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Well, congrats then.  On the subject of new beginnings. I've tried over the past two months to seriously try and learn Houdini again. It's loving hard and stressing me a lot because most of the time I've got no idea what's going on when the instructor online talks about things. I'm following a class on Vex and it's crazy the amount of functions he calls that he just knows (or has written down on a second screen) and how to use at the exact right moment. I understand the difference between a point and a vertex and For Loops and stuff like that on a very rudimentary level (more than an artist would, but I can't do a percent of what a programmer could do I'm sure) and it's really stressful and making me a bit anxious at the idea I'm wasting my time and wont ever "get it". Is this something common to artists that moved into a more technical aspect of the industry without having a background in math or programming? Does the impostor syndrome leave after a while for technical artists? How did you guys manage it?
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Dec 12, 2019 08:26
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Do you know python at all? Or any other scripting language? To some extent, you really just need to use it. I honestly don't use Vex enough to have all the commands memorized and usually have to look it up. Google is really you friend. Google "Calculate curvature vex houdini" and something useful will come up. A lot of people on my last team didn't really know Vex or Python. Houdini has to some extent taken away the need for FX artists to know python and more and more companies are now changing the defition to 'FX artist' rather than 'FX TD' and making TD's a separate discipline. You can do almost everything in Vops, if you fancy. I tend to do a mix. A wrangle here, a vop here, etc. It's not necessarily the cleanest or most efficient, but it's easier to debug and I can easier retrace my thinking when I look at old network, rather than looking at one huge vop or wrangle. The things to really get comfortable is for-each loops. Imposter syndrome never goes away...there's always someone smarter than you.
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Dec 12, 2019 09:23
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It’s actually a bit scary to me how studios rely so heavily on artist-developers. Maybe for setups for specific shots knowing some programming helps. But places that don’t wanna pay for software engineers are letting artists try and fix pipeline issues. I dunno any artist who actually understands the lower level, abstract “architecture” part of programming enough to fix issues related to speed and the time it takes to load in assets. It’s just vfx companies can’t seem to find it in budget to hire back-end developers.
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Dec 12, 2019 14:03
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I'd argue it's one of the strengths of the industry! The ability of having the people actually doing the shots, develop new tools and techniques is incredibly powerful.
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Dec 12, 2019 18:41
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ImplicitAssembler posted:I'd argue it's one of the strengths of the industry! The ability of having the people actually doing the shots, develop new tools and techniques is incredibly powerful. It can be. When corresponding time and pay to do so. Often it's arrived upon by incompetent or uncaring leadership who are just grinding employees into dust by expecting them to do multiple positions for little pay in the same amount of allotted time. Or at least in my experience. Going to go cry in a corner now.
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Dec 12, 2019 18:47
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Ccs posted:It’s actually a bit scary to me how studios rely so heavily on artist-developers. Maybe for setups for specific shots knowing some programming helps. But places that don’t wanna pay for software engineers are letting artists try and fix pipeline issues. I dunno any artist who actually understands the lower level, abstract “architecture” part of programming enough to fix issues related to speed and the time it takes to load in assets. It’s just vfx companies can’t seem to find it in budget to hire back-end developers. In our case, that's because developers in NYC seem fit to tell us very early on that they have offers of 250k + stock at google and we'd need to match it. All our VR & app development has had to happen in house, and we've had so many ideas drafted up for frontend apps that pull vr data from a server and user logins/subscription access for brokers that we just cant find anyone (reasonably priced) to develop for us. So the technical artists are having a go and juggling it with their art work. We did look for investment but ultimately it would put the entire studio on the line so we bailed, it's a lot riskier than a startup with only a handful of employees. Changing the subject, because I haven't shared anything in a while - this went 'public' recently although the client hasn't done any PR and it's buried on their website. https://vimeo.com/379076009/8813d0a352 It's got some issues - the intro was a client demand we fought hard on. The heli shots also feel a bit tacked on because the original version didnt have them, but technically i'm pretty happy with them. They needed a shitload of crane removal. It was 5 people for 10 weeks to deliver everything up to the heli shots, then one person for 3 weeks to do the heli shots (with a shitload of late nights). It was pretty challenging to storyboard - we had to cover it being 'the center of the world' as an intro, the arrival/public space, the hotel lobby, the public retail area, the hotel amenities, a hotel residence, the tower arrival experience, the tower amenities, the tower residence, and some aerial shots of LA - all within no more than 2 and a half minutes. It's an extremely complex development to try and explain the entirety of it in one film. Fortunately the NY team had already done still images of some of the spaces so we didn't have to model everything from scratch, but there were still some architecture changes that had happened in the 18 months since the images had been done. Really pushed for well dressed, clean & sharp images on this one - it was tough but i'm really happy with the team, there was a great atmosphere while working on it. Tried a new post production workflow too where we combined fusion as a first pass to generate glow passes etc and make deep alterations on the exr sequences in 32bit, then after effects in 16bit to re-assemble and do the final grade. It was a massive success and we're going to do that 2-stage post production for every animation going forward. There's some noise that we'd have loved to remove but the timeline was just too tight, so we did what we could in fusion to get rid of hot pixels - and trust me that wherever you see them, it was originally a LOT worse. The pace is kind of intense, we all knew it would be - I'm particularly curious how readable the narrative is (for lack of a better term) to people unfamiliar with the project? Here's the crane removal file for the close-up shot. probably could've been more compact, but at least it was tidy... 
cubicle gangster fucked around with this message at 19:06 on Dec 12, 2019 |
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Dec 12, 2019 18:58
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Oh hey that’s like a ten minute drive from me It’s cut like a video game trailer if that’s what you meant.
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Dec 12, 2019 19:47
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Ha, that wasnt what we set out to do - we asked the client which locations had to be in the film and got back a list of 50 that we had to go through and try and find some way to path them and shave some out of. I meant more like does the property itself make sense - when you're in the hotel vs the tower, how disoriented did you feel. It's why many of the cameras are simple one points - realized pretty quickly you cant use perspective heavy cameras when completely changing the environment with no linking features that quickly. When we linger in some environments we were able to introduce a little more variation to the cameras but a lot ended up getting cut once we edited the storyboard together.
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Dec 12, 2019 19:58
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Alan Smithee posted:Oh hey that’s like a ten minute drive from me Parts like the floating pool toy make it feel like the intro videos when you start a new level in the latest Hitman games, which is a positive in my book, I like them. I feel like I got the progression from the front of the property through to the tower, and I understood that I was looking at a lobby in the first few shots which I assumed was for a hotel; but if the towers aren't part of the hotel I think I missed what was supposed to tell me that the function was different. I thought it was just fancier hotel suites with kitchenettes. I had to watch it twice to catch onto the car going through the gate at ~1:10. I'm guessing now that the hotel are condo properties and the gate sequence shows the private entrance to that part of the property? Also goddamn how are there that many people in LA with the kind of money to live in places like this. It just blows my mind. Those must be what, $2 million minimum for a one-bedroom?
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Dec 13, 2019 03:18
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When there’s no more room in Vancouver/New York/Sydney/London the dead will buy Los Angeles
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Dec 13, 2019 04:03
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Listerine posted:Also goddamn how are there that many people in LA with the kind of money to live in places like this. It just blows my mind. Those must be what, $2 million minimum for a one-bedroom? Basically the differentiator between the hotel residences and the tower residences is the level of service - it's a Fairmont managed hotel. Smaller units, higher monthly fees, room service and then some. The tower residence owners will probably have their own staff but it'll skew the age ranges of buyers. The gate sequence is when we go from hotel -> tower. The market for this is mostly empty nesters up in the hills - couples aged 45+ living in a big empty house that's massively inconvenient. Lots of those super wealthy are sick of running a resort with landscapers, repairmen, cooks and contractors around and all angles of staff management. The tower has similar but better views than the best houses up on the hills so they're hoping it'll make for a very appealing downsize. I'm not sure there are any one bedrooms in the tower - but you're probably in the right $/sqft ballpark. Mostly it's 3 units per floor until you get up to the penthouse (which is insane and has a HUGE private pool)
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Dec 13, 2019 04:21
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You're telling me that's a hotel room at 00:56 
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Dec 13, 2019 12:01
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Fragrag posted:You're telling me that's a hotel room at 00:56 The nicest hotel room they have, which they dont have many of, but yeah. The idea is you can buy it outright and list the dates you're not in it - the staff will go into your unit, take photos of everything exactly where it was - toiletries, clothes in the closet etc, clear it all out for hotel guests and make sure it's all put back exactly where it was before you come home. Many insanely nice hotel suites like that are privately owned, this business model pre-dates airbnb quite a bit.
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Dec 13, 2019 17:33
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cubicle gangster posted:I'm not sure there are any one bedrooms in the tower - but you're probably in the right $/sqft ballpark. Mostly it's 3 units per floor until you get up to the penthouse (which is insane and has a HUGE private pool) I looked at their website- probably the reason it was buried on the site was because they didn't need to do any PR, there's only about a dozen units left total, and only 1 single bedroom unit listed at $1.85 million. The two 3BR units left are $6-8 million. The monthly HOA fees range from ~$1,600 to $4k. It's tempting, there's a Din Tai Fung right across the street at the mall.
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Dec 14, 2019 00:50
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Listerine posted:I looked at their website- probably the reason it was buried on the site was because they didn't need to do any PR, there's only about a dozen units left total, and only 1 single bedroom unit listed at $1.85 million. The two 3BR units left are $6-8 million. The monthly HOA fees range from ~$1,600 to $4k. Ha, that might be referencing a test database to show them how it will work... We made the website too! If they did relink it they are staggering the release of units, it's far from nearly sold out. Doing ok, but a dozen units left when the towers are only just going up would be ridiculously good.
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Dec 14, 2019 01:29
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cubicle gangster posted:Ha, that might be referencing a test database to show them how it will work... We made the website too! Ha! Well I know nothing about how real estate works, but it wouldn't surprise me in general to see something sell out that far in advance in this town. Maybe I still have time to get that extra $8 million together then!
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Dec 14, 2019 06:02
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ImplicitAssembler posted:I'd argue it's one of the strengths of the industry! The ability of having the people actually doing the shots, develop new tools and techniques is incredibly powerful. For shot specific workflows yes, but for the whole pipeline? http://fx-mind.com/blog/2017/2/13/visual-effects-pipelines-a-defaulting-debt I read this article a year or so ago and then got to watch it happen in real time as artists-developers at a place I was at started adding lots of extra widgets to a pipeline to make it “efficient” or “optimized” or “idiot proof”. As it got slower and slower and slower because no one had actually trained in software engineering. And the term “scrum” was thrown around like it was a synonym for “meeting” as opposed to a specific method of project management. I understand software engineers are expensive but letting a bunch of novices meddle around does not help deliver projects and puts large accounts in jeopardy.
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Dec 14, 2019 18:04
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Nice work Sonic https://screenrant.com/vfx-studio-mpc-vancouver-shut-down-closed/
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Dec 14, 2019 18:53
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MPC Vancouver did not work on Lion King and everything was wound down.
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Dec 14, 2019 19:59
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Comfy Fleece Sweater posted:Nice work Sonic It’s just the same issues Scott Ross has been saying for years about state of vfx industry. His talk and this post from the head of animation department at Sheridan sums up why this stuff keeps happening. Though in the case of MPC it’s also because they’re owned by Technicolor who have failing DVD and Connected Home services dragging down company financials. If they were just a Production Services company they would actually be profitable, as far as I can tell from their public filings. So they can’t afford to keep infrastructure in Vancouver when all their spare cash is being used to try to fix other parts of the business. https://www.awn.com/news/watch-scott-ross-talks-flawed-economics-vfx-fmx-2015 http://mayersononanimation.blogspot.com/2016/08/arc-and-hazards-of-animation.html?m=1 Ccs fucked around with this message at 22:19 on Dec 14, 2019 |
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Dec 14, 2019 20:03
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Does Blender have modifier stack like 3ds Max does? I'm kinda interested in trying it out now that it has a sane interface.
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Dec 15, 2019 23:14
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Sininu posted:Does Blender have modifier stack like 3ds Max does? I'm kinda interested in trying it out now that it has a sane interface. Are you talking like mirror, array, curve, etc. modifiers? Yes, it has those, and they work as a stack. 
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Dec 16, 2019 01:06
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Blender is free, but how do plugins like hardops work, if you buy it can you install it on any computer with blender or just once?
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Dec 16, 2019 01:53
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Plugins are just zip files, install everwhere
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Dec 16, 2019 01:57
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Synthbuttrange posted:Plugins are just zip files, install everwhere That's fantastic, thank you.
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Dec 16, 2019 02:16
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Blender is the single best open-source free software the world has seen. It's good. It's... dare I say it.. very good.. 
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Dec 16, 2019 08:57
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Ccs posted:For shot specific workflows yes, but for the whole pipeline? This to me just sounds like a lack of leadership and/or time, not a genuine critique of the work artist-developers do. The article mostly talks about the lack of funding for tools and systems to be overhauled after the pipeline itself has changed so much. You could argue artist-developers are a symptom of that problem, but it's not their fault. I would also argue that the concept of artist-developers will start to increase as programming literacy, cleaner languages and accessible APIs, etc. all increase. Node based programming and python have already done that to a large extent.
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Dec 18, 2019 09:18
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Can someone here edit a model for me? I managed to get a file extracted from a video game, but part of it is reversed and I'm looking to have it flipped (but not the whole model flipped). It's a Superman statue from Injustice 2, and I'm just looking to have his symbol flipped correctly without altering the rest of the statue.
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Dec 18, 2019 18:58
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Stupid_Sexy_Flander posted:Can someone here edit a model for me? I managed to get a file extracted from a video game, but part of it is reversed and I'm looking to have it flipped (but not the whole model flipped). What format is the thing in? I can give it a shot if it’s literally just selecting the polygons and flipping them
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Dec 20, 2019 22:00
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It's an obj file. Already got some help on it from the 3d printing thread, but if you want to take a peek at the file or just have it to edit/work on, let me know and I can send you a link for it. Thanks for offering to help . I appreciate it!
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Dec 21, 2019 13:03
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Stupid_Sexy_Flander posted:It's an obj file. Already got some help on it from the 3d printing thread, but if you want to take a peek at the file or just have it to edit/work on, let me know and I can send you a link for it. link to thread out of curiousity?
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Dec 21, 2019 23:25
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https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3365193
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Dec 22, 2019 00:37
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Stupid_Sexy_Flander posted:It's an obj file. Already got some help on it from the 3d printing thread, but if you want to take a peek at the file or just have it to edit/work on, let me know and I can send you a link for it. Awesome, I get to feel good about helping without actually doing anything  But seriously, that’s cool, if you manage to get it printed I’d love to see the result.
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Dec 22, 2019 03:20
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So for weight painting in Blender 2.8, has anyone noticed any uncooperative behavior? It feels like other bones in weight paint mode can "block" my brush. I feel like I have a really hard time doing any kind of weight painting that doesn't vastly overcompensate because of needing to click much more often or much harder just to get any kind of feedback when weight painting.
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Dec 22, 2019 03:26
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tuna posted:This to me just sounds like a lack of leadership and/or time, not a genuine critique of the work artist-developers do. The article mostly talks about the lack of funding for tools and systems to be overhauled after the pipeline itself has changed so much. You could argue artist-developers are a symptom of that problem, but it's not their fault. At smaller studios I’ve seen artist-developers write code that then is vetted by software engineers before it gets deployed. But in large studios the two groups appear silo’d, and sometimes the whole devOps/platform engineering/pipeline tds are in a completely different country. So artists just write tools and start deploying them without the pipeline ppl even knowing about it.
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Dec 22, 2019 08:06
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Ccs posted:At smaller studios I’ve seen artist-developers write code that then is vetted by software engineers before it gets deployed. But in large studios the two groups appear silo’d, and sometimes the whole devOps/platform engineering/pipeline tds are in a completely different country. So artists just write tools and start deploying them without the pipeline ppl even knowing about it. Hmmm?. This is not really possible in most studios, as artists can't deploy tools to the pipeline unless given specific permissions to do so. Auxiliary tools, sure, but anything that directly interfaces with the pipeline will usually have to go through rnd/software/pipeline-tds.
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Dec 22, 2019 10:26
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Speaking about artist-developers creating bodgey solutions, here is mine. I'm not sure how many people or companies use Autodesk's default renderfarm application suite Backburner, but I'm sure whoever has used it has found it unwieldy, closed off and badly documented. So I am developing a Python API to expose some aspects of Backburner. The main goal is to recreate the functionality that is present in Backburner Monitor but for now I've mainly implemented methods to retrieve information on items such as current render jobs and connected servers. You can check it here: https://github.com/Fragrag/BackburnerPy
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Dec 22, 2019 14:44
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Ccs posted:So artists just write tools and start deploying them without the pipeline ppl even knowing about it. This gave me all kinds of cold sweats. Christ I can't think of a worst idea.
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Dec 23, 2019 06:07
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ImplicitAssembler posted:Hmmm?. This is not really possible in most studios, as artists can't deploy tools to the pipeline unless given specific permissions to do so. Auxiliary tools, sure, but anything that directly interfaces with the pipeline will usually have to go through rnd/software/pipeline-tds. Have you ever worked in Montreal? 😅 apparently we’re the new hotspot for vfx but things are super sketchy here in terms of following procedure...
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Dec 23, 2019 07:16
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devtists, artops
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