Exotic Matter Makes Naiad Easier To Crack

Posted by vfxfinal on December 24, 2011
Posted in: News. Leave a Comment

Exotic Matter have finally made their exclusive fluid simulation software “Naiad” freely available to hackers and hacks everywhere by offering a free trial download. What does this mean? Finally I can have some of the worlds best fluid dynamics software to flow goop over my awesome blog logo or my name in my showreel intro, but best of all, finally we will see more example shark jumping flipbooks hit the tubes; and that is pure gold!

Dr.D Animator Wendy Pollreisz puts finishing touches on v01

Posted by vfxfinal on October 18, 2011
Posted in: News. 7 comments

“That should just about do it!”, said Wendy Pollreisz triumphantly as she clicked the publish button in tank and began the snappy publish to go through down through pipeline. “That’s one shot down, lets move on! I’ll be done with all my shots in no time at this rate. Happy Feet 2 is definitely going to be much better than number 1.”

Let me check off my list in my head quickly:

  • My lead likes it, and he’s pretty sure the anim supervisor will like it too.  That’s good enough for me!
  • The feet are on the ground like I was told by FX. Well, not really but at least through the camera it’s looks that way;)
  • I’m pretty smart, I had troubles getting Lovelace framed in the camera everything  so I moved and scaled her down a bit  to 0.94 and moved her down a bit. I had to unlock some stuff, but they said the were not looking for just some “button pushers”, so this should really impress my lead Mark.
  • Some other artists who just started with me told me to just scale down the hat to 0,0,0 and hide inside Lovelace’s body but I think might cause some problems so move it out quickly to just behind the camera in one frame, too. It happens so fast that nobody will ever notice it! See, I have some tricks up my sleeve and I’m just a year out of SCAD.

Six hours later when this publish is done, I imagine the rest of the glorious pipeline, jumping happily and dutifully to work:  from character finaling (thank God for them), to cloth/hair (such sweet guys),  to lighting (it’s so good to really see what I’ve animated),  fx (ugh, those grumps) and finally those amazing compositors that bring it all together, how do they do what they do?!  Quite a process!  But really, after it’s all and done, we’re just storytellers and I count myself lucky that I’m one of the fortunate ones to help bring it all to life.

I’ve heard some people really complain about tank (No, I won’t repeat those words here!), and they keep saying tank2 will be lot better, but I don’t know what they’re complaining about. It seems to work just fine for me, and I can just get busy finaling my second shot while it publishes – maybe I can get another one mostly done before trying out the ping pong table next to the kitchen…  Version 37! Hee hee, I’ve heard some people go that high, can you believe? Sure, I can respect that a story change or something might push it to version 3 or 4, but version 37! That sounds just cuh-razy!

If I hear another word about V-Ray, I think I’m gonna throw up.

Posted by vfxfinal on October 16, 2011
Posted in: Blips. 4 comments

My heart breaks at the thought of closed-box shading, my stomach churns every time I see a shader-ball rendering in a fucking box with a tiny slit in it, or a yet another shitty free car model from CGTalk or TurboSquid rendered with an indoor HDR. I despise the constant comparisons of shitty GI demo images to the sweetened bile puked out of Maxwell Render, where you cannot even define a simple god-damned CG camera (yes, Next Limit, the know the one that the ENTIRE INDUSTRY USES? Yes, the one without DOF effects all over it).  No. Fuck this, I’m going for Arnold! Yes, again. Arnold is obviously far superior, right? I mean, it renders a furry ball from that blurry video so fast, so obviously it’s better at absolutely everything.  Nothing better than a canned demo to prove that it’s the perfect soluton, eh?  Mmm, up yours Vlado, all your hard work is a bust;  Marcos is taller…  but I guess you still have hair, so maybe you’re even.

raytracing rules screw you renderman

Hey so also on the topic, Mr. Gritz, where are you, sir? The market is obviously wide open right now and  if you can just see your way to squirt out a limit surface subd Bumblebee in a box in under a minute (which, quite frankly,  is probably just the new Cornell Box) you will nail it, no doubt.  At least we know you have a healthy respect for the higher rendering concepts like ray derivatives and signal filtering, but sorry, neither OSL nor BMRT will cut it  these days and I’m sick of going to webarchive.org to get a copy of BMRT for Windows 95 to run on my new smokin’ DX2/66. What the Hell is a “GPU” anyway? You will have a horde of Embree products to compete with, which I’m sure will be as awesomely supported by Intel as that first class attitude coming out of mental images for the past 10 years.

Now if only I could get POVray to build so I can start start rendering me some production GIFs of jesters juggling chrome spheres over infinite chessboards. Right now I’m forced to use horribly inferior products to cobble together this sweet homage to raytracing at it’s finest.