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Ccs posted:sometimes working until 4 am is what you need to do in order to not be hit by the layoff train. No, no you don't. Don't ever believe that.
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Jan 22, 2023 16:49
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Companies in software have been experimenting with mass outsourcing like you describe for decades. Typically what ends up happening is that the company either folds or ends up insourcing again. It sucks to experience the cycle, but I wouldn't take it as a sign of an industry-wide movement.
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Jan 22, 2023 18:03
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I equate vfx more with manufacturing than software though, although software development is definitely a component of vfx. Anyway sadly it’s also a broken business model ruled by subsidies, lack of trade organization or union, and the “burn the passion of the young for profit”. But manufacturing has mostly been outsourced. Pierre Grage had this to say in his book Inside VFX and I think he has a point?  picupload
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Jan 22, 2023 19:05
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Again, people have cried wolf for years and if you are working for MPC , you are seeing the worst side of it. Instead, what has become more obvious over the last 3-4 years, is the re-birth of small boutique studios, especially with WFH and places like Imageworks are now bigger than ever, without any Indian outsourcing. I don't know any seniors/supes who are seriously worried about it. Once the trend became obvious (They're doing it because it's cheap, not because it's any good), I think most people relaxed. Granted, I finally managed to break away from VFX last year, but it's still my back-up should this new career not work out and I'm certainly not worried about it.
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Jan 22, 2023 23:46
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Some of it is good though. Just inefficient because trading stuff between sites and timezones is inefficient. But if for a certain company it all goes to India, then they won't be trading assets back and forth and they'll be able to underbid at 3x less than anybody else. I hope you're right, I just see a growing polarity shift in the industry. In every meeting we're told "we're actually mostly an Indian company now" because of where the headcount is. And friends at dneg say Namit (head of dneg and prime focus) also wants to make vfx an India centric industry.
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Jan 23, 2023 01:41
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Ccs posted:Some of it is good though. Just inefficient because trading stuff between sites and timezones is inefficient. But if for a certain company it all goes to India, then they won't be trading assets back and forth and they'll be able to underbid at 3x less than anybody else. Again, I think your view is very skewed from where you work.
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Jan 23, 2023 03:11
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Could be. My boss who’s been in the industry 20+ years remembers a time when it was all in California. Then it was almost all in canada and london. It’ll still probably always have a footprint in those places, same as vfx still has some footprint in cali, but where the majority of the work is could still shift. Depends on the skill of the labor pool.
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Jan 23, 2023 04:41
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Argue posted:Is retopoflow still a thing? I see some old (1+ years) videos about it on YT but there have been almost 0 vids talking about it since, so I'm wondering if its functionality has been subsumed by some other add-on that's the new cool thing. I use retopoflow 3, I just downloaded it off github a few days ago to install on my new workstation. The only problem with the github version is you have to unzip it to remove 'master' from the folder name then rezip it prior to installing it in Blender. Otherwise it gives you path error. https://github.com/CGCookie/retopoflow
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Jan 23, 2023 21:37
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:Companies in software have been experimenting with mass outsourcing like you describe for decades. Typically what ends up happening is that the company either folds or ends up insourcing again. It sucks to experience the cycle, but I wouldn't take it as a sign of an industry-wide movement. It is not about doing away with work, it's about degrading work. You will be more susceptible to lovely working conditions, longer hours and no leg to stand on because of this.
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Jan 25, 2023 07:54
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Mr Shiny Pants posted:It is not about doing away with work, it's about degrading work. You will be more susceptible to lovely working conditions, longer hours and no leg to stand on because of this. There sort of is a leg to stand on though - there's great bargaining in refusing to work under conditions you aren't happy with. Maybe i'm being naïve here but that seems like a great opportunity for another studio to do some PR about their better working conditions and suck up the best of western talent. The only thing you're gambling on is being able to work at a higher standard than outsourcing to indians. Maybe you wont get to work on a big marvel movie that year while it all burns down, its not a big deal.
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Jan 25, 2023 21:47
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Again, I think Ccs' world view is somewhat skewed from working for the lowest of the low bidders and a studio that specializes in living on the angst of the juniors. MPC also has the highest junior to senior ratio of *anywhere* by lightyears and their entire business model is based on having an army of low paid desperate juniors and a few well paid seniors to herd the cats. The seniors will burn out (or become supes and then burn out), whereas the juniors will be dragged along until they smarten up and get a job elsewhere for about 2x their previous salary. Having said that, they are also, for the same reason, giving way more people a chance of getting that elusive first job in the industry. You get to work on some decent projects that can help start your career.
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Jan 26, 2023 02:16
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Yeah thats the whole business model. It's born out of a bit of desperation as getting profit from the vfx industry is a little like getting blood from a stone. And it doesn't help that when you try to be the largest, you also become the studio with the most overhead, and then you need to continue to bring in the work to keep the lights on at the facilities you've set up all over the world. And the clients know you need to underbid to keep paying the rent and software licenses, and it becomes a vicious cycle.
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Jan 26, 2023 05:11
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No, it's the path that MPC and to a lesser extent Dneg have chosen and MPC does this better(?) than anyone else. Just the whole attempt to save money on Houdini licenses, sharing them over 2.5 facilities in 2.5 different timezones. It barely worked when it was London/Vancouver/MTL. If London worked OT, we couldn't do poo poo in the morning, because we had no licenses available. Management would rather have artist consistently twiddling their thumbs for 3-4 hours each day than paying for new licenses. Artists wrote tools to snipe licenses when someone crashed, but they banned those. They then kept trying to push us to do it in Maya, but no one wanted work in Maya (at least in Vancouver). They then added Mr. X and Mill Film (Australia) to the license pool and it became an even bigger joke. (And most likely in breach of SideFX' license agreement). I've never had that issue to the same extent anywhere else I've worked and I've just about worked for all of them. Regardless of that, I actually did enjoy my second stint at MPC, mostly because I had an awesome team. (Although as mentioned earlier, they left after a show or two as their confidence/experience grew and they understandably wanted more money). Dneg is also relying on high volume of work, but they're nowhere near as bad as MPC when it comes to relying heavily on armies of cheap labour and 'good enough' quality.
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Jan 26, 2023 06:15
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Ccs posted:remember this is feast or famine industry and sometimes working until 4 am is what you need to do in order to not be hit by the layoff train. That's not really necessary at all. I can't recall the last time I worked that late. Even in TV/Film. Something is wrong if that's the case. I'd leave the company. I'd try to get over to a good AAA games studio and transition to real-time in some way long term and get out of that stuff. Even eventually plan to find a way into a tech/tech adjacent field. Something you get paid bucks, get consistent bonuses and get some form of equity/profit participation [eg. stocks/rsus] I *THINK* I had to work an all-nighter almost back to back on Narnia on the delivery week due to a contractor animator being lazy on his last day and R+H's really lovely pipeline at the time [no real version control, straight dynamic link to new publish]. Guy on his way out committed an update to 3 characters on a shot with over 70 characters. Except he got lazy and did a wildcard and recommitted all 70 characters even though the rest were finalized for months. I had to hand-rebuild that shot. I also got paid like a week and a bit's worth of salary for those 2 days for OT. More recently? I don't think I have done any "normal" overtime in... um. 4-5 years? Normally 10-6 at most. Big K of Justice fucked around with this message at 18:37 on Jan 26, 2023 |
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Jan 26, 2023 09:39
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ImplicitAssembler posted:(And most likely in breach of SideFX' license agreement). This is 100% it, they are dodging buying GALS/global access licenses. SESI is 100% totally aware of it. hip files log a lot of poo poo, users, who edited what nodes at what time, what login/machine/domain etc touched that file. If you know what you are doing you can scrape that stuff. If a file reaches sidefx for support they'll be able to tell all the places that file went. [Hmm more users than licenses? Interesting] MPC is motherfucking dog poo poo. I can understand if its your only option to get a big project on your reel but once you get that done clear out. Life's too short to waste time at that place. Big K of Justice fucked around with this message at 18:32 on Jan 26, 2023 |
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Jan 26, 2023 09:43
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Anyone else playing around with this autorigger? Going to load a couple of ZBrush models and see if this thing works as advertised. https://www.reallusion.com/auto-rig/accurig/
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Jan 27, 2023 00:47
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tango alpha delta posted:Anyone else playing around with this autorigger? Going to load a couple of ZBrush models and see if this thing works as advertised. Looks interesting, thanks for the tip
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Jan 27, 2023 03:19
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Big K of Justice posted:That's not really necessary at all. I can't recall the last time I worked that late. Even in TV/Film. Something is wrong if that's the case. Oh something is definitely wrong. But it's not super unusual. When I was in animation school my professors had stories of working until 5 am and driving home and almost wrapping their car around a tree. They told us not to do that, but also warned us "studio bosses will definitely ask you to do that. And early in your career it will be hard to say no."
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Jan 27, 2023 04:42
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tango alpha delta posted:Anyone else playing around with this autorigger? Going to load a couple of ZBrush models and see if this thing works as advertised. Yes - I have been using it. Good for hands but a little finicky to work in Maya. I believe it may work slightly better for Blender but that is conjecture. In Maya the face bones kind of fly out of the head. For quick body and hand rigging it is cool and has better weighting than the auto rigging / weighting in Maya. So it wins for both rigging hands and better auto weighting but you have to fix the head / face rigging yourself. Oh yeah... content: https://cascadeur.com/
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Jan 30, 2023 09:01
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I'll try it out for blender when I get home, i cannot for the life of me figure out rigging or weight painting so it could be a game changer
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Jan 30, 2023 12:20
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arsenicCatnip posted:I'll try it out for blender when I get home, i cannot for the life of me figure out rigging or weight painting so it could be a game changer My old boss (who recommended it) is a Blender user, so I am going on that. YMMV however. I am excited to try AI assisted animation and plan on trying to streamline a pipeline between zbrush, accurig and cascadeur. Will report back with my findings. It looks like cascadeur offers autorigging tools as well. Hmm. https://cascadeur.com/ sigma 6 fucked around with this message at 18:12 on Jan 30, 2023 |
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Jan 30, 2023 18:03
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Pre-emptive  for when it's bought by Adobe, renamed Mixamo and costs $45 a month.My brief attempts at animating anything in blender always ended in  but working through the Cascadeur tutorials seems to be a lot better.
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Jan 30, 2023 22:06
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Geometry nodes are cool as gently caress https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KXa8z9M6bSY
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Jan 31, 2023 19:34
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About 3 months ago a client came up to us with an interesting problem - "we need people to know that we're going to be selling a building, but the design isnt final yet. what can do you do?" So I mulled it over a bit, put a pitch together for something really wacky - basically a personal project that sort of aligns with the brief, a heavily abstract way of making fun visuals that sort of loosely take place in what will become the project, a real teaser. They loved it and went for it. Then I had a 2 week long near total mental breakdown trying to figure out how to actually pull it off... but ideas started to form, a structure came to be, the logic presented itself - and the client was still on board. Found a composer to make an Amon Tobin style electronic ballet, client approved that no qualms. Had 4 weeks of production where my anxiety about if I could actually pull it off or not (and probably some degree of personal attachment contributed, because this is a bit different and I want it to be good/notable) kept me up at night... but every meeting with the client, no comments - just 'keep it up!' Then a few weeks of color grading/post/fixes, trying to make it all glue together in a way that makes sense... And tonight, i've just this moment sent the final to the client. Feels surreal. I'm super excited to share it! I dont think anyone has done anything like it in real estate before. I know this is a weird post to make with nothing to show for it but oh well. Should be public very soon! Edit: Also I know this post was all me & I - there were 4 other people on it too! I was just acting ship captain and trying to make it seem to them that I knew what I was doing. cubicle gangster fucked around with this message at 06:49 on Feb 1, 2023 |
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Feb 1, 2023 03:46
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imhotep posted:Geometry nodes are cool as gently caress They are, Default Cube is a wizard with them. The city stuff they've shown at Blender Con was pretty dope as well. As are the spaceships built using geometry nodes.
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Feb 1, 2023 07:08
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cubicle gangster posted:About 3 months ago a client came up to us with an interesting problem - "we need people to know that we're going to be selling a building, but the design isnt final yet. what can do you do?" Awesome, look forward to seeing it That's a unicorn of a client though
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Feb 1, 2023 08:50
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EoinCannon posted:Awesome, look forward to seeing it Yeah, they're a dream to work with. Did a couple stills for them in the past and after pitching a specific solution and had the same level of support/freedom. Definitely going to do everything I can to handle all their future work!
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Feb 1, 2023 19:46
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imhotep posted:Geometry nodes are cool as gently caress This is great stuff, thanks. I'm almost at the end of this tutorial but I'm running into a problem--when I create the noise texture for the rocks, the noise stretches around them along the xy plane; in the video, the noise is distributed evenly across the face of the rocks. I double checked and my node setup is identical, and I tried tweaking the numbers on the noise and scaling to match his, but no dice. Any ideas? Mine:  His:  Now that I look more closely, I think the noise texture might be stretching over the water too, even though I didn't notice any problems like that earlier. Edit: I just tried the same material on a hand-placed UV sphere that I deformed using the same method (instead of a procedurally placed one) and it looks fine. Argue fucked around with this message at 12:15 on Feb 6, 2023 |
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Feb 6, 2023 11:37
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Argue posted:Any ideas? Without watching that tutorial, my first assumption would be that you stretched your object at some point and didn't apply the transformation. So, see what happens if you select the object in Object Mode and use Ctrl+A > Scale. westborn fucked around with this message at 07:22 on Feb 7, 2023 |
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Feb 7, 2023 07:20
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It's not that, because the whole thing is procedurally generated out of a single spline object, but I did get an answer from the YOSPOS thread just now! It seems that when I'm instancing points in geometry nodes, the coordinates it generates are hosed because it's treating the entire collection of instanced objects as one mesh and creates a funky UV map. Long story short, instead of trying to unwrap it and come up with correct UV coordinates, I connected a Texture Coordinate->Object socket into the Vector socket of the noise texture, and now it works! The only thing left puzzling me is why the guy in that tutorial didn't need to do that; you can see his node setup quite clearly and he gets normal looking noise without having to do what I did.
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Feb 7, 2023 12:03
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I’ve been following the tutorial, I don’t think I’m that far yet, but so far I haven’t had any issues, I’ll finish it up today and see if I have the same problem. Edit oh nvm I didn’t see your most recent post Argue posted:
He’s a wizard with the shader editor in blender, he does so many little shortcuts and little things in that video, even the way he organizes the nodes. But yeah he’s really good, I’ve followed a couple of his tutorials, he made a magnemite from Pokémon which was well done, but I can’t think of any others as good as the river one off the top of my head. He also made a katamari ball recently with geometry nodes, and said they’re hard to model, which made me proud of the Katamari ball I accidentally modeled when I was following another tutorial. I forgot exactly how I did it, but I think I basically made an Icosphere with the least amount of sides that you can choose when making one, then I parented a sphere to each vertex, and added a sphere to the middle to overlap each of the other spheres then joined them, which isn’t the most elegant solution, and his his better I think because you can reshape and resize the little nubs, and the way I did it you can only resize them a bit to get close.  His titles are awful, I tried searching for this and had to just look through his recent videos to find it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O9b5ltjusH4 Also looking forward to seeing your project cubicle gangster imhotep fucked around with this message at 09:36 on Feb 11, 2023 |
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Feb 9, 2023 19:25
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This guy who’s only recently started making tutorials that try to make things in blender that look like Houdini is also cool, I haven’t tried this yet but I watched it and the idea behind it is cool, using the two rings and the proximity to weight paint the object. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TyhZIxIEz34
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Feb 11, 2023 09:38
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 I need to make something with this general feel. It feels like this would be something ZBrush would be well-suited for, but I'm not really sure what brushes are good for the task. I've tried using the curves brushes to lay some cylindrical lines onto a form, but the reference image has a bunch of inflations/deflations/line-weight looking variations that I'm not sure how to best accomplish. Anyone have advice on how to approach something in this style?
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Feb 16, 2023 01:26
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Harvey Baldman posted:
I've done a fair bit of fluid sculpting in zbrush I just use a lot snake hook and inflate with sculptris mode turned on and sometimes using IMM to insert a sphere on subtract to punch holes in things, dynamnesh, and lots of smooth You could also add long strands with IMM and then dynamesh them in These were done pretty much like that  
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Feb 16, 2023 01:38
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I was trying to figure out the solution to patches of the body clipping through clothes that I'm running a cloth simulation on, and I couldn't find a lot of solutions because most of what I've seen seems to involve deforming the clothes with the body and adding folds yourself. I saw a post that suggested just making the parts of the body that clip through the clothes invisible, but it was an old post, and it didn't explain how to do this either. Is this the right answer? The reason I'm not sculpting the folds myself is I want to create my own reference for 2d paintings, and if I were to just create the folds on my own, that would defeat the point of trying to create accurate reference. (normally, I just pose myself in a photo, but I'm hoping this will be useful for situations where I don't have the right outfit, or sufficient dexterity to pull off a reference shot)
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Feb 19, 2023 11:48
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Argue posted:I was trying to figure out the solution to patches of the body clipping through clothes that I'm running a cloth simulation on, and I couldn't find a lot of solutions because most of what I've seen seems to involve deforming the clothes with the body and adding folds yourself. I saw a post that suggested just making the parts of the body that clip through the clothes invisible, but it was an old post, and it didn't explain how to do this either. Is this the right answer? I would assume they meant like hiding that portion of the body that’s clipping from the viewport and the render, it still keeps the actual model there for any physics simulation or whatever.
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Feb 19, 2023 23:13
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Argue posted:I was trying to figure out the solution to patches of the body clipping through clothes that I'm running a cloth simulation on, and I couldn't find a lot of solutions because most of what I've seen seems to involve deforming the clothes with the body and adding folds yourself. I saw a post that suggested just making the parts of the body that clip through the clothes invisible, but it was an old post, and it didn't explain how to do this either. Is this the right answer? I did a fair number of Digi doubles/replacement work on a few movies back in the day and ... how do I word this.... You do a collision pass on the surfaces you don't see, but you don't render them. No one really does that, it just complicates the work and drives up simulation time for no benefit. Good simulation software will allow you to filter what is colliding with what. So taking the simulation out of the picture for a moment, you would only render the clothing layers you see, any surfaces you don't see you "delete" or hide. There's different terminology for this for different software, but you want to create groups/sets of things to hide, usually, on skin, you may have skin that's occluded by clothes and have that in some form of hide layer that doesn't get rendered or drawn in the viewport. There may be a bit of special treatment you may need to do with collars and other clothing holes but those can be solved with a bit of modeling. When it comes to the simulation, you may be running collisions on an entirely different subset of geometry, say a skin layer that is never ever rendered and is only used for calculating the collision pass. It may not even be geometry it could be a volume object like with some Houdini solvers. Depending on the scene / objective, there are exceptions, ropes/capes/dresses are often exceptions of getting away with simulation minimalism. It'll l depend on a case-by-case basis. As for accuracy.... cloth sims can be a crap shoot. I know at ILM they made a ton of hay 10 years ago about the skin/cloth simulations when I was there, but they had 2-3 really good 3d sculpt guys who would go in frame by frame fix the muscle sims/cloth stuff on various movies because that was way cheaper to final a shot then run some dudes cape in another 20 hour sim pass again. A good example is spending a ton of setup time for a sim only to wind up with something that 98% works but there's a small part that pops/sizzles deforms wierd, so you fix that post-sim via comp or some form of post-sim modeling pass. I guess to sum up you can do this: - Run the cloth sim on a specialized/optimized set of collision geometry. Eg. A torso only, or parts that you need. -Render the cloth geometry with the hero final character minus the stuff that is occluded by the cloth.
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Feb 21, 2023 07:07
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EoinCannon posted:I've done a fair bit of fluid sculpting in zbrush This is great stuff. I would know a few guys / places that would burn a ton of time trying to get simulated results like this instead of just sculpting it 
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Feb 21, 2023 07:08
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Big K of Justice posted:I guess to sum up you can do this: Oh, this makes perfect sense, thanks--I was already running the collision on a simplified mesh, but I didn't think to just flat out remove the occluded parts; I was trying to figure out how to compute the intersections, which in retrospect was silly.
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Feb 21, 2023 07:58
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With Zeno, ILM easily had the best post-sim tools of any software package. It was super easy to sculpt your way out of trouble, as you could easily blend in said sculpt over time, much easier than you could do in Maya/Houdini. The cloth sim was decent, but the hair solver was a friggin nightmare. I remember one shot I got for a trailer on Warcraft and got told I had 3 days to do it...it took 3 guys 2 weeks to get done, most of it due to the stupid hair. That was the last show I was a creature TD on...I'd had enough after that.
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Feb 21, 2023 08:21
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