Daniel Kutz:
BBC's Horizon looks at ILM and visual effects. This show is from 1985 and is a true gem. I thought it would be important and educational to show the interesting bits of the show, focusing on subjects such as optical printing, matte painting and even rotoscoping.
Via: Matt Leonard
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.
Major Kong:
One topic that I've seen confusing a few people is how Nuke handles caching. At its most basic, Nuke is caching results so that it doesn't have to keep recalculating frames, or specific parts of your tree, in an attempt to keep working in your comp nice and snappy. The details can get rather more complicated, however!
I re-read this article last night. Many Nuke artists don't understand how all the cacheing works in Nuke and in turn but get why things slow down. Even if you have read this do it again.
NASA.gov:
The original plan was to photograph a rare angular conjunction of Mars and Venus that occurred a week and a half ago, with the added bonus of a crescent Moon and the International Space Station (ISS) both passing nearby.
Save this one for refernece.
It's a good read for the weekend or at rendering time. Have a good weekend.
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.
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.
Mike Seymour:
Professional, innovative, polished and fun: from practical to sims, from NUKE to Maya, here then is some of what you can see inside fxphd, plus work the members have done themselves. The quality is outstanding and we want to congratulate those members whose work made this final edit. But in truth we had way more material than we could have hoped for, so please accept our sincere thanks for all your submissions and accept our apologies that our -very- talented editor could not make all the submissions work in the one edit!
Fxphd is a great resource for visual effects artists around the world. Every term I take away knowledge that I didn't have before. Sometimes I come away with a new thinking on a topic or a different way to tackle a problem. I even learn things I never new was out there. If you are a vfx artist and your not a member shame on you.
Lauren Davis:
Kevin Schmidt changes the blinking lights atop those high TV towers, climbing 1500 feet into the air. And thanks to drone photography, we can enjoy the astounding view without making the queasy climb.
Maxine Frances Roper:
Typically for a female, I was labelled odd rather than disruptive, and tried to hide my weaknesses and play to my strengths. By my late teens I'd set my sights on a journalism career and started freelancing. I often admired people who worked in fields I felt excluded from and used my own career ambitions to tap into their lives. Hero-worshipping other people was a way of taking the spotlight off my own weaknesses and winning approval.
Both my son and my wife have dyspraxia. I agree it deserves more attention.
Update: Sorry to theguardian for not posting the source URL. It's corrected now.