Next Door Spy In Development Copenhagen Bombay (Denmark)
Written and directed by Karla von Bengtson, creator of Tigers & Tattoos, Next Door Spy starts production this spring in Copenhagen. The film is a coproduction between Copenhagen Bombay Rights in Denmark and CB Sverige in Sweden, and both production companies will be present at Cartoon Movie, as well as Copenhagen Bombay Sales. The producers hope to find local distributors for the film.
I’m coming in a little late in the game since the release of Autodesk’s 2016 Entertainment Suite, but with multiple extension packs since, you can rest assured that the features for these add-ons will be full features in the forthcoming 2017 release. So let’s focus on Maya first. Among a multitude of advances, by far my favorite is a revamp to the hypershade and look-development system. Some sorely needed and long-asked-for features are finally part of the package. A preview window lets you see results of your shader work on different models, or just view the 2D output. This is absolutely critical to troubleshoot as shader systems get more complex. I’ve never been more aggravated than devving in Maya and trying to figure out which node in the shader is causing the problem. But no more! I can now solo individual nodes to see how it’s contributing.
This would be enough for me, but it doesn’t stop there. The shader development is tied to the Viewport 2.0. So, you can view the different pieces of the shaders in isolation to see how a bump map, or specular map, etc., looks in the scene. Frequently, within the shader, the effect is so subtle that it’s hard to tell what’s happening. Isolating the maps is a huge help. The view even works with new utility nodes like color correctors, noise (finally) and compositing node. And to top it off, there are Color Management tools that conform to OpenColorIO and ACES (Academy Color Encoding System) — and it’s flexible enough through the SDK to be modified for other renderers and studio color pipelines.
The 2016 version has a much-needed vector workflow — which dovetails into text tools and Illustrator files. Maya, since first release, had previously been insanely cumbersome