoopers can easily intercept and steal data over unsecured Wi-Fi networks, so these should be avoided, especially while dealing with sensitive information.

3.     Be cautious while carrying out online purchases
With e-commerce portals making their presence felt over Android and coming out with snazzy apps and  d coming out with snazzy apps and user interfaces, more and more people are purchasing products through these apps. Online shopping is fun, but not at the cost of security. Without the right safety measures and precautions, financial details can be easily lost or stolen.

4.     Comply with foolproof BYOD security policies
Organizations that encourage BYOD policies often face the repercussions that come with employee negligence and uncontrolled app downloads. In a situation like this, setting up clear, simple and transparent security policies becomes absolutely necessary. When all devices are connected to the enterprise network, it is a major risk when one employee downloads a malicious copy of Flappy Birds. Proper security policies need to be defined and adhered to in order to avoid widespread mayhem.

5.     Embrace an eff­ective and feasible security suite
Where there are risks, there are also solutions. Security suites for Android devices have now become more than just a luxury, they are a necessity. Without proper security in place, the world of Android devices will become a lawless and dangerous place, so everyone who owns an Android should acquire a security solution to go with it. Just as PCs without an antivirus will always be susceptible to all kinds of threats, an Android without a security suite will always remain vulnerable.