Blur Studio continues its progress from an in-game animation house through short films and, ultimately, to features with “A Gentleman’s Duel” - an eight minute 3D animated short in which a Frenchman and an Englishman vie for the superbly endowed favors of a noblewoman and, one assumes, her equally well endowed estate. It’s built like a brick mansion.

Matters quickly get out of control as they begin a duel in their Steampunk robotic combat suits. Mayhem ensues.

This short also marks Blur’s transition to Softimage software - they’ve long been a 3DS Max house - and the film became a testbed for their work with that software. It’s not 100% Softimage, but they’ve obviously done a fine job integrating Softimage into their pipeline.

This is Blur Studio’s fifth ambitious short film. They’ve already collected one Oscar nomination for their earlier works.

Technorati Tags: computer graphics, short film, animation, Blur Studio, Softimage, 3DS Max, steampunk, mech, mecha

The Latin-literate technophiles at Ars Technica have posted the first installment in what looks to be a very complete history of the Amiga, which in 1985 was the most advanced graphics and sound computer on the market. The engineers who designed it and the software developers who supported it made the machine an ideal entry point into computer graphics for artists and animators.

Anything I’ve managed to do with computer graphics is owed to those days and to those developers.

From the very outset the article concentrates on that central conflict between creative people and businessmen which was eventually to kill both the Amiga and the company that had purchased it, only to run it into the ground. It makes good reading.

Technorati Tags: computer graphics, computers, history, amiga