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Anyone else heading to Siggraph in a couple of weeks? Just as a heads up, if you have film industry experience (at least 3+ years) and fancy a new job in sunny NZ, drop me a PM as we'll be interviewing while in LA.
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Jul 28, 2008 23:26
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BonoMan posted:need 3+ years experience and filming in NZ? Hmmmm.....wonder what that could be. It could be any one of the hundreds of high end VFX places in New Zealand that are about to start of an couple of interesting films 
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Jul 29, 2008 22:46
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BonoMan posted:Yes it was and somehow late one night we ended up at a Sony party at 3 in the morning in some loving warehouse in the middle of nowhere. Surrealllllll. I was there in 2000 as well. The Gold Lounge ate all of my money. Never trust any establishment that pays $100 to the Taxi drivers who take you there.  The Sun robotic dolphin was the best bit.
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Jul 30, 2008 03:34
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Ratmann posted:I'm just wondering why you don't think this is a good idea. Katana? The Foundry? Nuke? Do you work at Sony?
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Nov 2, 2009 05:58
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Ratmann posted:
Ah ok, I've worked on shows where all of the lighting was done in comp (Harry Potter III I'm looking at you), and yep, it had its drawbacks. I agree the idea is attractive though, and with an efficient implementation it could really pay for itself. I dream of director review sessions where the comment for final is "Can you bring that light down a bit?", doing it in real time and then off to the pub.
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Nov 2, 2009 08:39
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BigKOfJustice posted:The lighting pipeline where I work is like that. The lighting pass was more or less place lights and go for illumination and make sure you have enough bounced lights, ensure you are reading the HDRI data, make sure all the proper groups are visible then kick off a few deep raster renders which will be tweaked in composting. I think it was a fair bit more than $8K when we paid for it, but we've certainly modified the crap out of it. We're more of a macho  kinda place though. Real men render, see if it looks right, tweak a slider a little bit, and then they re-render. On 1s. With everything dialed to 10. Only girly men use comp for anything but a little bit of grading. All of a sudden tens of thousands of cores doesn't seem that many. forelle fucked around with this message at 10:37 on Nov 2, 2009 |
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Nov 2, 2009 10:29
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Ratmann posted:Let me just say this really quick, no it's not an image based lighting thing, that stuff isn't anywhere here. It's part lighting app, you bring in your geometry, you have materials assigned to it, Prman or Arnold or whatever the gently caress, you build, or import, your light rig, you generate your metric rear end tonne of shadow passes, split your passes and you're done. Ahh ok, my mistake. I guess I just saw lighting and comp and jumped to a conclusion. Cheers for clearing that up. I still like the concept but I guess I'd prefer to take it to its logical extreme as a kind of Shake-for-shots. Some of the companies in Europe (France especially) have systems like this. You build a node graph that describes the whole process of rendering a shot from raw data through scene building, simulation, lighting, rendering, compositing, grading etc. It means that anyone in the company can re-render after making a change. Having worked in places where a texture change can take four days to filter back to review, I see the benefits.
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Nov 2, 2009 22:00
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BigKOfJustice posted:On another hand, we had a vendor show up with this new software product we were thinking of buying. The guy was clueless technically about the actual inner workings of the process of how the software worked and really couldn't answer our questions... then he pulled out this stunt: Is there any chance you could let me know which vendor this was? A PM would be cool. It's always good to know who you can trust and who you can't.
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Nov 7, 2009 01:06
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If anyone is interested, The Foundry just announced the 3D texture painting application I've been working on for the last 4 years while at Weta. It is called Mari. http://www.fxguide.com/article604.html And there is some more information here... http://www.thefoundry.co.uk/dl_file.aspx?ui=625782B3-7DF7-4C44-A571-E4439943704C It is fun.
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Mar 29, 2010 13:14
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brian encino man posted:Wow so you work at Weta? That's really really cool. What's it like there? Er basically give me your autobiography up to this second. Thanks! I did work at Weta, I'm now at the Foundry as product manager for Mari. Erm, I graduated in Computer Science, worked in the games industry for a while, left the games industry as film VFX was really what I wanted to do. Got a job at FrameStore in London in R&D, worked there for 3 years then Weta for the last four. I started the first week of Avatar production and left the week after the Oscars party. Weta is fantastic. A strange mix of very laid back and staggeringly hard working.
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Mar 29, 2010 14:34
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sigma 6 posted:Hahahah - somebody sounds a little bitter. I just got done with the Autodesk education meeting. Ran into a guy from R&H and he said that VFX studios haven't used UVs in a while and they don't use envelope weighting anymore either. The quote about UVs is pretty far from the mark. Apart from Disney and maybe Pixar, most facilities, if they use ptex at all, use it in very specific situations rather than as a general solution. Some of the most interesting work with Ptex (IMHO) is the stuff Scott Metzger is doing with onset capture, Lidar scans and projections, Mari and Vray. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1d8ypguQjFw&feature=youtube_gdata_player Scott showed an updated version of this at Sigraph using Faro Lidar scans and 12k spherical projections. Crazy stuff.
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Aug 11, 2012 23:04
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concerned mom posted:Awesome thanks man. Yeah this is going to be very normal heavy so hopefully a lot of info will be down for that. I was going to use the lightbox tool thingy to paint his face on from photo ref as well. I do however like to hand paint pretty much anything I can so I think this will be an interesting exercise. You could try giving Mari a go...... http://www.thefoundry.co.uk/products/mari/ Mari is designed for high quality, high resolution texturing painting. You can either get a 15 day license off the bat or a 40 day license from here... http://challenge.cgsociety.org/mari/?utm_source=CGSociety&utm_medium=stamp&utm_campaign=MariChallenge And if you want an overview (rather old, but kinda fun) of what Mari can do https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3WskWrQh4E (Disclaimer : I'm the Mari product manager and naturally think that it is awesome) forelle fucked around with this message at 16:40 on Oct 17, 2012 |
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Oct 17, 2012 16:08
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concerned mom posted:Just watched the vids and wow that looks incredible. You're doing some awesome work. I love how you can move it and blend lots of "little" textures together. In polypaint in Zbrush you'd polypaint the high; in Photoshop/Max (etc) you'd paint the low; in Mari I guess you paint the low? Hi, It depends how high the high is. Mari can handle several million polys on a decent GPU, but certainly not 50M+ from a high res zBrush model. LucasArts are using Mari to texture StarWars 1313, so it's pretty useful for game assets too. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WCCsGd7_kZM All of the assets in this are from Mari. Yep, Mari paints Pixels. You can paint upto 32k^32k, but that is pretty unusual beyond enourmous ground-planes and matte paintings. Most people stick to multiples of 2k,4k and 8k for film level stuff.
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Oct 17, 2012 17:14
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concerned mom posted:The trouble with texturing the high for me would be unwrapping it! Does Mari require an unwrapped mesh or does it effectively polypaint then you can bake that down? As it's per pixel I'm guessing it needs a UV map. If that's the case I think I'd definitely texture the low! Ahhh, Gotcha. Mari can paint uv-less using PTex from Disney, but we don't have PTex->Uv Transfer at the moment. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GxNlAlOuQQQ
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Oct 17, 2012 17:26
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mutata posted:None of these fancy shmancy tools work well with overlapping UVs, though, I bet. http://vimeo.com/47021260 - 0.57s
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Oct 17, 2012 18:03
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EoinCannon posted:Jumping in to say a few of us are using Mari at work and finding it very powerful, easy to use and just kind of does what you want without a fuss, if that makes any sense. Glad you like it. Are you in VFX or games?
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Oct 18, 2012 11:36
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FxGuide just posted a cool video we recorded at Siggraph 2012 of Scott Metzger showing off some Mari Spherical HDR work. http://www.fxguide.com/fxguidetv/fxguidetv-165-scott-metzger-on-mari-and-hdr/ The nice thing I like about this is how easy it is to light and render with. You take the PTex painted in Mari, tell V-Ray to use it as an area light source and you're done. You can drop objects anywhere in the scene and the lighting works.
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Jan 16, 2013 12:07
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sigma 6 posted:This is REALLY cool stuff. I saw him demonstrate a very similar workflow for a VES meeting and it blew me away then too. He said it was posted on the Nuke site, so this must be a newer, tweaked version. It's the level of detail he's able to capture that gets me. The shot near the end of the chipped wood is amazing. Makes the emails starting 'So I've got these 15 11k HDR spherical maps that I want to project in realtime' and ''Mari slows down a bit when your ptex files go over 60GB' worth it.
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Jan 19, 2013 13:37
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HolyJewsus posted:wow you worked on these tools? I'm not up to speed on vfx workflows in any sense, but this seems amazing. I've worked with 3d and laser scanning technologies before, but how is this working, the 3d point cloud is not coming from the hdr image correct? This is being mapped to a scanned spherical point cloud correct? Whats the cost of something like that scanner? I'm the product manager and ex-lead developer of Mari. The basic workflow is Faro 3D scanner->Point Cloud Point Cloud->Maya manual topology->obj Nikon Medium format camera->Multiple 11k Spherical HDRS Mari + obj + HDRS -> HDR PTex textures Vray + obj + PTex -> Render The scanner is about $30k as I understand it. The main benefit from this is that you get an environment you can render immediately, but also one that acts like one huge area light so you can drop CG directly into the scene and have it look plausible. It's very close to a fully captured virtual set. You could probably do a cheap version of this using a kinect and solved 2D HDR exposures. forelle fucked around with this message at 12:33 on Jan 21, 2013 |
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Jan 21, 2013 11:23
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HolyJewsus posted:That is what I was thinking Yeah basically. Normally this would be done programatically.There's a bunch of different techniques and bits of software that given multiple different images of the same scene can solve the location of each camera location in 3D space. Once you have this information, you can project the images from those solved camera positions back onto modelled geometry. It's kinda magic when it all lines up. I was wondering if Blender has a camera solver. It seems to have a lot of other stuff in there.
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Jan 23, 2013 23:07
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HolyJewsus posted:Hey Forelle, Sure. Drop me an email to greasley at the foundry dot co dot uk
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Jan 25, 2013 11:22
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sigma 6 posted:Seems like it really gets mindblowing results for taking a bunch of high res pics and knowing what to do with them. The only tedium here seems to be the retopo of the point cloud. Yeah, you get so much more than just the model as well. The HDR lighting solution it captures makes rendering in the environment a snap. I'm wondering if it would be useful for Arch-Viz or interior design work. There does need to be a simpler point-cloud->decent topology path though.
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Jan 25, 2013 11:24
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Geared Hub posted:The new campus sunk them. They had free rent as long CSC leased the other building, but when CSC moved out, they had no one to pick up that lease and no banks willing to touch R+H with a 10 foot pole for a line of credit. I always wondered about that place. It was certainly a massive chunk of real-estate. I liked the 1970s arms company vibe in the foyer and the elevator just for dogs.
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Feb 13, 2013 11:11
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Bullets Included. http://vimeo.com/64663512 One of our Mari users is making some cool training videos and made this trailer to show off. The training videos are at https://themarichannel.com Fun stuff.
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Apr 24, 2013 22:33
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Geared Hub posted:Anyone going to siggraph? [Anaheim in two weeks] I'm gonna be there. I'll be mainly hanging out at the Foundry Booth or the Texture painters BOF Fun Fun Fun.
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Jul 18, 2013 11:28
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Trintintin posted:How do those BOF things work? I've never actually been to one. Is it just like a bunch of dudes hanging out shooting the poo poo or is it like more specialized talks. It's just a general meet and greet. Get to know other people who do / are interested in X. Some of the BOFs have an open mike / projector thing where anyone interested can come along and show stuff. Nice way to get noticed if you're doing something cool. We might be showing some Mari stuff off. That said, We had a Mari / texture painting BOF last year that was basically me being grilled by a room full of people for 2 hours.
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Jul 20, 2013 10:42
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If anyone is interested in learning something new and potentially winning some very cool prizes we've just launched a new Mari texture painting competition at CgSociety. http://challenge.cgsociety.org/mari2013?z=0&utm_medium=plugblock&utm_source=cgtalk We supply a model, you paint it with Mari and potentially win a Dreamcolor HP laptop worth $7k, an Nvidia Quadro k6000 worth $5k and licenses of Modo Mari and Nuke worth $8k. I hope you guys don't think I'm spamming, it is CG related and should be interesting.
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Oct 2, 2013 10:30
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EoinCannon posted:Unfortunately I don't have time to enter the challenge but I wanted to chime in and say Mari 2.0 freaking rocks Glad you like it. The layering system is actually implemented on a full node graph, and in developer mode, we have a really rough node view. I'm hoping to get this polished up and shipped at some point next year. forelle fucked around with this message at 11:56 on Oct 6, 2013 |
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Oct 6, 2013 11:52
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EoinCannon posted:Something that won't be finished due to my recent SSD crash. This is really nice. How'd Mari work out for you? We're always looking for marketing material so if you have anything you'd like to show us let us know.
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Nov 1, 2013 14:28
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sigma 6 posted:I think so too. Yep, Scott has been doing some really fun stuff with Mari. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5wf7AZupkhc This is a more recent video. I almost poo poo myself when I saw him running Mari on a 4k display. I had no idea it would perform like that, but I guess 12GB of GPU RAM helps.
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Nov 27, 2013 12:58
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Listerine posted:Well I went there to check it out in person, and I talked to the guy about academic licenses and how upgrades work, and his description made it sound like I could get a discounted academic license and if I didn't pay the maintenance I'd just be stuck with that version going forward. Which seems fine to me since I'm just doing simple stuff. But then I went to the website and it lists educational licenses with annual rates that expire if you don't renew; I'm not a big fan of renting software and my pockets aren't deep enough to afford $2k. I'm kind of bummed out. I'd probably do 500-600 for a permanent academic license. I'll have to see what their salespeople say. Drop me an email at jack.greasley@thefoundry.co.uk
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Dec 16, 2013 15:25
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keyframe posted:Yea I think I will go take a class there see how it is. Glad you like it. I'm just about qualified to answer any questions anyone might have about Mari. forelle fucked around with this message at 15:41 on Dec 16, 2013 |
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Dec 16, 2013 15:26
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keyframe posted:Whoa nice to have you here Jack! I will keep asking if you have stairs in your house over at CG Talk and Foundry forums from now on. It seems the surface has an intel integrated GPU which isn't currently on our tested list. We have had Mari running (surprisingly well aside from driver bugs) on intel hw but this isn't in the shipping version iirc. Getting Intel support is something I'd very much like to do. The hd requirements are really just for vfx production sized assets. 10gb or less should do for smaller assets. Give 2.5v2 a go with the latest intel drivers and let me now how you get on. If there are problems submit them to support@thefoundry.co.uk and I'll look at getting them fixed. Normally this involves getting the driver team on the GPU vendors side involved which is fun.
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Dec 16, 2013 20:49
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Ccs posted:Alright. A guy in my iAnimate class named Peter Kasim gave me the cleanup animation example. He currently works at Weta. Having worked at Weta too, and knowing many of the Animators who worked on LOTR, Hobbit, Avatar etc, they'd be very annoyed if anyone suggested they were justing "cleaning up the pencil lines".
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May 14, 2014 16:08
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Big K of Justice posted:Thinking of probably bailing out of the industry once I wrap up my ILM contract, go do something else that is CG but not have the "free government money" shuffle every few months. I'm hanging out in the ILM models and texturing department all of this week. It is nice. I like the commons. Doughnuts were nice too.
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Jun 12, 2014 21:11
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Big K of Justice posted:
They've gotta up their Atrium game. Pixar Atrium for the win. Oh and also Dreamworks free Canteen = best canteen. ImplicitAssembler posted:My favourite item is the ET bike. My favourite bits of kit are the Optical printer, scanner and Motion control computer. It reminds me why I'm so glad everything went fully digital. gently caress dust.
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Jun 13, 2014 19:54
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Eastdrom posted:Hypothetical question. If i texture a model and start rigging, and the rig deforms badly because of amateur polygon flow, etc. Is it easy to go back and change the model or is a case of re-doing the UV map? Mari (https://www.thefoundry.co.uk/Mari) has tools to transfer the paint from one geometry version to another. It does a pretty good job as long as the geometry hasn't moved too much. I can probably answer any questions people have about high end visual effects texturing.
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Sep 19, 2014 21:38
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mutata posted:Alternatively, 3D Coat has per-pixel painting on mesh (as opposed to per-poly). As does Mari If anyone in this thread is interested I can look at getting them a nice long eval of Mari to play with.
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Oct 10, 2014 19:20
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mutata posted:I heard a rumor that Quixel was working on a Mari-based workflow for their material stuff. It's news to me if they are. It would be cool to see though. Drop me an email at greasley@thefoundry.co.uk and I'll sort you out. Same for you CeeBee. Adding a custom shader for unreal / unity support is super easy.
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Oct 11, 2014 11:39
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Cyne posted:How on earth could they ever enforce this? And what if your job has nothing to do with VFX anyway? The Foundry have always been a bit weird on the restrictions for their PLE licenses. Yeah, it's not really a very clear EULA and I suspect it will be updated soon. It's mean to mean "Please only use this for personal, non paid projects. Don't use it for commercial work"
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Oct 23, 2014 12:35
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