I had lunch with a friend and mentor of mine Jim O' Hagen. We got talking about what we wanted to get better at or maybe something we needed to learn. He mentioned Codecademy.com . Jim mentioned that Miles had posted a commandline tutorial from them and it was really good. Last week I posted about discussions on the Nuke mailing list about wanting to get better at math. I thought I'd pass this forward.
Work in Progress
Today I submitted a shot that should have been a WIP. I guess my point was to get ideas and direction. I should have said just that. Instead I submitted shot that needed work. It's ok to submit a shot that needs work but you need to state that upon submission.
Problem solving is hard. It's ok to ask for help.
Your F**ked →
Robert De Niro:
“You weren’t just following dreams, you were reaching for your destiny. You’re a dancer, a singer, a choreographer, musician, a filmmaker, a writer, a photographer, a director, a producer, an actor, an artist. Yeah, you’re f**ked.”
Any talent that the rest of the world doesn't understand will be met with resistance. That's why we have a saying, "F**k you pay me". It used to be called knowledge work and payed very well because the people who needed that work done hadn't a clue what to ask for. They just wrote the check and were glad when the work was finished. But today everyone thinks they know how this is done. News flash they don't. Mr De Niro is right. One of my hardest jobs is convincing others that I am worth every penny.
Visual Effects and Overtime →
Scott Squires:
The visual effects industry and workers suffer from a number problems. Two of those are massive overtime and unpaid overtime.
If you are working unpaid overtime doing it wrong. You are also making it really hard for us who don't work unpaid overtime. Stop Doing This.
If you run a place and ask artists to work unpaid overttime shame you. You are breaking the law. If the only way to get a project done and on budget is to pay no artists overtime your doing it wrong. Huge amounts of overtime are bad for both the artist and really bad for the company.
Mailing List
Yesterday the nuke mailing list received a message informing us that the list would be transitioned into a new forum based format.
I have been apart of mailing lists since I started using Shake. The Shake list was a great resource. Easily searched when information was needed. Some of the smartest Shake artists participating. The same applies to Nuke. A mass of knowledge from other artists in the trenches to employees of the The Foundry[hello Deke].
The Foundrys decision to end the mailing list in favor of a forum is crazy. Add a forum to your Comunity section fine but for us members of the mailing list let us continue.
We have now moved away from your mailing list in favor of a Google group. Ok that will work but you do get that by doing that you pushed all the top Nuke artists away from the very support you wanted them to provide. The Nuke list answers all questions, not just high end compositor questions. We have moved away from RTFM. Having Foundry employees participate within the group helps us. We don't have to wait for support. Maybe we had a question that support has no business answering. The mailing list made it possible for artists to pick up the strange and artist centric support questions and freed The Foundry to make Nuke better. I didn't have to navigate anywhere, it was in my email[almost like a support email].
Pushing talented artists away from you is always a bad idea. This is true of both Vfx vendors and software companies. Artist have plenty to be angry about right now let's not make a simple mailing list one of them.
For those artists that are interested here are the new Google Groups. To all that contribute daily to the list, Thank you.
Update:
The Foundry has back peddled on closing the mailing list. Smart move guys.
Practical →
For a shot of a map blowing away like cocaine, we shot baby powder in 10 minutes to get a good take while sims were going for days #mochat
This discussion on Twitter reminded me when Jim O'hagen was trying to fake blood spreading on a shirt. After a couple of hours of nothing. He got a camera from production and a paper towel. He shot water spreading into the paper towel. With that he had a matte for the effect. It worked great.
Mailboxes
Today I watched Myong Choi place a cg mailbox in a shot. From download to comped in Nuke was under 20 minutes. Granted he didn't model it ,he didn't make the textures. Something about that seems neat. The speed of the thought going from idea to solution so fast. Did it work? Are we able to deliver the shot with the addition of a mailbox? No, we can't but the speed in which it happened was really neat.
Teach, You might Learn Something
One of my best moves was taking the seat right next to the FrameThrower when I started at Pacific Title And Art Studio. I could look over there shoulders and listen to what was being said. I also got to watch senior artists present there work. How they handled notes and which questions I needed to ask to get the answers they needed to get the shots done. I could also go lever to the senior artist and ask how they did something. The senior artists at Pactitle were and still are helpful to me. They always had time to show me a technique or at least tell me the shot number so I could open the Shake script and have a look at how it was done. I also was asked a lot "what do you think?" or "do you see anything wrong with this?" As I gained more experience I could share my ideas and techniques.
You might be asking what's my point? Learning and teaching is so important to a post production environment. Closed minds and the thought that this is your technique is crazy and really not helpful. I have heard requiters say over and over again "You also need people skills." It's in every job post on the Internet. "Must work well in a team as well as on your own."
Be a teacher to the juniors, also learn from them. Pass knowledge around and speak up if you think you might have a solution to the problem an artist is having.
The Serkis Is Back In Town →
Vfx Soldier:
One piece of advice that I learned in my VFX experience was that perfecting your craft is one thing, but learning intimately about the craft you are delivering assets to is just as valuable. If you’re a Character TD you should know how animators work to deliver high quality assets to them. The same goes for Animators to CFX and FX departments, CFX/FX to lighting, lighting to compositing, etc.
When that happens, you have more people knowing the pitfalls and not having an ill-conceived notion of how VFX works like Mr. Serkis. Also, it’s worth noting as I mentioned in my previous piece that we bare some responsibility for this by not respecting our craft the way others do in the industry.
So who will learn first the visual effects industry or Mr. Serkis. I'm going to bet on the visual effects industy. If you are not asking questions and learning and teaching your craft your not doing something right. If your the smartest artist in the room your in the wrong room. Teach and be taught. Nothing bugs me more than a artist that isn't willing to teach or learn. If you know everything all ready your in the wrong field.
MacPro
Apples core professional community has always consisted of artists. By that I mean folks that take pixels and make something amazing out of them on a daily bases. This might be photos, editing or simulations in Houdini or compositing in Nuke. Apple has always served the artist. In the nineties SGI was the king of doing this. Image compute speed and disk I/O at all costs. Matador and Cineon are some of the fastest image processors I have ever seen. The interactivity was great. These only run on IRIX boxes. The Foundry wishes its paint is as fast and interactive as Matadors was.
In 1997 SGI released the Octane. This machine was built for speed more importantly graphics speed. There was no 5.25 inch disk bay( they were all the rage). No CD-ROM drive. There were 2 full length PCI slots and 1 half length one. You didn't check Facebook on a Octane. There was a reason Sony Imageworks had stations for artists to use the internet. These machines were fast and even faster for drawing images.
In 2013 Apple released a new MacPro. This machine had SGI written all over it. Small, the GPU is fast. Fast disk I/O. The MacPro is pretty, but behind the design is a cooler core that can run faster longer. This means more power for a longer time from the CPU. Get what ever is in your head out on the screen no waiting. The Octanes GPU was a designated card from SGI. Sound familiar, it should the GPUs in the MacPro are also designated by Apple. They will also need the software developers to support OpenCL. From what I have read OpenCL is the the next step but it's happening slowly. Even Nvidia now supports OpenCL. No Optical drive is also similar. ThunderBolt is the new PCI slots and the internal drives bays.
The amazing thing about the new MacPro unlike like the Octanes is it can also email clients, make Quicktimes for clients, word processing and web browsing as well. A far step from the Octane. Sure you could check websites and send email on an Octane but nothing like how the new MacPro handles those tasks.
This isn't a machine for people who just want the fastest Mac for no other reason than being the fastest Mac. This is about solving image related problems and getting them done as fast and as precise as possible. The new MacPro isn't about text or fonts, it's not about Retina or your iPhone. It's not even about playing games. The new MacPro is about image compute speed which is really important to Apples core community.