ready steady bang – 30 ways from Ed Barrett on Vimeo.

This game is a blast because the animation is amazing. Simple as that.

[Ready Steady Bang]

Nothing to see here folks…

MayaMaya has been updated to v1.1.1 and now is a universal tool that simply asks you to choose your Maya location on startup. You may need to reset the preferences if you have been using an older version of MayaMaya.

Download: MayaMaya

[andoru.labs]

I ran into a situation where I wanted to remove a lot of empty folders from a directory and did some digging and came up with a new stupid tool to make that easy. empty! just asks for a folder (you can run the app and choose one, or drag and drop one) and it will look for empty folders inside that directory and delete them. As folders that contain empty folders become empty, it will also delete them, but it won’t delete anything that contains proper files or folders with files in them.

You want to be careful with this if you are deleting stuff from a server as there is no confirmation to delete and no trash to restore from, so it would be wise to copy the directory to your computer first, run empty and move it back. It is a bit nerve racking to listen to it delete hundreds of folders but I have tested this on pretty heavy directories with multiple files and it works great, but… this tool is made available as is, I cannot guarantee it won’t run into a situation where important files may be deleted, make sure to back stuff up before using it on a heavy directory.

One cool thing I worked into this is the ability to select your folder in Finder, then simply run the app from Spotlight or Finder, and it will default to the last path you selected in Finder which is a great time saver. I will start integrating this into all my other tools where it makes sense as it is incredibly simple.

Download: Download page. . .

Log:
[2010.05.12: v1.0] – released!

Enjoy! If there are any issues, concerns, or requests please contact: andoruLABS.support. This app is free, no donations allowed on this one. . .

[andoru.labs]

Another jaw-droppingly good bit of animation from the amazing team at Meindbender.

For a look at their process, take a look at this CGSociety article posted up awhile back discussing their early Cartoon Network bumpers. They are using the physically accurate Maxwell Render to do things that would be incredibly difficult to do with traditional stop motion but able to achieve using 3D packages and impeccable traditional animation skills. The only thing the computer is really letting them do here is have a more controlled workflow. I would love to see some storyboards, I am sure they have carefully keyframed these beautiful little shorts well before they even start thinking about rendering.

[Meindbender]

Maya x_x updated to v1.1. Support for Maya 2012. 2012 is good, it’s splash screen is real big…

Maya x_x download page. . .

Log:
[2011.04.09: v1.1] – updated for Maya 2012
[2010.11.21: v1.0] – released!

[andoru.labs]