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Art tops, pm me
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Dec 23, 2019 19:52
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cubicle gangster posted: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. If you are still looking, this is kinda what I do. 
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Dec 25, 2019 11:53
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Ccs posted:So artists just write tools and start deploying them without the pipeline ppl even knowing about it. Yeah, that's what you get when anyone with decent coding/database/infrastructure experience can make 200-300k for doing less work at a big bay area company or a bank vs slaving away at a VFX company with no real sense or budget for IT support. Combine that with artists who are self-installing and spreading around "that script I used on my last job" it can be a complete headache if there is no oversight. Our Tech artist/dev department logs everything through perforce and everything has to go with some form of review before getting deployed. It's not that much extra work to implement, but I was at companies where pipeline/tools were budgeted in overhead and whelp they all got cut because they weren't part of production which was billable hours. That particular company had an expansive "sanity check, verification" script that would look at all 3d assets being version controlled except with no maintenance, it started breaking. Production didn't see the value in it since the "artists would just figure it out", and after a few years publishing a simple fx cache to lighting would result in 3 pages of error messages and warnings but we were told to ignore all of them and just push it through.  Or the other big VFX shop that gave EVERYONES user account superuser access to every machine globally. This had something to do with some "stupid trick" that allowed them to abuse software licenses between Canada/US and Europe/Asia [causing some software companies to change licensing terms]. This worked until someone blew up and deleted an essential tools folder, combined with the fact the most recent backups were corrupted, including the off-site backups. Somehow that studio passed the Disney/Marvel security audit..  I'm glad I'm at a place where this stuff is taken seriously.. even the companies owners are software engineers and are perforce/pipeline savy.... to the point where senior management was knowledgable enough to roll back the studio from bad deployments/builds pretty quickly in the middle of the night to keep things rolling smoothly the next day.
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Dec 26, 2019 21:07
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Is the VFX industry clusterfuck ever going to be fixed? My heart says no, they’ll just keep moving work to 3rd world countries and eventually use AI and proc modeling to avoid paying humans and giving reasonable work hours As more time goes by, I regret less and less my decision to go with a boring but stabler job...
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Dec 26, 2019 21:16
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It might get better if they can unionize. It might get more tolerable if the US ever joins other modern developed nations and implements solid social safety nets/healthcare. If none of the above, then it's a toss up.
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Dec 26, 2019 23:16
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Yeah that all sounds exactly what I was dealing with. I started the same day as an IT guy and I think he quit a month later after seeing the state of things. If one tries to raise any of these issues with supes or management it becomes “well we really don’t have the resources to address that concern at this stage”.
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Dec 27, 2019 16:04
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Mr Shiny Pants posted:If you are still looking, this is kinda what I do. Not actively, but if you're willing to have a chat i would like to know more! Send me an email to cubiclegangster at gmail. Never know what's going to happen and I like learning what's possible / how difficult things are. Edit: Can i crowdsource some opinions? I have a new personal project which is a bit more ambitious than the last. It's in the early storyboard / massing stages and i'd love some opinions about the flow of information. Normally would try and be a little more precious with it this early, but also I want it to be good and would hate to overlook something. The 'story' of the world is that there's no more ozone layer and so much solar interference that the only cars which can get around outside the domes are old muscle cars - really though this is just an excuse to do some grand swooping shots of a car through a barren landscape ending in a lush syd mead painting for contrast. Here's my early still storyboard - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S94TbkMvMP8 And here's a first pass at some animated cameras - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NWkt6InzuBg Most will be re-done, this was to explore the feel of them and start confirming the style. First thing I know for a fact is that the music no longer works. the cameras are too dramatic for something so plodding. Going to speed that up by about 30bpm and lean into the faster cuts. I'd like to get a bit more story in - the first edit has some opening shots looking through the dusty haze at communication towers on/near the domes. Maybe too subtle? I threw around the idea of opening with a phonecall of someone asking for a package to be delivered but that feels too cheesy and on the nose. Also considering adding a northern lights from space effect across the surfaces of the domes, try and show how thin the atmosphere is. I will explore that when I get into developing the look, I think that idea is strong. Anyway I think that about sums up my feelings. I don't like the edit, and i'm trying to make it stronger with more layers to the implied story. It's a personal project for no money and I'd like it to be something that people find interesting. Any and all opinions welcome, and if everyone says it sucks i'll probably just make 2 still images of the exterior and the interior shots with no other context. cubicle gangster fucked around with this message at 18:43 on Dec 29, 2019 |
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Dec 29, 2019 18:12
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Does anyone have a resource for best practices for doing physics shenanigans in blender? I'm trying to replicate a gif I saw on reddit some time back of a pit of colored balls being stirred and naturally the ten thousand or so spheres I'm accounting for is a touch taxing on my system. Is there a smarter way to be doing this than having umpteen gajillion rigid-bodies going to town? My gut is saying that a particle system or potentially some fluid simulation might be a better way to go.
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Dec 29, 2019 21:18
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cubicle gangster posted:Anyway I think that about sums up my feelings. I don't like the edit, and i'm trying to make it stronger with more layers to the implied story. It's a personal project for no money and I'd like it to be something that people find interesting. Any and all opinions welcome, and if everyone says it sucks i'll probably just make 2 still images of the exterior and the interior shots with no other context. I think it’s looking loving cool I don’t have like specific ways to improve it, but I’d hope you can avoid the “car commercial” angles, which it gave me a sense of after like half the 2nd video (might be the music) I’d rewatch interstate 76 vids and Mad Max vídeos for inspiration of cool framing of muscle cars that isn’t necessarily reminiscent of a car commercial video Comfy Fleece Sweater fucked around with this message at 23:04 on Dec 29, 2019 |
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Dec 29, 2019 21:57
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Warbird posted:Does anyone have a resource for best practices for doing physics shenanigans in blender? I'm trying to replicate a gif I saw on reddit some time back of a pit of colored balls being stirred and naturally the ten thousand or so spheres I'm accounting for is a touch taxing on my system. Is there a smarter way to be doing this than having umpteen gajillion rigid-bodies going to town? My gut is saying that a particle system or potentially some fluid simulation might be a better way to go. In a general sense, particles would be ~1 kajillion times better than rigid body sims at something like that. With spheres, what you're simulating is more akin to a liquid than it is a pile of rocks, and that is solidly particle territory.
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Dec 29, 2019 23:02
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Comfy Fleece Sweater posted:I’d rewatch interstate 76 vids and Mad Max vídeos for inspiration of cool framing of muscle cars that isn’t necessarily reminiscent of a car commercial video That's a great shout, I will do that before the next pass on the cameras. I've just spent the last 5 days detailing up the architecture and developing the final shot, did a huge push tonight. It was an odd feeling to have spent the last few hours staring at syd meads work and modeling away, then once i'm done for the night the FIRST thing I see on my google homepage feed is that he has died. the spreadsheets and folders on my harddrive all refer to this as 'syd mead project' When i started thinking about what my next project would be back in october it was just a 1:1 recreation of something from US steel as a still.
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Dec 31, 2019 06:13
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Warbird posted:Does anyone have a resource for best practices for doing physics shenanigans in blender? I'm trying to replicate a gif I saw on reddit some time back of a pit of colored balls being stirred and naturally the ten thousand or so spheres I'm accounting for is a touch taxing on my system. Is there a smarter way to be doing this than having umpteen gajillion rigid-bodies going to town? My gut is saying that a particle system or potentially some fluid simulation might be a better way to go. You are probably looking for this: https://blender-addons.org/molecular-script-addon/ I haven't played with it since it was ported to 2.8, but it previously was pretty easy to setup rigid body particle systems that self collide using it. That page has a link but this compilation video better shows what the addon can do (example ball stirring around 11 min mark): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d-8bLbL3sXQ Chance fucked around with this message at 10:53 on Dec 31, 2019 |
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Dec 31, 2019 10:20
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Ah, perfect! Thank you! I bet that's exactly what was being used in the video I'm trying to replicate.
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Jan 1, 2020 01:08
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I recently got back into Blender. 2.8 is amazing. I don't know if he's been mentioned ITT, but check out Lance Phan's channel. He's a goddamn wizard and is doing the most incredible tutorials on procedural Blender textures I've ever seen.
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Jan 2, 2020 17:57
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I saw this on imgur and thought it was pretty neat looking, so I tried to make in in Blender. https://imgur.com/gallery/zS6vst0 Rendered at low-res cause I didn't want to wait all night and I need to do a much better job with the texturing. https://i.imgur.com/unPBh2E.mp4
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Jan 3, 2020 05:37
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fooled me
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Jan 3, 2020 06:16
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That looks amazing! Honestly, if you had your printer dialed in and used a roll of silk copper, you'd have something virtually identical. IF someone is looking for something to tackle, I just discovered this and would love a model so I can print one for the shelf. The ice bomb thingie in the trailer : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iRKasf_wN1M Stupid_Sexy_Flander fucked around with this message at 04:04 on Jan 4, 2020 |
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Jan 3, 2020 06:39
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Well that was an exciting year in the vfx industry. Thought I was just gonna be doing animation, ended up doing animation, matchmove, roto, mo-cap editing, and sculpting and was an unofficial lead for a little while. Also worked the craziest hours I've ever done and drank more free alcohol than ever before. Tomorrow I start at a slower paced place but want to keep some of those skills active, so I'm working on a new character to practice sculpting and also getting it into the UE4 game engine cause that's quickly becoming standard. Questions for those who've dealt with this stuff before: Should the head mesh be connected to the main body mesh for a UE4 character? Or as long as a I skin the vertexes at the same weight I can have the head be separate? For Blendshape/Morph Target reasons it seems it'd be smarter to have the head be a separate mesh? Also willing to take any advice on design, topology, anatomy, etc. The plan is to use Nvidia Hairworks for the hair, but I've got a groom artist helping me with that.    Original concept (already altered the upper leg a bit after a modeler told me that a biped can't have their knee be so high even if it's based on quadruped anatomy) 
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Jan 6, 2020 03:42
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2019 year in review for 3D work. Lost some work on the school computer but nothing major. Some of these are long term personal projects. Some are freelance gigs. Wasn't sure if I should categorize the laser burning stuff here or not but that was definitely a new thing for me in 2019. 3D year in review.
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Jan 6, 2020 20:16
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Another year, another VES nomination! While I wasn't caught 100% by surprise like last year, it's still put me in a state and all I can do is pace like crazy, lol. So proud of the team, everyone busted their asses and we've got at least one first-timer nominated as well! And to cap it off, I finally took the plunge to Blender 2.8! Can't say it's been easy, I've had years of old UI to unlearn... but 2.82 seems to solve some of my UI/UX concerns, and drat Cycles seems faster than 2.79! Been working on converting my skin/hair shaders to eevee too, and I'm decently pleased with it. Hair is still a little convoluted with no Principled Hair BSDF, but I figured out a method that's passable, though not as photoreal as I want (can't seem to nail down good translucency via eevee). Ccs posted:Well that was an exciting year in the vfx industry. Thought I was just gonna be doing animation, ended up doing animation, matchmove, roto, mo-cap editing, and sculpting and was an unofficial lead for a little while. Also worked the craziest hours I've ever done and drank more free alcohol than ever before. Congrats on the exciting year! I do kinda love that about this industry, I always end up filling in roles I wouldn't expect. How did you like the lead work? It's a different skill than just an artist for sure. Do you think it's something you'll pursue?
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Jan 7, 2020 21:29
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It was weird because it was my first job in vfx (after some time in tv) so I felt like an imposter mentoring ppl who only had slightly less experience. Mostly I was just trying to calm people down, reminding them of best practices, and having more trouble finishing my own shots because I’d be called away to answer questions every 20 minutes. It was funny having people treat me like I had authority, with one guy from Japan bowing sometimes and another dude shaking my hand every time I taught him how to use one of the proprietary tools. Its actually the second time I’ve been a fake lead, I was one for 6 months on a tv show. They never actually gave me a raise while doing that role, but after I did the lead job for 6 months I got bumped up to senior level. Whereas the vfx place ran out of projects so I jumped to a different studio before the axe came down, but because of that I never really got the pay/title bump I would’ve gotten had that studio had another project to put me on. Now I gotta build up my reputation at this new studio haha. The hours that leads in vfx have to put in is astonishing though. In tv it meant maybe staying an hour later to deal with stuff. In vfx it means doing your own shots until midnight after the crew goes home at 8 or 9. I think the supervisors were there until 1 am to qc the whole day’s work and then have calls with other sites around the world. It’s like investment banking hours but without the huge bonuses.
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Jan 8, 2020 02:35
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So I'm trying to create a rig for my character's hair. I am making anime styled characters so the hair is comprised of solid geo. I at first tried Daniel Kreuters hair rigging tutorial which relies on rigid bodies but encountered various issues so I'm trying something else. I found a tutorial that suggested using a low poly mesh to surround my hair mesh and then apply soft body/mesh deformation to them here but I couldn't get it to work. I found another tutorial but this time it is similar to Daniel's method but uses cloth simulation. This works better but is extremely bouncy testing it on my character's ponytail.  Currently is my cloth sim settings, the lattice that's highlighted is my object with cloth sim modifier; I have a IK bone rig setup as per the video; I added some cross edges for structure which introduce their own issues but anyways. The big issue is even relatively gentle movements, i.e when I turn the head bone, results in the ponytail just dancing all over the place with its edges just bouncing a lot and doesn't really resemble the way hair moves. Worst case I might just make a normal IK rig with control bones and just animate it manually because this is just taking up so much time but if there IS a way, I'd like to know how to go about it to let physics do most of the work for me.
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Jan 11, 2020 21:26
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Actually it seems like maybe cloth sim is just broken in 2.8+ but not in 2.79, or maybe it was broken in 2.79? In any case in 2.8, no matter what I do with the settings there is no change in the simulation and it remains acting like jello.
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Jan 12, 2020 19:04
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Gah. I'm trying to bake the normals off a high poly sculpt to a low poly one in blender, but every time I try I just get a blue image rather than any detail. I've done it before, but something is not right and it's driving me mad!
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Jan 13, 2020 20:36
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Raenir Salazar posted:So I'm trying to create a rig for my character's hair. I am making anime styled characters so the hair is comprised of solid geo. I dunno blender but for tv shows in Maya ive used fake physics where the vector of the head control is calculated and then that is applied to keys on the hair. Then you end up with a good base animation to edit afterwards if needed instead of relying on a simulation. You can either see if anyone online wrote that kind of tool for blender or try devising an expression that can be applied to the hair rig controls.
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Jan 15, 2020 04:35
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I'm kinda not sure what to google from that, but "blender hair rig" gave either Dan's video series, the soft bodies one, or the cloth one. Or just by hand making IK controls.
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Jan 16, 2020 00:11
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I don't know blender, but you can do a lot by also chainging up rigid bodies. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jt6T_1BJRX8 The tentacles on the aliens here was done by chainging a bunch of spheres together, setting them as rigid bodies. This then allowed me to either control them by target positions, (so they would try to hit key poses set by the animators), random wiggling (a mix of sine curves on on the 'motor forces') or just plain dynamics. I set it up so that the animator could blend between the 3 modes and apart from a few tweaks to the noise presets, I didn't have to touch a single shot once the rig was done. ILM used similar system on David Jones' tentacles on Pirates, FWIW. ImplicitAssembler fucked around with this message at 01:46 on Jan 16, 2020 |
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Jan 16, 2020 01:44
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Well Dan's method uses rigid bodies but something went wrong the first time; I made an empty scene and experimented and tried again and I think I can improve my results this time. The big issues were that the other two methods (soft body and cloth sim) seem broken; as in not working as expected according to the other tutorials I used.
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Jan 16, 2020 02:10
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You could try this? It’s similar to a tool Brian Horgan wrote for Maya to automate a “jiggle” based on locator location. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=NrCOMATodzQ
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Jan 17, 2020 02:27
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So I opened a new scene, redid very carefully Dan's rigid body tutorial and it seemed to work...? So I went and redid it in my working scene and it... DIDN'T work. A carefully compared the two scenes and so far a big difference I can spot seems to be scale seems to matter in a way independently of anything else. The test scene I made a rig/with rigid bodies that was 8x the size of my working scene. Both scenes had all the objects with scale transformations all applied but the physics still behave differently at different scales (adjusting mass of the RB's does nothing). I slightly suspect that the other methods might work better when scaled up, so I'll conduct an experiment later today. Ccs posted:You could try this? It’s similar to a tool Brian Horgan wrote for Maya to automate a “jiggle” based on locator location. At a glance I think it uses the same method as one of the above videos where you have essentially a "string" object with cloth physics affecting it and then using bones that follow empties that are parented to the vertices of that "string" results in physcs. This method doesn't work for me for unknown reasons in 2.8, though might be scale related. And to be clear I'm not really looking for a thing that results in a jiggle, I want to animate my character's hair mesh, and it should react to gravity.
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Jan 17, 2020 15:10
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Yeah so something is very weird about Blender 2.8 and none of the devs have responded to my ticket, I think there's a cover up happening. In my clean hair physics test scene where everything is scaled up 8x, *now* if I recreate the cloth sim tutorial but at 8x its original scale, only *then* does it seem to work and give results similar to what is to be expected. For some reason it seems like Blender's physics are just not working at 1x scale but provide more intuitive results at 8x scale.
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Jan 18, 2020 07:37
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Raenir Salazar posted:... I think there's a cover up happening. In my experience with 3d apps I would say laziness (or in commercial products, cheapness and ridiculous release schedules) are more likely than "cover ups"
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Jan 18, 2020 07:46
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EoinCannon posted:In my experience with 3d apps I would say laziness (or in commercial products, cheapness and ridiculous release schedules) are more likely than "cover ups" It's just really strange because I talked to the Blender guy who did one of the tutorials, they haven't touched 2.8, so they loaded up their own tutorial and confirmed its broken in 2.8; so based on my observations Blender 2.8's physics are just sorta fundamentally broken in a very obvious way, but it doesn't seem like there's any indication that anyone has noticed.
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Jan 18, 2020 08:10
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That's probably because anyone using it professionally has their in house devs fix it and are too preoccupied to contribute. One of the pitfalls of open source software. It's not a cover up or laziness, they are just busy and made a mistake.
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Jan 18, 2020 08:59
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Argh I’m so infuriated with Windows 10 right now. Been R&Ding a moderately heavy grain sim in Houdini - 912 frames, currently with ~13mil particles. Takes roughly 36 hours to simulate+render the full range. I had some crashes on 17.5 this week, lost a good 25 hours of sim time, so I updated to 18 and it seemed to work fine. Of course, windows decided it wanted to update itself last night, literally 15 minutes after I’d stepped away from the machine for the night. That lost me another 8 hours of sim time, and holy gently caress am I annoyed. How in gods name do I work around this? Anyone have any luck disabling the auto restart? Task scheduler restart task just tells me my admin account isn’t allowed to disable it, and I don’t know how to tell windows my machines working hours are 24/7, not whatever hidden schedule it’s decided for me. I just want to be able to say “hey, don’t update unless I manually restart”, or even have it say “windows will update at 2am”, not “windows will update outside of active hours”, which could be that night or four nights from then.
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Jan 26, 2020 14:35
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Slothful Bong posted:Argh I’m so infuriated with Windows 10 right now. It's not ideal, but using Active Hours with Pause Updates (which can remain paused for up to 7 days) can probably solve most of your problem
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Jan 26, 2020 16:04
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There's this method that I think will do what you want, but it sounds like you would have to actually click on the notification to get it to update. If you want still want updates installed automatically, you can set it to "Auto download and schedule the install" instead, and then enable another setting in the Group Policy Editor called "No auto-restart with logged on users for scheduled automatic updates installations". If you do it this way, it should not restart as long as there is a user logged in. The Group Policy Editor has a lot of help text to go along with everything. If you have Windows 10 Home, you probably can't use the Group Policy Editor, but you can find the registry entries to edit at the end of the big wall of documentation MS provides.
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Jan 26, 2020 17:35
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ZombieApostate posted:There's this method that I think will do what you want, but it sounds like you would have to actually click on the notification to get it to update. Yup, that way should work. I generally just grab Win10 Pro(oem) licenses for my pcs when I install windows, since it's like 10-15usd per key. And that grants access to the Group Policy Editor. None of my pcs reset themselves ever, they just get those notifications in the corner, and will only update+restart if I consent. It's how it should be by default, really. Especially when it's too loving dumb to notice that the pc is being used for something like rendering when forcing a restart.
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Jan 26, 2020 20:25
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You guys all rock  I have 10 pro, but never delved into the GPE stuff, so I wasn’t aware it could do all that. I definitely want the updates, so being able to install them on log off is perfect. I was able to do this via task scheduler for auto shutdown, so that not working with the update system threw me for a loop.
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Jan 26, 2020 22:00
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Still working on this dude, wondering if anything looks off to you guys (he's a demon cat... man) 
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Jan 26, 2020 22:12
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