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Anshuman Kashyap is a senior concept artist at Rockstar. Read more... View the full article

Hello. Do you like XCOM? Do you like the recent and excellent MechWarrior Tactics game? And most importantly, are you interested at all in the passage of time? If so, then there’s someone I’d like you to meet. Read more... View the full article

Destiny 2’s newest expansion dropped its first major secret on Tuesday. Following the game’s weekly rest, players discovered clues in the European Dead Zone leading to a new exotic quest. I finished it earlier today, and can confirm it’s a certified banger. Read more... View the full article

“Exclusionary Design”, also known as “Hostile Architecture”, are the names given to the relatively modern concept of “an urban-design strategy that uses elements of the built environment to purposefully guide or restrict behaviour”. Specifically, it targets the homeless and the young. Read more... View the full article

The Last of Us’ TV adaptation is a rare bird in terms of staying true to its source material—particularly when it comes to video games. But even a show that aims to be as authentic as HBO’s treatment of the hit PlayStation series needs to make a few changes to adapt to a different form of storytelling. After the… Read more... View the full article

The Academy Award nominations are in — and for the 15th year in a row, NVIDIA technologies worked behind the scenes of every film nominated for Best Visual Effects. The five VFX contenders for the 95th annual Academy Awards, taking place on Sunday, March 12, include: All Quiet on the Western Front Avatar: The Way of Water The Batman Black Panther: Wakanda Forever Top Gun: Maverick For over a decade, filmmakers and VFX studios around the world have used NVIDIA technologies to power the most advanced, visually rich movies ever made. Today, creators and artists are transforming VFX using advanced capabilities in graphics, like real-time ray tracing, simulation, AI and virtual production — all powered by NVIDIA RTX technologies. Diving Into Natural Wonders With Cutting-Edge Graphics Award-winning studio Wētā FX created the stunning visuals for director James Cameron’s much-anticipated sequel, Avatar: The Way of Water. The film is one of Wētā’s largest VFX projects to date. The team created 3,240 shots — which is 98% of the total shots in the film, more than two-thirds of which featured water. In computer graphics (CG), making water look natural and realistic — from how it moves off a character’s skin to how it drips from clothing — is one of the biggest challenges for visual effects artists. But for this film, Wētā developed and implemented a new water toolset that advanced their capabilities across simulation, rendering and more. The team started with pre-production and performance capture using a real-time, GPU-based ocean spectrum deformer, which served as a consistent, physically based starting point for water on set. From there, Wētā created a new suite of water solvers — many of them within Loki, the studio’s in-house multiphysics simulation framework. Loki allows coupling of multiple solvers in any configuration. For example, hair, cloth, air and water can all be simulated together. Other key innovations from Wētā centered on both dry and wet performance capture, new deep learning models to process stereo camera images and generate depth maps for compositing, and neural networks to assist with facial animation and muscle systems. Creating Captivating Car Chases Through Gritty Gotham Wētā FX was also behind the cinematic visuals for The Batman. The team, led by VFX supervisor Anders Langlands, worked on the gripping highway chase between Batman and the infamous villain, the Penguin. As they race through the city of Gotham under heavy rainfall, the Penguin sets off a sequence of car crashes and explosions. To create a feeling of danger and exhilaration, the team put the car chase scene together through heavily enhanced live action and completely CG shots. Rendering the proper lighting; simulating realistic raindrops colliding with multiple surfaces, hydroplaning and wheel spray; and illuminating rain through headlights and streetlights all added to the complexity of these shots. Wētā also worked on background environments for scenes in the Batcave and Gotham’s City Hall. Taking CGI to the Sky The practical effects and cinematography behind Top Gun: Maverick was an instant highlight of this heart-pounding Hollywood blockbuster film. But to add more layers of realism to those outstanding aerial shots, VFX Supervisor Ryan Tudhope and the team at Method Studios partnered with the camera department, aerial coordinators and the United States Navy to film extensive air-to-air and ground-to-air footage of real jets. They captured over 800 hours of aerial stunts, mounts and plates to provide their team with a practical foundation for the visual effects work. The Top Gun: Maverick team implemented various VFX techniques, creating a surprising 2,400 VFX shots for the movie. The visual effects included creating and adding CG planes in scenes, as well as adding missiles, smoke and explosions in various action sequences. The invisible nature of the visual effects in Top Gun: Maverick make it a top contender for the Academy Award for Best Visual Effects. A New Swimlane for Underwater Worlds In Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, Wētā FX further demonstrated its leadership in creating photorealistic underwater sequences. Chris White, visual effects supervisor for the film, was tasked with creating the Mesoamerican-inspired Talokan underwater kingdom. To get a realistic look for the characters in this undersea world, Wētā used a combination of live-action sequences shot in water tanks and dry-for-wet shots that helped capture realistic underwater motion for the characters, clothes and hair. Wētā also reflected how various skin tones would react to light with the added complexity of a murky underwater environment. The bar for realistic water simulation has once again been raised by Wētā FX in Blank Panther: Wakanda Forever. All Action on the VFX Front Movie magic is made when visual effects are so seamless that the audience remains completely immersed in the story, not realizing that what they’re seeing is an effect. This is how VFX supervisor Markus Frank and production company Cine Chromatix earned their Best Visual Effects nomination for All Quiet on the Western Front. To authentically tell the story of two young soldiers during World War I, Cine Chromatix and the film’s visual effects teams focused on the fine details needed to craft VFX that are hidden in plain sight. The result is stunning. Even after watching Cine Chromatix’s VFX breakdown reel for the film, viewers may find themselves scrubbing back and forth to decipher fact from fiction. See How Oscar-Nominated VFX Are Created at GTC NVIDIA congratulates all of this year’s nominees for the Academy Award for Best Visual Effects. Learn more about visual effects, AI, virtual production and animation at NVIDIA GTC, a global technology conference taking place online March 20-23. Register for free and hear from industry luminaries creating stunning visuals in film and TV. Check out all the media and entertainment sessions at GTC. Featured image courtesy of 20th Century Studios. View the full article

Good news for all the potty-mouthed YouTubers out there. A new update introduced by the monetization policy team makes some important changes, letting you cuss more often in your uploads and still collect that ad-revenue bag. Read more... View the full article

Everyone knows old Pokémon cards are incredibly hot right now, but nobody knows exactly what they’re worth to collectors. Exhibit A: Someone put a holographic Illustrator Pikachu in near-perfect condition up for auction on eBay with a starting bid of $480,000, and it went over like a lead balloon. Read more... View the full article

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Genshin Impact is hardly the worst offender when it comes to portraying women in video games. The sexualization of its female cast is limited to extraneous hip windows. Their personalities are inoffensive and charming. But as I watch every major update usher in personal developments and new lore for its male… Read more... View the full article

Last week, director and actor Michael B. Jordan revealed his top five anime recommendations during a press junket interview for Creed III. Read more... View the full article

So you love Grogu, aka Baby Yoda. We all do. And his television series, which is oddly named The Mandalorian, is now back for its third season. How exciting! And who knows, maybe you also like the bounty hunter action, western tropes, and maybe even the Mando himself. If any or all of that is true, then here are some … Read more... View the full article

A month after Twitch streamer Brandon “Atrioc” Ewing accidentally revealed that he was watching sexually explicit deepfakes of his fellow streamers while on stream, Twitch has issued a lengthy statement regarding its stance on the controversy and what the company is calling “synthetic non-consensual exploitative… Read more... View the full article

Loot boxes have been a thorn in gamers’ sides for as long as they’ve been around, with lawsuits and players deriding them as exploitative gambling mechanics. EA has been a prominent example of publishers using loot boxes, and its massively popular soccer game FIFA is no exception. FIFA’s Ultimate Team, or FUT, card… Read more... View the full article

The latest episode of HBO’s The Last of Us is full of standout scenes. While episode 8, “When We Are In Need,” is full of tension, drama, and even a bit more action than the show typically gets into, the moment that has viewers in a chokehold right now is one of its quietest: when Pedro Pascal’s Joel calls Bella… Read more... View the full article

A new Elden Ring mod morphs FromSoftware’s open world epic into a gory Pokémon battler, with infinite spirit summons you can pit against each other like you’re Ash Ketchum at the renaissance fair. You can download the “Elden Ring Spirit Battler” now on Nexus Mods, no strings attached. You only need to be enthusiastic… Read more... View the full article

Remakes, adaptations, reimaginings, reboots, they’re all tricky business. And with a game as celebrated as Resident Evil 4 next up on the remake meat grinder of modern video games, you might be curious as to what’s gonna get left on the cutting room floor. Well, a recent interview with the game’s director reveals that… Read more... View the full article

Cheaters suck. By exploiting vulnerabilities in any given game, either through datamined hacks or purchasable cheats, charlatans can ruin the fun for everyone involved. Sometimes these swindlers need to be publicly shamed to grasp the gravity of the ban hammer that’s fallen upon them, and that’s exactly what Escape… Read more... View the full article

If you thought the war between Ukraine and Russia couldn’t possibly get any worse, it just did. A group of Russian weebs cosplaying as a band of thieves from the popular shonen manga Hunter x Hunter have joined the fray. Read more... View the full article

Destiny 2’s Lightfall expansion how now been out for a whole week. It made a bad first impression, but the post-campaign has been much stronger. There’s plenty to appreciate in between the disappointing story and the overall mixed bag of new additions and confusing changes. Outside of the jovial surfer cyborg Nimbus,… Read more... View the full article

I boot up Hogwarts Legacy and step away to refill my coffee cup. Thanks to the PS5’s quick resume mechanic, my character is staring at me from the start screen before I even get a chance to add oat milk to my brew. I gaze, absentmindedly, as the boar’s head mounted on the wall behind her snarls and startles her, as… Read more... View the full article

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The Last of Us show had a pretty gruesome episode this week. The Winter section has long been regarded as the original game’s darkest section, reckoning with its most villainous figures and horrifying realities of the post-apocalypse. Because of that, it’s perhaps merciful on the showrunner’s part that the show omits… Read more... View the full article

Xbox shared the latest games to join its subscription service Game Pass in a blog announcement earlier today, and it’s looking pretty good. This early month update adds Guilty Gear Strive, plenty of Dead Space, and a few important updates to games you already have. Read more... View the full article

It’s a nightmare scenario for Yu-Gi-Oh fans who have to look up cards with convoluted descriptions. Over the weekend, the administrators of Yugipedia—which, as its name implies, is a wiki on all things Yu-Gi-Oh—announced that they had accidentally deleted half of the wikia’s primary database. “Yugipedia has suffered a… Read more... View the full article