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JoeyJoJoJr Shabadoo posted:How do I fix the lighting in this? I am loving horrible at lighting and have no loving clue what to do. I'm going to be removing those lamps because I think they're distracting so disregard those. Also, an ambient occlusion of this comes out entirely black, why? Remove reflections (or tone them down to like 1%), greatly reduce specular and use specular maps, so you only get it where needed. Add better noise to to everything.
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Jan 31, 2013 21:10
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(Figured it out, because I had a box around the whole room. That's bizzare. Oh well)
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ACanofPepsi posted:Now that they're done can you give a hint about what the two projects were? Were they unannounced projects, or something we've already seen teaser trailers for? Just curious how far along a project can get before the rug is pulled out from a big company like R&H. The show that caused the biggest problem was Snow white, as it apparently destroyed their cash flow. Why it got pulled, I don't know.
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Feb 11, 2013 22:33
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I doubt that R&H is 'done'. Unlike DD, it sounds like R&H was reasonably healthy, but ran into a cash shortage that it could not cover when 2 shows got pulled.
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Feb 12, 2013 08:07
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SVU Fan posted:It seems like this has been happening to a lot of VFX houses. Is it different for games? Well, it's not really comparable industries. The problem is that I can't really think of anything else I would *want* to do. Games, maybe.
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Feb 12, 2013 10:11
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keyframe posted:I am in Vancouver and need a job. Know anyone looking for animators? Despite all the work happening in VanCity, there's still very little creature work going on....Now, if you were to be a FX TD, OTOH...
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Feb 18, 2013 07:44
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Illuminti posted:Best idea I heard was refusing to work overtime (for free), for a month or something, a big tentpole film will have to get delayed to achieve anything. I'm glad I left film and do commercials now, I'll see your Life of Pi and raise you an advert about cheese and a life! I don't do OT for free and as far as I know, neither does any of my friends and ex-colleagues at any of the major VFX houses in NA. (London is a different story), so I honestly don't think it'll have any real effect. The problem with any kind of labour with-holding action is that you will primarily hurt your employer, who will then get penalized by the studio. For this to have any kind of real effect, we are talking a completely withdrawal of labour for 4+ weeks, *globally* and then the studios might start hurting.
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Feb 26, 2013 21:38
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Hmmm, strike action will count as force majeure (just checked), so in theory the VFX companies can't get penalized by the studios if the workers go on strike.....
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Feb 26, 2013 23:26
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cubicle gangster posted:Really? I don't know anyone who works in advertising who's been let go because a job ended - most people I know in that industry have been at the same place for between 3 and 5 years. Any they love the fact that one week they're on set/tracking then the next doing cloth sims then the next doing modeling & lighting etc. Before I moved into features, I spent some 6 years in commercials (In London), both as staff and as freelance. I'd develop relationships with 3-4 different shops and that would usually keep me busy. Jobs varied from 3 days to 3 months and once place I worked on back-to-back projects for 9 months or so. The thing is, as a freelance, you are usually given the crappy jobs. I found commercials way more stressful. You have very little room for experimenting with techniques/technology and all-nighters were far more frequent, because with the shorter turn-around, you had less time to recover from mistakes/bad decisions. As for horror stories, everybody got them. Be it about freelancers, clients, bosses, co-workers.
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Mar 1, 2013 09:39
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cubicle gangster posted:I wasn't suggesting it as a freelancer, what's wrong with going full time? Oh nothing!. Sweet gig if you can get it.
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Mar 1, 2013 23:55
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Ccs posted:Is it specifically bad just in California or is there a major downturn for VFX everywhere in North America? Lots of work in Vancouver and Montreal is kicking off with several studios opening up there. I'm still getting odd contact from LA, so there's still work to be found, although as always, experience is king.
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May 18, 2013 11:43
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The rust textures on the raised railway are pretty good. Where it really fails is the lack of shadows. Even if you didn't have the resources to render the whole sequence, a couple of key frames with proper shadows,normal maps and occlusion could have show what you intended it to look like. Now, this will just get tossed in the bin straight away. If I have a (FX) shot I really want approved,I always render the characters/environments with occlusion (fake or real,doesn't matter too much for that purpose). Making your work pleasant to look at (even it its irrelevant for the task at hand), gives a much more positive impression. This is for working with people I already know and who already know my abilities and for what often is technical tasks that will be textured/rendered/comped by other people down the pipeline. You are trying to sell your work to people who don't know you and assume that you have very little ability. (That is the default assumption for someone who's straight out of school). Good enough simply isn't. It has to be the best you can do...otherwise you don't stand a chance.
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May 20, 2013 18:25
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Geared Hub posted:The problem is [directed at the thread, not so much at the banned goon] when you reach the skill level where you have open doors all over the place, you tend to have things like a family or a house, so you usually get situated in one location, which is in the past, fine if its a big media center like LA, Bay Area, etc. That is a very LA-centric viewpoint. Most of my non-US colleagues have lived in London, Sydney, Wellington, LA, SF, Vancouver, you name it. I've done Denmark, London, Wellington, London, Vancouver and I'll probably move 2-3 more times before packing it in. As far as I'm concerned that has always been the nature of the industry, but a lot of people in LA have never really experienced that, so I can see why it sucks for them, but frankly...welcome to the club.
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May 21, 2013 02:09
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Geared Hub posted:
Not news really. Just look at the amount of really crap job applications from people out the Indian schools. Many of the reels are astonishingly bad, yet they're carefully compiled with walk-thru's of the various elements...and frankly, the situation isn't much better here in the '1st' world. Most colleges will have a '3D <something> course', which is a complete waste of money and time.
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May 22, 2013 07:41
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Hazed_blue posted:Anyone here have experience with 3D printers and the like? Our EP would like to do a test print of a model that I did, but we're having... trouble preparing the model properly. Try this thread. http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3365193
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Jun 12, 2013 18:01
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Frankenfinger posted:"People" "Training" - these are not words I understand. Seriously I'm one of four guys in our entire department, one of the two who actually does 3D viz in said department, plus our intern who won't be here forever. Word has come from our creative director that this is what we "need" to provide. I have to find a solution that I can pick up and implement in four weeks. I don't get the option to say no. Would Lumion suffice?.
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Jun 12, 2013 21:50
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We check references by default...and showing non-public work is a big no-no, at least when it comes to yet-to-be-released projects.
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Aug 16, 2013 20:12
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It's easy to find animators. Maybe not good ones, but you can always find decent animators It's very hard to find FX TDs....even decent ones.
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Sep 6, 2013 20:08
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International Log posted:Are you pondering what i'm pondering? Unless you look closely, she does look like a hunched-over lady.
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Oct 1, 2013 18:47
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International Log posted:Are you pondering what i'm pondering? Unless you look closely, she does look like a hunched-over lady.
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Oct 1, 2013 19:04
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Ccs posted:So...what are they talking about? I've done face rigging and it seems to me that Disney and Pixar use very cutting edge techniques. This person seems to be mistaking artistic choices for lapses in technical know-how. What are these rigging workflow differences between Disney and Blue Sky?
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Oct 12, 2013 06:38
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Big K of Justice posted:
I remember one junior animator quitting because the client didn't approve his animation  .Similarly when I moved to a studio that previously had done a lot of TV work and a lot of their staff were used to getting their work approved with very few changes on said work. Some of them had a torrid time getting used to the 'process' of doing feature work. One guy in particular, refused to do changes that he didn't get a sufficiently convincing explanation for. It takes a very special mindset to maintain creative thought and individuality in the feature film process and a lot of people get disillusioned with the whole thing. There's certainly room for individuality and ego, but you really have to pick your battles.
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Oct 18, 2013 19:55
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Torabi posted:Annoying as hell to swap back and forth just to select something close to what I had selected. But I guess it will have to do. Some script that makes q toggle between select and whatever you had previously but still, it doesn't make any sense to me as to why it is like this. QWER.This will let you switch between selection and the various transform controls. Shift-WER will let you set keyframes.
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Oct 22, 2013 19:51
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BonoMan posted:I've never used it, but Andrew Kramer at Video Copilot seems to like it a lot. Seems maybe marginally more intuitive than Fluids from what I can tell. Since Maya's FX sucks donkeys ball, it can only be better.
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Oct 26, 2013 20:42
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BurtLington posted:It's a real shame there isn't much online documentation for Houdini. I did a six week course in it a year ago but it was very much the basics of everything. Some in-depth destruction workflows would be great, does anyone know some good places to learn? Digital Tutors have a pretty good shattering one but most of the other Houdini tutorials are out of date. Destruction is very straight forward. Chop stuff up. Do rigids setup/simulation. The only (big) company that does it differently is MPC with their Maya/Kali toolset. sigma 6 posted:Recently, I was told that the big studios are not using separate render passes as much or at all. Can anyone confirm this? I can confirm that it's not true.
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Nov 19, 2013 23:03
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sigma 6 posted:In regards to the renderpass thing. Well, he's still wrong. Big studios still uses render-passes. As for the comment about 'the better the beauty pass', well, doh!. It's just that rendering is *very* resource heavy and compositing isn't.
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Nov 23, 2013 07:58
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Skilbs posted:I am waiting to hear a date and time for an interview at MPC for a cloth TD role, this is my first proper interview for a VFX job. Does anyone have any tips? I currently feel like I am just waiting until they find out that I have bumbled through all the cloth work I have done previously and most of it worked accidentally. "Yes, I love working overtime and not getting paid!" Jaded-ness aside, express willingness to learn, be confident in what you have done before and don't make any excuses. MPC can be a great place to learn and grow, but the pace can be unrelenting, more so for a junior artist who can't afford to say no.
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Dec 11, 2013 20:15
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BonoMan posted:Do you guys have any good techniques for objects through a scene for some CG enhancement/replacement. At worst, it's a couple of hours of work tracking it in.
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Dec 17, 2013 20:23
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BurtLington posted:For all you Houdini experts - I'm trying my hand at a very large and ambitious destruction project where I destroy Big Ben with something like a small meteor. Here is a short test of what I have so far: When you are fracturing you need to consider how the structure is built and how it will react to forces. At the moment, everything is fractured with the same (obvious) voronoi pattern and way too low resolution. Also, if you hit a tower like that in the middle, it's unlikely that the top will completely crumple and it very much looks like the whole thing fracture at once rather than a progressive destruction.
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Feb 3, 2014 23:23
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Canned Bovines posted:I've just been made the designated cloth guy at work. I know nothing about cloth. Does anyone have some good resources on the basic theory? We're using a proprietary system for it and I'm having some trouble sifting through the piles of "Here's what the options in MAX/Maya/Blender do" tutorials out there for useful information. Usually it's just spring-based systems, so there's nothing really special to it. Level of control will depend on the system, but the real key lies in good cloth simulation meshes. After that, it's establishing how many layers you can run (efficiently) at a time and how much control you can get with pre & post shape tools. I haven't really done cloth in anger for nearly 10 years and back then *cough*,we didn't have a lot of the post-shape tools many places have now. I'm curious how you end up with a proprietary system without anyone telling you how to use it
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Feb 14, 2014 04:59
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pastorrich posted:I have a question for you guys if that's alright. I was in school to become a game designer, but I quit because of personal issues and now I'm trying to find something to make a living of. I still like the video game industry, so I thought about becoming a self-taught 3D modeler and part-time painter. How good are you at working to a brief? Deadlines? Putting up with changes, even if you disagree with them? (How big/frail is your ego?). Then there's the technical issues as well. There's a lot more to working in 3D than being artistically capable. I also think it has become a lot harder to get into the industry without some sort of schooling, but if you have the right combination of talents and a stackload of perseverance, it's not impossible....but you wont find out until you try.
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Feb 17, 2014 06:09
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Ccs posted:On the subject of cloth sims, I'm putting an ncloth jacket on a character, but at certain times the character's arm is going to intersect the body. Is that going to cause the cloth underneath the arms to flip the gently caress out? Or is there a way of telling it to be cool in that area when that happens. Maybe an input mesh attract or something? What I used to do, was turning the character mesh into a nCloth mesh, enabling input attract, except in the areas where it would intersect . So typically I would paint out armpit and elbows and control the amount of gap I need with the collision distance. This would leave enough of a gap for the clothing. This means running the sim in layers, but the skin is fairly quick to run. Alternatively you can disable collisions (on a per-vertex basis) in the trouble areas, but I would found that it would cause issues when for instance the character would raise it's arms high and you would now get the non-colliding area intersecting with the mesh.
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Feb 18, 2014 01:21
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Softimage XSI was lost when they released it. I was a beta tester (and long time Softimage user) and everyone on the beta-mailing list went 'WTF?!?.' when they announced they were going gold. That little move caused so many people to move to Maya. I was 50/50 at that stage and as much as I loved what they were doing, it was just useless for production. You had to model in Softimage and then use a converter to bring them into XSI. Rendering was barebones too, with Mental Ray being too in-efficient to use in production. A friend of mine ran a small 3D studio and he had been heavily involved in the beta and was one of the first to try to complete a project in XSI and XSI ended up having 4 guys in his office for like a month to complete a relatively basic commercial. The final nail in the coffin was Autodesk buying it. With largely the same type of customer base as Maya, why should they keep supporting it? The problem is that there's no real alternatives. Maya is sucking rear end now and is now mainly functioning as a hub for 3rd party tools and really needs to be completely overhauled, but that does not appear to be coming any time soon. Houdini, whilst developing at a rapid pace, is still mostly a TD tool. I guess the only real hope is Modo, which I've yet to play with. Anyway..RIP Softimage. It was the software I started with 20+ years ago and the industry has come a long way since then.
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Mar 5, 2014 01:34
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Ccs posted:How does Maya need to be overhauled? It's the only major 3D package I've used but I like it, but also want to hear what could be improved. Badly outdated UI/workflow. Clunky mix of mel/python (Don't get me started on the expression editor). Mostly useless fluid-system. Mostly useless RBD system. nCloth that is poorly integrated. A function curve editor that was always behind what SoftImage/XSI had. I now mostly use the in-house software, but even in previous companies Maya was mostly used as a container for 3rd party tools that actually did the work. Houdini got the right idea with it's node based system. They just need to make the modelling/animation/rendering side of it more accessible for non-TD's.
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Mar 6, 2014 01:07
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You never use the UI??
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Mar 6, 2014 02:28
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Both MPC and Framestore are hiring in Montreal. I know MPC is trying to convince people from Vancouver to move that way,
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Mar 7, 2014 01:52
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Jewel posted:I don't know much more than the basics, but isn't the fix for gimbal lock just to use quaternions? What's the holdup exactly? That Maya ages ago, decided that calculating quarternions for orient constraints was too processor heavy and despite the great increase in CPU power since then, still hasn't added them in. I'm 99% certain that the custom built maya version we had at Weta in 2003/4 used quarternions in the orient constraints and it caused me no end of trouble when I went to a different company afterwards. (And support refused to acknowledge that there was anything wrong with baked rotations flipping). Since then, we've just added a euler filter process to every post-animation release task. It's been a few years since I had to deal with this, so it may all have changed...
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Mar 21, 2014 02:22
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mutata posted:Yeah, they'll have a job until something changes and the subsidies go away and Hollywood just turns even more to overseas production. Unsustainable is the industry that relies entirely on handouts. It's worked well for Vancouver, though. I moved here before it was really a *thing* and I was seriously expecting to end up doing TV work, but instead ended up doing the same quality of work as I was doing in London. The talent and infrastructure has exploded and there's a lot more Canadians now working in the industry, whereas when I first moved here, it was only the token one or two per department. It's taken a good 5 years to get to that level and we're still struggling to find good enough people, so it's all well and good for Quebec to offer better incentives, but if they can't get the people to do the work, then it's a non-starter. If the rumours are right, that was also one of the reasons that Prime Focus moved most of the Hercules work to London: They simply couldnt hire enough (quality) people in Vancouver. Having said that, I do expect to move once or twice more before 'retiring', but then that's how the industry has always been for me and frankly, I don't have much sympathy for the people in LA refusing to move. In the end, it's still a well-paid job and more and more of the companies are offering decent benefits, something that was non-existant 10 years ago (at least outside California).
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Mar 21, 2014 22:55
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FWIW, there's no shortage of animators (in Vancouver).
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Mar 22, 2014 00:46
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Odddzy posted:While we are on the subject of python. What are good resources for learning python for vfx? There's no real special 'vfx python' aside from the package specific commands/modules. Most of the work is going to be sorting data and to lesser extent, building UIs.
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Mar 22, 2014 09:03
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uglynoodles posted:I'm personally really frustrated with my Game Art course I'm on right now and their refusal to teach anything other than 3DSMax. So, what will you do when you finish and get a job in a place that uses Max?
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Mar 24, 2014 02:56
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