Intel推介動畫製作工具MACHINIMASIA

ANIMATE, CAPTURE AND CREATE DIGITAL ANIMATION WITH INTEL AND MACHINIMASIA

PETALING JAYA, 13 July, 2007 – A new craze in digital content creation is taking off in Asia, offering aspiring Asian filmmakers and digital animators an opportunity to express and share their creativity in new ways. “Machinima*” (pronounced muh-sheen-eh-mah) is an evolutionary film technique that utilizes game characters and environments to create unique digital animation for short films.

Popular in the U.S. and Europe, the burgeoning new film genre is expected to be popular in Asia Pacific as it combines the popularity of gaming with personal, unique expression through digital media, as popularized by social networking websites.

“In the past, digital animation was largely limited to companies who could handle the compute-intensive workloads required to create animated films. However, the advancement of technology in personal computing by Intel has created a new wave of enthusiasts that now have access to powerful processor technologies to create their own digital short films and animations,” said Rupal Shah, APAC Marketing Director, Intel Technology Asia.

According to Shah, Intel® Core™ Microarchitecture provides the amazing PC performance and compute intensive capabilities required for digital content creation, and to take advantage of the growing number of multi-threaded applications available. A powerful choice for multimedia and entertainment enthusiasts, the four processing cores in Intel® Core™ 2 Quad processors provide astonishing performance, up to 79% faster for highly-threaded applications like creating multimedia and 3D content[1].

“For Machinima artists this amazing performance translates into less time waiting and more time creating,” she said.

Rather than working with costly camera equipment or spending months animating each scene using costly 3D packages, a Machinima film can be produced by “acting” out scenes within a computer game. The scenes are then captured and stitched together using digital video creation software to create the final masterpiece. The whole process is significantly less complex and far less expensive for budding film directors.

Intel is working with Machinimasia to conduct a series of workshops teaching aspiring content creators how simple and easy it is to produce their own original works. The workshops will travel to Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore, Philippines, Thailand, Korea and Taiwan from July to December 2007. The first workshop is held in Malaysia today.

During the workshops, participants will create digital animation on Intel Core Microarchitecture-based PCs gaining valuable insight on how digital filmmaking and computer game animation are brought together within a real-time virtual 3D environment. They will also learn the finer points of how to script, direct, produce and create their very own animated story with some of today’s most popular games.

“Machinimasia[2] kicked off in Singapore last year making it the first country in Asia to benefit from this new media art movement. We now look forward to taking it to the next level across the Asia Pacific this year with Intel as our technology partner of choice,” said Eugene Lim, acting head of Machinimasia.

“Machinima currently has a community of more than 500,000 and sees a strong following in the gaming and virtual world as an accessible means to showcase creativity online. It is also a great introduction to the world of digital content creation for students,” he said.

[1]Performance measured using 3D Ray Tracing on POV-Ray* 3.7 Beta 16, comparing the Intel® Core™ 2 Quad processor Q6600 to Intel® Core™ 2 Duo processor E6700. Actual performance may vary. See http://www.intel.com/performance/desktop/extreme/3d_ray_tracing.htmcom/performance/desktop/extreme/3d_ray_tracing.htm for more information.

[2] The Asia Chapter of The Academy of Machinima Arts & Sciences New York