MEET MELINE : THE 3D ANIMATED SHORT FILM (by Sebastien Laban & Virginie Goyons) from Sebastien LABAN on Vimeo.

Last year in Lyon, France Sebastien Laban and Virginie Goyons debuted their short film “Meet Meline”. This 3D animated short was completed after 2 years in the making. Meet Meline was basically created at the home of Sebastien and Virginie. In one of their bedrooms to be specific. Virginie, a 3D Supervisor at a gaming company in France, and Sebastien A director and Photographer, wanted to create a simple animation to train themselves in 3D, but after they took the animation  to a 20 seconds short they decided to take it to a greater level and push their limits. This film was created in their free time with no real budget.

The six and a half minutes short tells the story of a little girl that very soon in the story gets visited by one of her drawn creatures. The story continues with her trying to find this creature, and it expresses her curiosity very well. This film sets you back to your childhood, at the time that we were all so curious about everything.

The animation the textures and the camera angles of it are superb. The compositing and post production of it is also something that deserves some kudos. The music and sound FX are incredibly awesome. Not so often a 3D short comes around with such carefully crafted sound.

The film is totally worth the watch. I’m sure you’ll enjoy it in many ways.

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Thousands of game developers were waiting for Adobe CS5 release for a one specific reason. Adobe promised new Adobe Flash CS5 will have I-Phone / Android app compiler. That means you could make games for I-Phone and Android from Flash itself. Lots of companies were in pre-production for new games. This could open doors for new games, new opportunities, new development systems and eventually new jobs in gaming industry. Apple’s application store is so big it could turn all those dreams into reality for game developers like us.

Well, Apple already destroyed it all before it even started. New version of the iPhone Developer Program license makes those dreams impossible. It is like a slap on the Adobe’s face, some other game engines, Indie Game Developers and game players.

Here is what Apple says on new version of Developer License section 3.3.1

3.3.1 — Applications may only use Documented APIs in the manner prescribed by Apple and must not use or call any private APIs. Applications must be originally written in Objective-C, C, C++, or JavaScript as executed by the iPhone OS WebKit engine, and only code written in C, C++, and Objective-C may compile and directly link against the Documented APIs (e.g., Applications that link to Documented APIs through an intermediary translation or compatibility layer or tool are prohibited).

Well that means you cannot make games with Flash and send it to Apple anymore. Adobe CS5 is not even out yet and Apple bans the Flash with this last minute move. This section also affect some other game developing engines, like Unity 3D for example. Some of the most successful games in app store are made with Unity, but this new section bans also Unity 3D for future games. It might also affect future Unreal Engine mobile or I-Pad plans badly. So what is going to happen to developers already in production of games with Unity 3D? Don’t ask us, we are one of many and we are still not sure…

Why? Don’t they want more games in their store? Isn’t that weird?

Well it is Apple after all and monopoly is in their vocabulary. They don’t want a lot of Flash games and apps releasing for both IPhone and Android. Elimination of Flash and other engines will consequently keep them on top. It’s not in their interest for every iPhone game to be available on Android.  Of course on this death row are some other game engines to be sacrificed, and some small game companies and some indie developers will be screwed here and there. That’s just couple of eggs lost in the way of the great omlet.

We love to make games and we will never stop doing it. It doesn’t matter for Apple, Microsoft, Sony or whatever the platform it is, we will figure it out and keep making games for players. It will be Flash, Cocoa Touch, Unity or whatever we have to use… At the bottom line game developers make games for players not for these companies.

We wish Apple could  learn to share the big pie and not to limit game developers or players.

But we guess there is no app for that…

.

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Yesterday at 11am(EDT) Adobe unveiled the new Creative Suite 5. The new features  were presented in the following categories:
- Design Premium
- Web Premium
- Production Premium

Each of these packages explained a few of the things that we’ll be able to take advantage in the new release. Here is a short list of the new features :

For Photoshop:

- A new Fill with content awareness. This will allow you to remove an portion of an image and have the gap be completed by Photoshop. The result: a clean quick content removal and filling the blank space without the use of the Clone Stamp or any other method. All this in just seconds.

- The ability to use 3D in text right inside Photoshop.

- Ease to handle HDRI.

- A noise reduction improvement. Images will retain detail much better.

- A lens correction effect. This will help correct the lens distortion by simply telling Photoshop the camera you used.

For Flash:

- Export the content created in flash to multiple devices. This is the one feature that got us really excited. If this is truly what it claims it does, developers will be able to take their applications  technically everywhere from web to Android and hopefully iPhones and Ipads. This will really change things for game developers (assuming that it will work seamless).

For Illustrator:

- The possibility of of easily handle dashes and lines. with just a single button tap yo can get your lines to match much better in the corners.

For Dreamweaver:

- You can check how a page will behave across all the browsers. Using BrowserLabs we can now compare browser renditions of a page or “onion skin” them one on top of the other.

- Dreamweaver will also link all the files that are required to load a page. this will help you see what files are connected to a page and less trip to testing in a server.
For the other programs the changes didn’t see that drastic other that Adobe is now developing 64bit versions for all of them. This is great for those of us who are dying to change to 64bit and use as many ram as we want.

In conclusion, the new CS5 seems pretty promising. Some of the softwares are really good updates while others aren’t that much. I’d recommend you get trial versions and see if the fit to you before upgrading.

Here is a link if you want to know more and see some videos:

CS5 Full description

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