Andrew Kramer who is the key person behind the famous After Effects Video Tutorial site videocopilot.net released in the last few days two new After Effects Video tutorials. In 3D Offset you can learn how you can animate layers with intelligent shifting. In the second new After Effects Video Tutorial Speed Particles you learn how to create a dynamic particle system that emits based on the speed of a layer. Trapcode’s Particular is used in the Speed Particles tutorial. As all other plugins Trapcode offers we strongly recommend to look into Particular and the other Trapcode plugins, they make your live so much easier and allow you to generate effects you have been looking for.

Videocopilot.net offers even more After Effects Video Tutorials most of them are free to watch, if you do benefit from the great free after effects tutorials please don’t forget to check out the great products and DVDs videocopilot.net offers.

1) Simple emission
2) Add Gravity
3) Randomize particle attributes
4) Add interaction with other scene geometry

ICE: An Artist Tour #1 from Bradley Gabe on Vimeo.

Smashing Magazine did compile a list of 70 Beauty-Retouching Photoshop Tutorials

Dirk Metzmacher from Smashing Magazine writes: “

Beauty retouching is probably one of the most popular application areas in which Adobe Photoshop is used extensively. There are two simple reasons for that. First, Photoshop offers a variety of advanced tools to smooth out skin and hair, optimize body proportions and emphasize some beautiful details. And second, if you have some experience with Photoshop it is easy to learn the basics and quickly produce very impressive and beautiful results.

…”

These 70 Beauty-Retouching Photoshop Tutorials show you how you can:

• Beautiful Skin
• Smooth Skin
• Beauty Retouching
• Remove Freckles
• Dark skin - bright skin
• Change Hair Color
• Remove Hair Roots
• Trimm weight
• Digital Nose Job
• Enhance Iris Color
• Whitening Teeth & Eyes
• Apply Eye Make-up
• Whitening Teeth
• Use Smart Filters
• Beautify a Face
• Phoenix Hair Effect
• Make Nails Longer
• Give Models a New look
• and many more

Bloggers told Iran, “You Suck at Photoshop,” when news broke about doctored photos of Iranian missile tests.

Season 2 rolls on as Donnie Hoyle explores the measure of a man while teaching you about the Measurement Log.

Jerzy Drozda Jr (aka Maltaannon) shows you a few tricks on how to make your own sound loops.

1- Curve Flow Force: Generated from tangent to curve
2- Curve Attraction Force: Generated by subtracting point position vectors from cloud point to closest point on curve
3- Axial Force: Generated by taking the cross product of vectors from forces 1 and 2

Vortex Control from Bradley Gabe on Vimeo.

Bradley Gabe shows in his XSI 7 Video Tutorial how you can creates a static particle emission, then drives point animation using vectors pulled from curve tangency.

ICE Demo: Building a Force from a Curve from Bradley Gabe on Vimeo.

New ICE videos and video tutorials available at SOFTIMAGE in the Softimage community:

http://community.softimage.com/forumdisplay.php?f=86

• Geometry Instancing - Characters & Walk Cycles
• ICE: For Dummies…
• Faking Shattering in ICE
• Spawning Fireworks with ICE
• Introduction to ICE Particles in XSI 7 Demo
• Introduction to ICE Deform in XSI 7 Demo
• ICE Vignettes - what’s possible with ICE in XSI 7
• and many more…

TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design. It started out (in 1984) as a conference bringing together people from those three worlds. Since then its scope has become ever broader.The annual conference now brings together the world’s most fascinating thinkers and doers, who are challenged to give the talk of their lives (in 18 minutes).

We covered the Top 10 TEDTalks in our news TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) Talks, now it’s time for StrongMocha TED favorites:

Alisa Miller: Why we know less than ever about the world

Alisa Miller, head of Public Radio International, talks about why — though we want to know more about the world than ever — the US news media is actually showing less. Eye-opening stats and graphs. (Recorded March 2008 in Monterey, California. Duration: 4:29.)

Amy Tan: Where does creativity hide?

Novelist Amy Tan digs deep into the creative process, looking for hints of how hers evolved. In 22 minutes, she revisits her childhood, shares her family history and delves into the worlds of physics and chance. It’s a wild ride with a surprise ending. Amy Tan is the author of such beloved books as The Joy Luck Club, The Kitchen God’s Wife and The Hundred Secret Senses.

Philippe Starck: Why design?

Designer Philippe Starck — with no pretty slides to show — spends 18 minutes reaching for the very roots of the question “Why design?” Listen carefully for one perfect mantra for all of us, genius or not. Philippe Starck designs deluxe objects and posh condos and hotels around the world. Always witty and engaged, he takes special delight in rethinking everyday objects.

Jill Bolte Taylor: My stroke of insight

Jill Bolte Taylor got a research opportunity few brain scientists would wish for: She had a massive stroke, and watched as her brain functions — motion, speech, self-awareness –- shut down one by one. An astonishing story. Brain researcher Jill Bolte Taylor studied her own stroke as it happened — and has become a powerful voice for brain recovery.

Susan Savage-Rumbaugh: Apes that write, start fires and play Pac-Man

Savage-Rumbaugh’s work with bonobo apes, which can understand spoken language and learn tasks by watching, forces the audience to rethink how much of what a species can do is determined by biology — and how much by cultural exposure.Susan Savage-Rumbaugh has made startling breakthroughs in her lifelong work with chimpanzees and bonobos, showing the animals to be adept in picking up language and other “intelligent” behaviors

Rick Smolan: A girl, a photograph, a homecoming

Photographer Rick Smolan tells the unforgettable story of a young Amerasian girl, a fateful photograph, and an adoption saga with a twist. Rick Smolan is the co-founder of the America 24/7 and Day in the Life photography series — and a natural storyteller in many media. His latest books are America at Home and Blue Planet Run.

Nicholas Negroponte: One Laptop per Child, two years on

Nicholas Negroponte talks about how One Laptop per Child is doing, two years in. Speaking at the EG conference while the first XO laptops roll off the production line, he recaps the controversies and recommits to the goals of this far-reaching project.The founder of the MIT Media Lab, Nicholas Negroponte pushed the edge of the information revolution as an inventor, thinker and angel investor. Now he’s the driving force behind One Laptop per Child.

TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design. It started out (in 1984) as a conference bringing together people from those three worlds. Since then its scope has become ever broader.The annual conference now brings together the world’s most fascinating thinkers and doers, who are challenged to give the talk of their lives (in 18 minutes).

Top 10 TEDTalks

With 50 million views since Ted debuted online two years ago, TED talks have become a powerful cultural force. Ted has released their Top 10 TED talks of all time

With speakers like neuroanatomist Jill Bolte Taylor and global health expert Hans Rosling, the list proves one of the compelling ideas behind TEDTalks: that an unknown speaker with a powerful idea can reach — and move — a global audience. Links to all 10 talks are found below — or browse through our Top 10 TED Talks Theme. Even if you’ve seen all the talks, the highlights video is darn fun.

Top 10 TED Talks of all time

1. Jill Bolte Taylor: My stroke of insight
2. Jeff Han: Touchscreen demo foreshadows the iPhone
3. David Gallo: Underwater astonishments
4. Blaise Aguera y Arcas: Jaw-dropping Photosynth demo
5. Arthur Benjamin: Lightning calculation and other “Mathemagic”
6. Sir Ken Robinson: Do schools kill creativity?
7. Hans Rosling: The best stats you’ve ever seen
8. Tony Robbins: Why we do what we do, and how we can do it better
9. Al Gore: 15 ways to avert a climate crisis
10. Johnny Lee: Creating tech marvels out of a $40 Wii Remote

Beyond the Top 10 TEDTalks:

SOFTIMAGE has announced XSI 7, with their latest release SOFTIMAGE addresses many of the pain points that 3D artist are facing. 3D artist can now easily without knowing any properitary program language design new images or movies and finish project faster. One of the biggest improvements is ICE - Interactive Creative Environment which extends into everything within XSI. Artist can deform, apply weigh, author, share & collaborate, apply particles and  animate particles, faces, vertices, edges or velocity of faces. With ICE artist can do what they love to do: be creative.

From the Press Release

“Softimage Co., a part of Avid Technology, Inc. (Nasdaq: AVID), today announced SOFTIMAGE®|XSI® 7, the latest version of its professional 3D animation software for games, film and television. SOFTIMAGE|XSI 7 software will introduce a transformative open platform called ICE, designed to capture the infinitely creative vision of content producers. With a visual interface and an easy-to-use node-based programming model, users will be able to quickly create complex visual effects. ICE will allow artists to explore, learn and modify the robust library of particle-based visual effects and deformation tools that will ship in SOFTIMAGE|XSI 7 software, or simply build new ones from scratch.

…

Availability:
SOFTIMAGE|XSI 7 is expected to be available in Q3 2008.
Pricing for SOFTIMAGE|XSI 7 Essentials will be USMSRP $2,995.
Pricing for SOFTIMAGE|XSI 7 Advanced will be USMSRP $4,995.

…”

Some of the new key features of SOFTIMAGE|XSI 7 :

• ICE - Interactive Creative Environment
  With ICS (Interactive Creative Environment) artists can create complex 3D effects and tools extremely quickly and intuitively using a node-based dataflow diagram. ICE Demonstration videos.
  
• GIGACORE II ARCHITECTURE
  The new core, GigaCore II  is fully multi-threaded and 64-bit.
• Integrated mental ray 3.6 Renderer
  This update adds new controls for final gathering and displacement rendering, as well as options for optimizing and accelerating global illumination, and global ambient occlusion settings. XSI 7.0 integrates  mental ray renderer version 3.6.
  • Importons - Importons are photon particles emitted from the camera (instead of a light source). mental ray uses these photon particles to calculate how important a photon is for the illumination of an image. With this technique, you get a lighter photon map and faster rendering as photon lookup is optimized.
  • Stand-ins - Object render archives (also known as mental ray assemblies or stand-ins) provide a method of offloading assets so that they can be loaded and unloaded, on-demand, at render time. The object render archive file is loaded into the render as an encapsulated “sub-scene” which can be unloaded automatically if mental ray starts to run low on physical memory. This reduces memory consumption and allows for faster rendering times. Stand-ins are particularly useful for assembling cumulatively large and detailed scenes such as cityscapes, dense forests of trees, and even crowds of animated characters.
  • New Final Gathering Algorithm “Exact” mode - Exact mode bypasses the final gathering point cache entirely and always computes the full final gathering solution for every sample. This mode will yield more accurate and superior quality results because none of the final gathering points are derived by interpolating values from an initial cache of final gathering points.
  • Auto-Configuring BSP 2 Raytracing Acceleration - The BSP2 raytracing acceleration technique is the next generation BSP algorithm used by mental ray. It was developed, primarily, for the efficient rendering of scenes with large BSP trees and is required for rendering scenes with stand-ins (also known as mental ray assemblies). It is also auto-configuring so the user does not have to setup complicated BSP options anymore.
  • Irradiance Particles - The new mental ray irradiance particles algorithm provides a method of calculating global illumination using importons. Irradiance particles are easy to set up in your scene and with just the default settings, you can reach a desirable illumination quality much faster than the existing solutions of global illumination photon tracing combined with final gathering.

• Render Manager Improvements
  3D Artist can now easier setup and manager their render jobs, all that with an simpler and easier to use interface.
• GLSL Shaders
  Two new OpenGL-based shaders are now part of XSI 7.
  
• OpenGL Particle Shader
  Improved function that allows the artist to even better work with particles in XSI using OpenGL.
• Global color management tools
  Artist have more control on the output images or videos with color management. Supports
  
• Delta II
  One of the major breakthroughs in workgroup collaboration was Delta referencing (in XSI 6). In addition to XSI’s robust referencing system, Delta allows you to store the changes to a model in a lightweight manner. You can then export, import and apply deltas manually. You can also edit and delete deltas and items within deltas, and even change a delta’s target model. The result is an extremely efficient, robust and flexible way for artists to work collaboratively in production.
  Delta II updates the already successful referencing system with numerous new features:
  • Create New Clusters
  • Create new cluster properties, including texture UV coordinates, vertex colors, weight maps, and envelope weight properties. You can create cluster properties on new clusters, or on clusters that pre-existed in the original model.
  • Add deformation operators and ICE trees to the construction stack. This includes deformations on new and pre-existing clusters as well as deformations that are linked to other objects (lattices, waves, cluster centers, etc.).
  • Add operators to the stacks of cluster properties, including painting and smoothing weight maps and envelope weights, modifying texture UV coordinates, etc. Note that UV modifications are frozen when the model is offloaded (including before switching resolutions or saving the scene).
  • Delete any operators, clusters, properties, and cluster properties that have been added to the referenced model. Deleted items are removed from the delta.
  • Save animation mixer Cache data in the delta.

• RTS 3.0-an updated realtime shader API featuring all new programmable shaders that support the latest display technologies.
  XSI version 7.0 supports the Realtime Shader API version 3.0. There have been some major changes and enhancements since version 2.0 that add flexibility and simplicity in the development of realtime shaders