|
I'm waitlisted as a volunteer. I don't think it's gonna happen. Some of my friends are going though, good luck to you goonz.
|
#
?
Jul 8, 2013 19:22
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 15, 2024 08:51 |
|
|
I'll be there! The career fair is going to be ridiculous. Less studios involved then last year, and a billion fold more artists looking for work. Should be entertaining. Some of the talks look really solid though. Edit: This was just announced today. http://www.sidefx.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=2524&Itemid=387 The 'Houdini Engine' is a SideFX provided plugin for Maya and Unity (if its popular enough I'm sure they will quickly expand to other programs as well), that allows users to take Digital Assets created in Houdini and use them inside of Maya or Unity. No clue how the licensing for these things will work, but seems like a pretty awesome business strategy. It should also mean more jobs for Houdini artists since you don't really have to worry about the studio not having a Houdini pipeline. Trintintin fucked around with this message at 19:09 on Jul 11, 2013 |
|
#
?
Jul 9, 2013 03:39
|
|
|
So I finally finished a few sketches. Here's a speedsculpt of everybody's favorite, hero, antihero, villain, whatever. Deadpool. Done as a test to try out Sculptris.  I also finished my first "full" environment.  Thoughts?
|
|
#
?
Jul 12, 2013 18:18
|
|
|
noob question: I'm making an animation where the camera zooms from seeing a full CG planet Earth to a small spacecraft orbiting it, all in one continuous shot. For this to look good, at some point I will have to use pretty high resolution textures for the Earth. These textures exist, but are huge - think 100+MB jpgs. In the interest of not killing my computer I was thinking it would make sense to use a texture that's only hi res for the small area where the camera is close. Is there standard way to do this? In Photoshop I enlarged a small texture without interpolating new pixels (turning one pixel in to a 10x10 square of just that color), then droped in a hi res area from a larger version of the same texture. This brought the file size down to about half the size of the plain, all hi-res file (but only if I saved as png), I'm wondering if I'm missing anything here. At this point I'm looking at blowing up my lowest res texture up to the size of the highest res one, then Photoshopping in two or three levels of higher detail where the camera will get close. This will still give me a massive file, but save maybe 20-40% on file size. Is this stupid? ninja edit - I'm using Max 2013, and am still very new to it
|
|
#
?
Jul 13, 2013 03:39
|
|
|
If you're doing it entirely in Max, good luck!  That kind of shot is where compositing will really help. Break the shot up into stages, then composite them in after effects or what have you.
|
|
#
?
Jul 13, 2013 04:05
|
|
|
No, I've got AE too. Would the staging be something like rendering the frames with the lo res textures til it's ugly, backtrack a few frames then bump up the res, render til ugly, repeat? And then fade them in to each other in AE? edit - and maybe have the high res textures be straight black where the camera doesn't see to further save file size?
|
|
#
?
Jul 13, 2013 04:14
|
|
|
Thats one option yes. Make sections of the scene with the appropriate texture size, so you dont need a whole planet until you're nearly in orbit. Closer to the ground you can go from curved planes to flat planes when you're nearly on the ground. Render them all out as seperate passes, then layer them out in after effects with some nice zoomy cloud layers. Actually, thinking about it further I'd just keep rendered sequences for when you actually have movement. i.e. if you want to do a little street scene first, you render that stuff out oversized, then you can scale it down over time in AE to mimic a zoom out effect, put still layers as needed with more scale over time and radial zoom blurring, cloud layers, then finish off with your orbital scene.
|
|
#
?
Jul 13, 2013 04:27
|
|
|
Prolonged Priapism posted:No, I've got AE too. Would the staging be something like rendering the frames with the lo res textures til it's ugly, backtrack a few frames then bump up the res, render til ugly, repeat? And then fade them in to each other in AE? yep. dont worry about making the textures be black - dont texture the whole earth. the close up you can do flat. mid level, you can add a bend modifer to a plane, then the top you can do a sphere. render all 3, blend between. the hard thing will be getting the sense of speed right between them - this will take a number of test renders. use a checker map in your 3 different scenes to a good relative scale and re-render over and over again until the camera motion feels correct. edit: if you look at some ads and movies that have done this effect, they use clouds to blend between the first 2, then a big jump in speed to hide the gap between the next 2. consider trying something similar. it's an effect that's been done many times before - use reference. you'll be surprised that what you thought in a movie was a constant pull out was actually broken up more when you really look at it. cubicle gangster fucked around with this message at 06:29 on Jul 13, 2013 |
|
#
?
Jul 13, 2013 06:27
|
|
|
Also, if you get really stuck, videocopilot - pretty much the leading AE tutorial site - has a tutorial specifically for that! Although they use footage not 3D, but at least the after effects part is explained pretty much perfectly from what I remembered: http://www.videocopilot.net/tutorials/earth_zoom/
|
|
#
?
Jul 13, 2013 07:19
|
|
|
Thanks ya'll! I should be more clear about what I'm trying to do, though. I won't actually zoom all the way to ground level - the closest I'll come is somewhere in Low Earth Orbit, around the altitude of the space station, so I'll never go below clouds. This video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5SALJSbfn1k is lame, but it shows the general idea. In the real version the little green cylinder will be the craft, and I'll have to zoom much closer to Earth to see it - right now it's waaaaay too big. But yeah I've seen that videocopilot video, and I might do something like that in reverse for a moon descent shot. Cubicle gangster, using a checker map is a great idea, as is using only bits of the texture on planes. I'll keep you guys updated as this comes along. edit: I should also say that that video was rendered (and composited) at 24 fps. I like the idea of rendering 25% fewer frames, and getting that filmic look. Is that a stupid idea? I think I might need to bump up the motion blur a little, but otherwise am I shooting myself in the food because computer screens generally refresh at 60hz and It'll always look a little jerky? If so, why don't films on youtube look jerky? Prolonged Panorama fucked around with this message at 17:14 on Jul 13, 2013 |
|
#
?
Jul 13, 2013 16:53
|
|
|
Geared Hub posted:Anyone going to siggraph? [Anaheim in two weeks] I'm gonna be there. I'll be mainly hanging out at the Foundry Booth or the Texture painters BOF Fun Fun Fun.
|
|
#
?
Jul 18, 2013 11:28
|
|
|
forelle posted:I'm gonna be there. I'll be mainly hanging out at the Foundry Booth or the Texture painters BOF How do those BOF things work? I've never actually been to one. Is it just like a bunch of dudes hanging out shooting the poo poo or is it like more specialized talks. Also for those interested, Framestore (like Pixar) is doing applications on their website for Siggraph interviews. Sign up for one here: http://tinyurl.com/n5wlxgf Having to write cover letters for potential interviews at Siggraph is weird. Edit: The student film I worked on last year finally went public yay! https://vimeo.com/69668528 Trintintin fucked around with this message at 20:38 on Jul 18, 2013 |
|
#
?
Jul 18, 2013 19:38
|
|
|
Anybody going to Comic Con this weekend? It'll be my first time, and first time as a "professional", I'm pretty excited. I might try for Siggraph too, but it looks like the scheduled it around the same time as Comic Con for some weird reason.
|
|
#
?
Jul 18, 2013 23:47
|
|
|
Yeah the Brit studios are big on cover letters.. Double negative recruiting emailed me asking for a cover letter and what position I want to apply for which is obvious if you look at my résumé or demo reel for 2 seconds.  Especially since I selected the position I'm applying for using their online system... I guess thier job submission system is messed up...Ah well whatever I'm running the interview gauntlet next week event though I accepted a gig back at ILM again... Which consisted of me emailing them 'sup and they were all like 'come on back'. No interview and no stupid cover letters. Now I got to pack and find a place in the SF Bay Area. LA is a loving dead zone for vfx peeps with so many looking for work... Some companies are really dragging out their interview process... Big K of Justice fucked around with this message at 09:55 on Jul 19, 2013 |
|
#
?
Jul 19, 2013 09:51
|
|
|
Geared Hub posted:Yeah the Brit studios are big on cover letters.. Double negative recruiting emailed me asking for a cover letter and what position I want to apply for which is obvious if you look at my résumé or demo reel for 2 seconds. nice to see you're not hurting too much on the job finding process though. Is the project you are working on under wraps?
|
|
#
?
Jul 19, 2013 17:02
|
|
|
Odddzy posted:nice to see you're not hurting too much on the job finding process though. Is the project you are working on under wraps? Pretty much until after next summer. On Job finding though it was rougher than usual. Usually I had new work lined up pretty quickly but it took a while, had a few crap offers fly my way, but I figured it would be better to wait it out a bit and wait for an opening at one of my old employers. Still really bad in LA with the collapse and reformation of DD and R+H. Usually having R+H, DD and Sony in West LA was a nice big-vfx-vendor cornerstone you can bounce between, but with DD and Sony pushing all work to Vancouver for the tax credit and R+H running lean and mean, its shaken things up a bit. Thats the problem with film work, its feast or famine, like I said a few times before, never saw it this bad before....
|
|
#
?
Jul 19, 2013 17:41
|
|
|
Can someone give me some sort of technically creative advice? I'm trying to make origami-looking models for use in a game, in part because I thought it would help my old-ish computer cope, and in part, that it would speed up the process (and then philosophy came in). But, the minimalist triangles are either sticking out, or don't look like origami. And hi-poly baking looks like it would help only if I went very high (where my computer wouldn't handle it) because on the low levels you get fuzzy edges. I think I'll try to draw edges into diffuse by hand to see how it looks, but I don't expect pretty results. Just in case, I work in Blender, and maybe my hurdle wouldn't arise on software that I paid for, so suggestions in this direction are invited. Anyone?
|
|
#
?
Jul 19, 2013 18:51
|
|
|
supermikhail posted:Can someone give me some sort of technically creative advice? I'm trying to make origami-looking models for use in a game, Pictures would help out.
|
|
#
?
Jul 19, 2013 19:58
|
|
|
Odddzy posted:Pictures would help out. Can do.  That's the hires model, but I can't get it to bake well (normals) to lowres, probably because it's not closed. E: to correct some dumb things I've said on account of being sleepy. While the baking errors I can correct, actually the worst things begin when I render the super low-res version. Example:  The dark areas on the lip of the petal aren't in the textures, and I think it's the render engine assuming that those parts are actually on the other side for some reason, possibly because they're really stretched single triangles (?) but here I'm completely out of my territory.
supermikhail fucked around with this message at 21:45 on Jul 19, 2013 |
|
#
?
Jul 19, 2013 21:18
|
|
|
Anyone here live in Miami? Is there any CG work currently being done out of there? We've got an office starting up in south beach. Come October I'll be moving there to run the 3d department and interview/hire the team for it. Apprehensive about the quality I'm going to have to pick through... :/
|
|
#
?
Jul 19, 2013 22:46
|
|
|
cubicle gangster posted:Anyone here live in Miami? Is there any CG work currently being done out of there? what's the quality level you're looking for?
|
|
#
?
Jul 19, 2013 22:59
|
|
|
Ideally, taylor james/dbox. high end still/advertising work. Doesn't have to be architectural, but does have to be something that's covered 3d/rendering/retouching. If someone's got a vfx background and not much experience in photoshop that would be fine too - if they've got an eye for detail then PS will take no time to pick up. People with experience managing scenes, lighting, & rendering are more exciting than modeling backgrounds. Will look at anyone with around 5 years experience and a basic understanding of a generalists skillset though. Not expecting to get someone who can hit the ground running, but would like them to be able to handle their own jobs start to finish after 6-12 months. cubicle gangster fucked around with this message at 23:59 on Jul 19, 2013 |
|
#
?
Jul 19, 2013 23:52
|
|
|
Trintintin posted:How do those BOF things work? I've never actually been to one. Is it just like a bunch of dudes hanging out shooting the poo poo or is it like more specialized talks. It's just a general meet and greet. Get to know other people who do / are interested in X. Some of the BOFs have an open mike / projector thing where anyone interested can come along and show stuff. Nice way to get noticed if you're doing something cool. We might be showing some Mari stuff off. That said, We had a Mari / texture painting BOF last year that was basically me being grilled by a room full of people for 2 hours.
|
|
#
?
Jul 20, 2013 10:42
|
|
|
I'm having a really hard time figuring out what's wrong with my textures. As far as I know I'm doing everything correctly in this scene, yet all of my textures axe extremely washed out: This is being rendered in Vray. Now the table in this image isn't mine. It's a free model that I downloaded form the internet, and as you can see it's textures look just fine, unfortunately I don't know what settings it uses. As for the floor, I've tried many variations for the settings. In this image specifically the reflect value is at 80, Fresnel IOR is at 2.4, and glossiness is at .7. The diffuse map is way darker than it appears here. Same Idea with the shelves, the diffuse is almost black, fresnel IOR is at 2.5, and glossyness is at .7. What's happening here? Why does the table look fine while everything else is so light?
|
|
#
?
Jul 21, 2013 05:33
|
|
|
I would bet you are mixing assets that are set up to work via linear work flow and those that are not. If you take your textures into photoshop, change the gamma on them by .454 and save out new maps. If they look correct when rendered with those maps, its a linear work space issue. Sadly, I haven't touched Vray in a REALLY long time, so I can't provide you a hit button A than B and C solution, but its an easy fix regardless. You probably just don't have your texture maps being read in at sRGB colorspace, so its washing them out thinking they might have 16 or 32 bits of data, when its only 8. Note: I could be COMPLETELY wrong, but those look just light enough to be in the wrong color space IMO. Second Note: You could also change the texture maps on the table by gamma 2.2 (inverse curve of .454) and it would be equally as light as the book shelves if this is your issue.
|
|
#
?
Jul 21, 2013 06:19
|
|
|
Still getting comfortable with ZBrush; here's a one eyed alien I'm working on:  Edit: Did some more work on him:  
le capitan fucked around with this message at 23:37 on Jul 21, 2013 |
|
#
?
Jul 21, 2013 20:02
|
|
|
Ervin K posted:I'm having a really hard time figuring out what's wrong with my textures. As far as I know I'm doing everything correctly in this scene, yet all of my textures axe extremely washed out: Dont re-save new maps in photoshop. Put them in a colour correct slot and change the gamma there. Go to your rendering -> gamma/LUT setup tab, take a screen shot of that and post it here. Also, take a screen shot of your color mapping settings, and let us know if you're using the VFB or not.
|
|
#
?
Jul 22, 2013 17:41
|
|
|
Been a while since I posted anything in this thread. Here is a "lunchcrunch" I did recently based on a Gris Grimly sketch. Lunch crunch is the zbrush club Danny Williams started.  Anybody here going to SIGGRAPH tomorrow?
|
|
#
?
Jul 23, 2013 04:46
|
|
|
sigma 6 posted:Anybody here going to SIGGRAPH tomorrow? I am going on thursday!
|
|
#
?
Jul 23, 2013 09:25
|
|
|
I'll be at siggraph today (tuesday). Didn't sleep at all tonight so I'll be a mess, I'll be going to the side fx houdini thing/party and probably the blue sky party afterwards. I may swing back tomorrow but I got to get packing and poo poo done for my move to San Francisco.
|
|
#
?
Jul 23, 2013 13:53
|
|
|
I've been using fusion a lot recently to handle some helicopter shots, and I've only just figured out the 3d tools (and subsequently fallen in love with them). So I watched this to learn a better way of removing objects from my plates: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=USS84b1iUp4 Which is amazing, so now all my background cleanup is being done with this technique in 1/10th the time it used to take. Cannot understate how easy it is to get perfectly clean results - the idea of using any other method now is madness to me. But I also needed to cut out the foreground objects which go over the cg (trees etc) and get a good mask. Because it was trees on trees, no tracking tools worked, and drawing the mask by hand was a nightmare. So with the top down projected plate from that tutorial I created a polygon mask flat, animated the tops of tall objects to account for any rotation and projected the alpha channel back onto the plate. The plate you create the mask on is perfectly stable, and the ground level is totally locked. Instant, perfect mask! And now i've just imported a low res 3d model to project the render back onto and imported the lights. and my mind has been blown by all the possibilities and how powerful this is. I cannot tell you how many hours/days this has just saved me. I know this is pretty standard poo poo for 3d compositors, but i've pretty much only used them in 2d mode until now. cubicle gangster fucked around with this message at 20:57 on Jul 25, 2013 |
|
#
?
Jul 25, 2013 20:50
|
|
|
Wow Siggraph was pretty depressing, not like the old glory days in the late 90's early 00's. I remember New Orleans 2000 where I had so many CG/Animation & Software t-shirts I had to pick up an extra duffle bag to haul it home. Big partys, open bars, money everywhere. Big name bands at crazy parties, some with strippers.... just to lure you into a job.. which quickly turned Siggraph into a week long free bender... This year? The courses and and art exhibits are great for development work and such but the exhibit hall is a pale shadow of its former self. Autodesk didn't have a booth at all, no VFX studio booths, with only Double Negative having a table in the job fair section [which itself was pretty sparse, many studios I've talked to were flooded with resumes and elected to just have phone interviews or have interviews offsite in hotel rooms]. No half price workstation graphic cards either, I could get my hands on a Geforce titan for $999 but that was it. Walked out with a drinking glass from the OpenGL/ES consortium and a shirt from sidefx/houdini. Hopefully things pick up.. it was still good to go, I got caught up with a few of my rhythm and friends and saw faces I haven't seen in 10 years... I'm pumped about Houdini Engine and a sneak peak of Houdini 13's FEA/FEM simulation tools... Big K of Justice fucked around with this message at 03:03 on Jul 26, 2013 |
|
#
?
Jul 26, 2013 02:50
|
|
|
Geared Hub posted:Wow Siggraph was pretty depressing, not like the old glory days in the late 90's early 00's. That's sad  . My last SIGGRAPH was actually New Orleans 2000. My god that was so much fun. Somehow ended up at the Sony party in some BFE warehouse. Super awesome. I actually JUST last week threw away some of my swag from that (the Sun Microsystems party invite, which was some monocular thing). It was also the first time I saw a 3D printer. You could go in and design your own thing on Maya stations and 3D print it. It was a very loose sort of cornstarch resin, but very cool. Also isn't a GeForce Titan already $1000 retail?
|
|
#
?
Jul 26, 2013 02:59
|
|
|
BonoMan posted:That's sad Yeah, their excuse was its hard to get but I checked my phone right away and I could get one from amazon anytime I wanted so I passed. I was hoping for a half off PNY quadro card like they had 2-3 years ago.. I still got my Orange dinosaur maya user group t-shirt from Siggraph 2000.... I got a Toy Story one from 97 or whenever. Big K of Justice fucked around with this message at 03:06 on Jul 26, 2013 |
|
#
?
Jul 26, 2013 03:04
|
|
|
Geared Hub posted:Yeah, their excuse was its hard to get but I checked my phone right away and I could get one from amazon anytime I wanted so I passed. I was hoping for a half off PNY quadro card like they had 2-3 years ago.. I kept my pins and For the Birds poster (as well as my Geri's Game VHS!).
|
|
#
?
Jul 26, 2013 03:19
|
|
|
So is it Siggraph dying down on its own or is it just reflecting whats going on in the industry as a whole?
|
|
#
?
Jul 26, 2013 03:23
|
|
|
Good question. I had a good time, but it really isn't like it once was. Geared Hub is right. The floor is almost sparse compared to years past. Nvidia was doing some projection mapping on a car. You could pick the rims you wanted and immediately see the projection map update on the wheels. Tons of mocap and 3d printing but nothing to really write home about. A lot of VR stuff too. Wish I could have caught more of the Zbrush, Houdini, and Vray demos. Never did get to see Houdini's new "engine" presentation. The presenter I saw just ran through their demo reels and looked really bored. This software caught my eye for painting though. Black Ink. Never seen custom brush manipulation like that before. Very cool for quick concept painting stuff.
|
|
#
?
Jul 26, 2013 11:40
|
|
|
So I've been testing the build for our farm, and I've run across something that I cannot figure out. On a distributed render using 3 hosts: a dual e5520@2.7 (16 threads), a 3930K@3.2 (12 threads), and the farm node is a dual e5-2650@2.0 (32 threads). Everything is running balls to the wall on all cores on all machines, but the i7 and e5520 are plowing through the rest of the frame before the e5-2650 finishes even a single of it's initial 32-bucket assigment. It's not hanging, and eventually finishes. The 2650 should at least be keeping pace with the older dual xeon, and loving destroying the i7. I've been troubleshooting the software config for a day now and I can't nail down wtf is going on, but I'm pretty sure it's an obvious "whoops". Anyone experience this before?
|
|
#
?
Jul 26, 2013 14:09
|
|
|
Checked you're not hitting a ram limit, network speeds, slow switch? Disk space on the node could be an issue too. e: before that, check its not DR being lovely ( it usually is) and send an identical frame to all 3 with backburner. are you using HT on the 32 core machine?
|
|
#
?
Jul 26, 2013 14:55
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 15, 2024 08:51 |
|
|
Nowhere near ram limit (render claims to use about 3.2gb) on any machine; the i7 has 32gb and the older xeon has 12gb. Problem node has 24gb. Task manager shows all 32 virtual cores pegged at 100%, HT seems to be working just fine. I'm running identical backburner jobs on the two xeon machines, and the problem node lags behind from the start. Problem node is temporarily on a different subnet, but logs show no warnings, picks up the maps (all UNC path'd) just fine. It has 11.6gb free (accounting for 24gb swap). Ok, here's something hosed up, CPU-Z shows ~1.68v on idle, and ~.063v fully loaded. WTFF. e: oh, ok, I'm dumb and that's normal. Vcore drops as consumption rises because  . Back to being completely lost it is.
Handiklap fucked around with this message at 15:35 on Jul 26, 2013 |
|
#
?
Jul 26, 2013 15:30
|
|