ISLANDERS: New Shores official announce trailer is here!

Among all the options, we feel that the Guardian Ebony and Guardian Arkveld are the best armors in Monster Hunter Wilds. These are our picks for the Low Rank segment of the game, though you do need to spend several hours just to reach this part of the campaign. Our guide discusses everything you need to know about how to acquire these gear pieces.Table of Contents [hide]Monster Hunter Wilds best armor guide - Guardian Ebony and Guardian Arkveld setGuardian Ebony armor setMonster Hunter Wilds best armor guide - Guardian Ebony and Guardian Arkveld setBoth the Guardian Ebony and Guardian Arkveld armor sets can be yours fairly late into the campaign (roughly after a dozen hours or so of playing). Prior to this part, we suggest doing the following:Practicing a bit in the Training Area so you can determine the best weapons for your playstyle.Crafting early-game items that should help you for the first few hunts.Guardian Ebony armor setEventually, you should reach the Ruins of Wyveria, where you'll get to battle Guardian-type monsters. The key factor that differentiates these beasts from their normal counterparts is that they can channel energy to heal/close their wounds. This means you need to be quick in destroying their wounds so you can cause as much damage and grab as many materials as possible.Continue Reading at GameSpot

Before leaving your camp and beginning a new day in Baldur's Gate 3, bolstering your party with the right buffs can make a huge difference. Since the game offers several buffs that last until the next long rest, it's wise to take advantage of them and prepare for the unknown that lies ahead.

The final race of Monopoly GOs Snow Racers event is here, and the stakes are higher than ever. This is your final opportunity to rack up medals and claim the exclusive Engineer Jon board token. The third and last is even more exciting because the medals are doubled. So, whether you've been leading the pack or are hoping for a last-minute surge, this race can dramatically change your position on the leaderboard. To help you finish strong, this guide covers all the Monopoly GO events happening on March 01, 2025, along with a winning strategy to maximize your score.

Hi fellas,Good day!I'm trying to create reflections in DXR. I have setup the code. The problem is that I couldnt find any issue regarding the hlsl code. c++ side is ok. any thoughts??//============================================================= REFLECT SHADERS =============================================[shader("miss")]void MyMissReflectShader(inout ReflectPayload payload){ float4 skycolor = SkyTx.SampleLevel(ssAnisot

AMD's most powerful and expensive CPU is being discounted but why?

Another packed week in tech draws to a close, and we've got the savvy summary you need.

The intricate stop-motion and puppeteering crafted by Tippett Studio for Alien: Romulus. An excerpt from befores & afters magazine in print.A key story point in Fede lvarezs Alien: Romulus involves time lapse monitor footage of a rat being crushed in an experiment, and then shown to somehow regenerate itself. That footage included stop-motion animation and puppeteering orchestrated by Tippett Studio at their facility in Berkeley, California.Here, members of the team tell befores & afters about the build involved, and the complex nature of the animation project, since it required going from a crushed rat to a regenerated one, and a number of steps in between. Plus, they discuss lining up their animation with real rats as well.b&a: What was the brief here from Fede?Chris Morley (visual effects supervisor and director of photography, Tippett Studio): Fede is a big fan of Phil Tippett and practical effects and just really wanted this to happen. When he described the sequence he said, Basically, you guys are going to smash a rat and then the rat regenerates. And thats it. So it was very, very basic direction and he trusted us from the very beginning. He knew that we had worked on other stop-motion stuff. We also have a rich history of visual effects, so we know how both can work together seamlessly and efficiently.What was really cool was he gave a brief explanation of what the scene was without getting too detailed into the story. He just mentioned that it was kind of a pivotal storyline to the whole picture. So that was, like, Okay, thats some pressure. This is going to be really cool.They had some postvis, so it was really clear what they were trying to achieve, and then it was just about all of us. Weve worked together for over 20 years, a lot of us, so it was just about putting our heads together to figure out how we were going to do this.Lisa Cooke (visual effects producer, Tippett Studio): When the brief came in and it said, Smash a rat and it comes back to life, I had no idea how we would do it, but knowing this team, I knew they would figure it out. Disney was very particular. You cannot harm a rat. You cannot even use any piece that was part of a real live rat, so the rat puppet that we created was completely built by hand.Chris Morley: Yes, Disney has a special soft spot in their heart for Rodentia, I dont really know what thats aboutb&a: To work out how to do it, what kind of conversations did you guys have about how this would be done with stop-motion and puppeteering?Chris Morley: Well, usually well just think about ideas first. Well say, Lets visualize the final piece. Okay, smashed rat regenerates. We have to do it stop-motion, so were not going to take a totally smashed rat and stop-motion regenerate it, were going to shoot it backwards.This is where we all have different ideas and then we come together. Then people like GibbyTom Gibbonshas so much experience with stop-motion because his history is in stop-motion before digital stuff, and so Gibbys usually a voice of reason of, Heres how it could work.Gibby, I know there was a lot of back and forth with what stages to shoot when. Do you want to talk about what we came up with in terms of what would be the best scenario for the regeneration?Tom Gibbons (lead stop-motion animator, Tippett Studio): When we first started talking about this, I remember we ran the gamut of ideas, one of them being a rod puppet. I remember we were going to do a rod puppet or we were going to do strings. We were going to shoot it at speed, basically, and see what performance we could get. And after talking that through with some of the other ideas, I remember I was pretty adamant about not doing that, but it was a great idea. It was still like the whole arsenal of old school tricks to figure out the best way to do this was on the table. And we rolled back around to stop-motion because it was the most controllable in the sense of, we could go slow, and we could make all the shapes potentially in the poses that we wanted to as we went from smashed rat to real rat.The look was intended to be similar to when animals die and then are being cleaned and decaying. They have that time-lapse look, even as they gas up and then collapse in on themselves. So the idea was we would reverse , and that kind of weird time lapse as adding two knots that you can get where the animals, they gas up and then they just collapse in on themselves.I tried to think of different ways to do that and I went down some bad rabbit holes. It became a combination of all the bad ideas coming together to make a single skin that we could use to have the rat be a rat in the very beginning and then basically just kind of crush it down by using foil and wire and all sorts of just weird, silly things. We even had push rods. So, if I collapsed the rat too quickly, we installed push rods shapers underneath that I could basically push the skin back out again to claim the shape that I wanted to get to.Chris Morley: It was all about the fabrication of this rat because thats what truly makes or breaks the technique, and coming to the conclusion of, This is what we need. We dont need a crazy machined armature or anything, we need pliable surfaces that we can plump out and also dent in. Thats when JD and Mark came in to help with the fabrication and the design of this rat.In fact, we originally got a rat sent to us that Alec Gillis had made. Thankfully they sent faux pelt. That was a big concern for us because we wanted to get a real taxidermy rat pelt, but that was out of the question because Disney said, No animal products whatsoever.John JD Daniel (puppet fabrication, Tippett Studio): Yes, Alec Gillis sent us this amazing and beautiful rat model of a white rat, but it was based off of a sewer rat. We actually had two live rats that were in our studio that were used in the beginning and the end of the sequence and we had to match those absolutely. Lab rats are usually kind of small and round, and so we needed to take this amazing rat pelt and all of these materials and completely strip it down to all of its parts. We literally recreated a new rat to match our hero live actor rats.What was wonderful was that, along with the puppet itself, Alec Gillis sent extra pelt on wax paper, and some extra bones and organs, and we used every part of that. It was wonderful. But then basically the entire skin was pelted and then foil was placed in so we could animate with it, and then all of its skull had to be reconstructed and new eyeballs added in as well from a local glass artist.Mark Dubeau (art director, Tippett Studio): In addition to building a rat, we had to create this entire set around the rat. Production sent us palette after palette of props and sets and tables and whatnot from production. It was actually kind of stunning to see all the stuff show up and then we had everythinglab coats, microscopes, syringes, you name it. We had to go in and match in terms of not only the look of the way everything was set up on their stages over in Budapest, but also in terms of the lighting, I know Chris and Ken spent a lot of time trying to make it feel like it was set in the same world. Even though in a lot of cases we were seeing it on a monitor, you still wanted it to feel like it was in the same place.Chris Morley: It was totally awesome. It was about a 10 feet long bank, so we were able to make a counter and it had a backing, and then we had all of the props set up that would be slightly off screen. In the end, it was quite simple to match the lighting because there was a very soft top light. We would do little things like making sure the little W logo for Weyland was somewhere in frame so you could see it. We lit and shot everything to hold up on a big screen, but I just love the fact that this was going to go on a CRT monitor and look aged. We didnt hold back on the detail and the precision, even though it was going to be in a CRT monitor. It just makes it that much better.Mark Dubeau: It was surprising when we got the enclosure that the rat is in. They had actually engineered that so it would go down with a motor and it could potentially crush the rat for real. We had to go in and put a lock nut in there just so that there wasnt any accident that happened with the real rat. We wouldnt have been able to stop it. It just went down like that when you gave it power, so we had to make sure that we didnt wind up accidentally killing a rat.b&a: What were the materials that you were using to really sell the gore of it, especially the insides of the rat and the muscles and that sort of thing?Tom Gibbons: The kit that we got, it was not only fur shaped like a rat, but if you took the skin off, it was what we called the meat rat. It was literally just a muscled, sculpted version of a rat out of silicone. I cut pieces off of it in the shapes that I wanted so that when I broke the skin I could push little mounds of meat and bone through it. In order to get that stuff, its jelly and Vaseline and meat silicone and little plastic bones. I shaped the skulls and the ears out of aluminum rubber.I was given the restriction of not making it too splattery or gory, so it only happens in a couple of very isolated places. Chris did a pass on it to amp the bloodiness of it up to taste without getting us in trouble.John JD Daniel: Tom also rebuilt the entirety of all of its little claws and then painted it up with latex to make these wonderful little animatable hands.Tom Gibbons: Yes, the one thing that we didnt get from the original puppet was feet and hands. They were more or less little rubber paddles. They would hold up on film, but they just wouldnt in animating, so we remade them. Fortunately, that kit that they sent us was awesome. We were true scavengers. We used every bit of that thing for our own.Chris Morley: And, as far as orchestration and paths forward that were revealed to us, there was a lot of, Lets do a little of this, then we have to skip to this and then we have to go back to this, because we were dealing with live animal rats.Lisa Cooke: We had to have a rat handler and a rat safety monitor to watch the rat handler. We had two rats, Grayson and Sneaky. They even had their own green room.Chris Morley: In terms of the real rats, so, we had this machine, and it had this big waffle iron thing that smashes down. So, as JD mentioned, we had to rig the machine with a screw so it would not fall down at all while a real rat was in there. The thing is, we had to get the plate of the post-rat regeneration first because we needed an exact pose and position to give to the fabrication team; Gibby, JD and Mark. Thats why you hear Gibby talking about resculpting the ears, resculpting the hands. It was all just to match that single frame. Then as soon as wed line up to that single frame or line up to the live action, it would cut to the live action. The way that Fede designed the shot was supposed to be time-lapsed, so there were nice skips and jumps which made it very easy to be able to blend it back into the live action.I remember we had the camera set up from the day that we shot the real rats in there, and we locked that camera and left that camera for the stop-motion shoot with a barrier around the camera so that no one would kick it. The focus was locked, everything, and we used that to constantly go back in with our fabricated rat and A-B it with the last frame of the practical rat until their silhouettes matched.Mark Dubeau: Werent the rats chosen because one of them was kind of cute, fuzzy, and young looking, and then the other one was rougher looking?Lisa Cooke: I think we got lucky. Grayson had a really bad hair day and Sneaky was more together, so one of them we could use before the smash and the other one could be used after the smash.Chris Morley: It was serendipity. I love that stuff. Its happy accidents. One rat happened to be super gnarly. Thats the one after it regenerates because it just looks a little fucked up. Thats the kind of magical thing that happens in our favor when the film gods are on our side.Mark Dubeau: He was a heavy smoker and had a drinking problemb&a: Lets talk about the stop-motion shoot. What can you say about how that was approached?Webster Colcord (stop-motion animator, Tippett Studio): I think whats interesting was that it was a very linear process because you had to shoot the live action first for where the rat would end up. And then Gibby animated backwards, and then I animated backwards from where Gibby landed with the smashed rat to show the still barely alive smashed rat, and then we went even further backwards to shoot a little bit of live action puppeteering.Chris Morley: In comp we did a split line for the smash. It went from real rat right here, then smash, with the split line in comp to cover. Then when it lifted back up, it was the stop-motion rat, well, it actually wasnt the stop-motion rat. It was the same model that we were going to use for stop-motion, but we did a little bit of rod puppeteering where Webster and Melissa came in and we shot that one live action. We were shooting with the R5 camera, so we were able to shoot 8K live action with the same aspect ratio as the stop-motion frames. It was super cool to be able to shoot both movie and single frames from the exact same camera. That allowed us to do all the little tricks, like the little twitching with the rods.Webster Colcord: The thing to remember is that there was no going back because Gibby and JD made the beautiful pristine rat puppet, and then Gibby reverse animated, smashed it with all kinds of stuff going on in between, and then I shot a little bit and then cut it apart to make it loose enough so we could rod puppet it. Really, it was a backwards linear production flow. Totally unlike our CG projects where we bounce around and do different stages and go back and change things. We couldnt here. This was linear, practical.b&a: And Webster, just on that live action puppeteering, what kind of access did you have to the casing it was in?Webster Colcord: There was very limited access. Luckily, Melissa is tiny.Melissa Claire (puppeteer, Tippett Studio): I have a very small arm that I could just jam in there.Webster Colcord: So, Melissa was doing the head of the puppet and I was just doing the breathing. What was cool too was that Chris compd in the fluid. Meanwhile, Ken was playing the Weyland-Yutani mad scientist.Melissa Claire: Kens hand might be in the movie, right?Chris Morley: Kens hands definitely in the movie, and Ken we enlisted to do the injection on the rat. In that shot where you see the gloved hand coming in and injecting the black fluid into the rat, thats a combo of Webster, Melissa and Ken all at the same time with a live action shoot.Ken Rogerson (visual effects editor, Tippett Studio): And just to be clear, the access in that scene was very restricted because Im leaning over Webster, whos half hanging out of the set, and Melissa has climbed down underneath the set and is reaching up blind, puppeteering from below. And Chris was over by the camera, so were all four people in about three square feet of space, I think.Chris Morley: I was watching out for their feetDo not kick the tripod. The camera had been set up for two weeks!Ken Rogerson: At that point, we were super committed. We had to follow through on that inverse pipeline where, when you got to the end of one process, that became the first frame of the next process, down to this last shoot, the live action injection.Chris Morley: It was quite an editorial undertaking because the way we had to shoot it backwards and forwards and split it up and everything, it was really great for Ken to just bring it in editorial and figure it out. This was planned and it all worked, which was great, and then it just required a little bit of compositing in there. I love doing compositing as well and was able to just blend the stuff together and make sure all the trickery was working.Webster Colcord: I think we should have Gibby talk about the sheer nerve it takes to not animate something smoothly. Gibbys style has become the studio style and his animation is beautiful and flows with great arcs and overshoots, but this was meant to be time lapse.Tom Gibbons: It was antithetical to the way that you would normally do stop-motion, and the part that I was trying to capture that was the hardest mental leap was that if you watch animals decay over time in a time lapse thing, they dont just deflate like a balloon or something. The air doesnt go. They have the tendency to collapse and then all of a sudden, parts of them will start to all of a sudden grow back out. Thats what it looks like because other parts are deflating quicker. Its like a bad souffl, when a bad souffl just drops.So, the idea of being able to try to take this rat down in ways that wouldbecause again, I had to work backwards. It wouldve worked way better mentally if Id been able to animate from the smash up into a real rat because your brain just wants to work forward in time. It doesnt really want to work backwards, so trying to get that weird stuttery step look, but then also do it in reverse was a complete mind fuck.Webster Colcord: One thing I used on the breathing shot where the rats just breathing, because its so delicate, was just a brush to move the bits of fur for some frames because it was so touchy and subtle.Chris Morley: A lot of times we do stop-motion, we also do a little bit of previs. How much previs did we do, Gibby?Tom Gibbons: The one advantage I had that I thought would help much more than it actually did when I started shooting was I just took one of our old CG rats and I worked with our rigger to give me the freedom to scale it down in weird ways and do an animation from a crush up into a real rat so I could try to get the dance right of that, and that helped a lot.I did that for a week or so before I actually did the real stop-motion just so that we could see the shape. That way, when JD and I were making it, we could try to understand that we wanted the knee joints and the hips and the pelvis to be able to come out of the skin in a way, that is, poke sharp angles up. Again, it was a lot of great ideas, and in the end it was just close your eyes and just start stabbing it and hope that it looks good.Lisa Cooke: I just wanted to add that the rat puppet was one of the most laborious puppets weve built. From what we were given, to what the team created, it was a very exacting process and they did a beautiful job. I was saddened that we had to smash it because it looked so good.Ken Rogerson: When we look at the live rat in the split frame where we matched the stop-motion rat up to match the last frame or first frame of the live rat, you could barely tell a difference. Chris did a little bit of comp work to blend that, but it almost didnt need it. Really, the stop-motion rat stands up and becomes the live rat. Its pretty amazing.Chris Morley: The thing that allowed us to really capture that feeling of the broken souffl that Gibby was talking about was the fact that it was the faux pelt and on the underside was basically tinfoil to where we could poke sticks and have sharp corners and then poke sticks to soften it up. It allowed Gibby and Webster to get the right pose every time. The tinfoil under the body allowed us to do that. A huge part of that rat build was getting that tinfoil. And I remember JD would have the pelt out and it looked like a bear rug.John JD Daniel: There was only so much extra pelt that I had. I had the one main pelt and some extra. Once I made cuts, there was no going back. This was the prop. I would check all of the rat. I had Gibby sculpt rat shapes so we could confirm that this would fold into this and then okay, here we go, gluing it and then youre done. So there were no multiple rats. There was one rat that we built.Tom Gibbons: A couple of things I would just mention that were a surprise to me, but it is so obvious now, is that in order to get the live action and the stop-motion characters to match, I eventually just sculpted a clay rat that was a fully clay rat, and I used this rat skull for the head because it was the right proportion, and it was probably the only real thing that was a given one-to-one. We knew that the rat skull fit inside a real rat head, and the rest of it was just made up. So we did a rat out of clay that we used to then take the pelt and just shape it across the top, and the first time we did that it looked great. But then I realized that was like stretching a balloon skin across something. Which didnt work, because rats, theyre little bags of bones inside little rugs, so theres all sorts of skin fur that you just never see.issue #22 Alien: RomulusYou can take a rat and flatten it out and youre like, Holy cow. Thats a lot of skin, that you never see because theyre always balled up into these little cute snowballs. So, we winged out the arms and the legs so we could get all the skin in there so that when he did start to collapse, the body as it collapsed wouldnt just pull the legs in with it because there was extra skin.We had only one almost full pelt left over from Alec Gillis. I used one full pelt in the shoot, then as the rat collapsed and I realized I needed a rib cage to come out or a pelvis, Id go cut new pelt and Id blend it into the rat as it was going down in order to get the shape that I wanted, because there wasnt enough granularity in the foil or the wire to get those shapes. So, I was just sculpting our rat down and then building another rat on top of that rat with just the one leftover pelt.The one thing that we built that we didnt get to put in the movie, was that we were going to pop an eye out onto the cheek and I made a little glass eyeball. I put an optic nerve on it and I built this whole armature and miniature-like clockwork inside the head so that I could pop the eye out onto the cheek and then reel it back into the head. But we never got to use it.Chris Morley: We did bulge some eyes digitally.Tom Gibbons: But no eye pop. I thought it was going to be in there, but it didnt make the final cut.Webster Colcord: I came on the stage after Gibby had shot the big shot with the rat reforming backwards, and you can see what an artsy craftsy project it was because it was just like a big childrens art studio. It was so much different than the usual thing we animate, like a big robot with ball and socket joints and all that. Instead, it was just sculpting in front of the camera.b&a: What was it like working with Fede?Ken Rogerson: That relationship was really great on this show. Sometimes were fairly distant from the director and working through a lot of supervisors, but he really took a lot of interest in what we were doing. He gave really great direct feedback and information about what he was looking for.Chris Morley: He was super positive and loved what we were doing. He actually asked if we could shoot a few more inserts. We were all game for that and shot some more inserts for him that I believe he took to another company. In the last rat shot in Romulus, you can see the after effect of the black fluid. It starts bleeding and then you see its back tear open. That was taking some footage that we shot, and then I believe another company did the digital gore for that. That was really cool that he trusted us. He knew from the work that we did that we were fully capable of hooking him up with what he needed, and he was just really thankful for what we did.I try to be a huge proponent of using stop-motion as a viable means in the modern visual effects process, and we are fortunate enough at Tippett to have such a rich history where we have a lot of pretty exclusive companies coming to us for stop-motion work, even though were predominantly a digital effects house. We have the stage, we have the knowledge, we have the stop-motion animators, and it takes filmmakers that are willing to take that gamble of not having 100 takes of something and just embracing the realism, the tactile nature and craftsmanship of stop-motion animation. Fedes definitely one of those. Rian Johnsons one of those. Jon Favreau and then all the people on his team, Doug Chiang, John Knoll, theyre super champions for the stop-motion process.The thing that makes Tippett a little more interesting is that, yes, we love stop-motion, but were not purists at all. If theres any digital stuff that we can do to help augment the stop-motion to be even more of a viable visual effects process in this modern era, we have no problems doing that. We actually love doing it, addingmotion blur, re-timing, mapping textures onto stop-motion things to help them blend. We do it all and its really wonderful because its photographic, its moved by humans. Even if you re-time, it has that foundation of craftsmanship in there and were just very fortunate to be part of that process.b&a: Ken, Im curious whether you got to keep the yellow lab coat or whether you had to send it back?Ken Rogerson: Oh, it was made out of literally just latex rubber and if you wear that for five minutes, you never want to see it again.Chris Morley: Theres some Ken DNA in it for sure.Ken Rogerson: It was heavily corn-starched but still, it was designed to look good on camera, not wear well.Chris Morley: You wore it well, you looked good in it.Lisa Cooke: Everything was boxed up and went back to Hungary, unfortunately.b&a: Any final observations about this project?Lisa Cooke: Disney takes their animal welfare very, very seriously. Kudos to them. And, because of that, this project had a happy ending, Grayson and Sneaky were saved from a feedlot and they have both found forever homes.Chris Morley: Not in a snake belly.The post How to animate a rat being smashedand do it backwards appeared first on befores & afters.