Autodesk open sources Aurora – an interactive path tracing renderer that leverages graphics processing unit (GPU) hardware ray tracing
https://github.com/autodesk/Aurora
Goals for Aurora
- Renders noise-free in 50 milliseconds or less per frame.
- Intended for design iteration (viewport, performance) rather than final frames (production, quality), which are produced from a renderer like Autodesk Arnold.
- OS-independent: Runs on Windows, Linux, MacOS.
- Vendor-independent: Runs on GPUs from AMD, Apple, Intel, NVIDIA.
Features
- Path tracing and the global effects that come with it: soft shadows, reflections, refractions, bounced light, and others.
- Autodesk Standard Surface materials defined with MaterialX documents.
- Arbitrary blended layers of materials, which can be used to implement decals.
- Environment lighting with a wrap-around lat-long image.
- Triangle geometry with object instancing.
- Real-time denoising
- Interactive performance for complex scenes.
- A USD Hydra render delegate called HdAurora.
Nickelodeon Studios Production Workers Go Public With Wage Concerns During Union Drive
“With a union, Nickelodeon production workers say they are attempting to boost wages — which several claimed Monday are currently untenable for those living in the Los Angeles area — and lower healthcare costs. “The current pay gap for production roles makes it near impossible to survive in Los Angeles. Many of us have taken the shame of asking our parents for money so we can pay rent and eat,” says production coordinator Ryan Brodsky said in a statement. “We’re working full time for one of the largest corporations on earth and there’s no reason that our parents should be funding this multi-billion dollar corporation.”
CG asset production coordinator Minh-Chau Nguyen added that “many” colleagues have attempted to earn more by taking on side jobs, working more overtime, taking out loans or asking friends and family for help. “This unsustainable model of working more for less needs to end now. With voluntary recognition from Nickelodeon, my hope is that the future generation of production workers can focus on building their career instead of worrying about unlivable wages, work-life imbalance, and inadequate benefits.”
Peregrine Bokeh moving to Foundry Nuke
After 12 years developing and supporting Bokeh we are excited to announce the product has found a new home with Foundry.
https://peregrinelabs.com/blogs/news/bokeh-has-a-new-home
Modern car design
or the lack of it..
Fitpoly or polynomial regression plots for converting sparse data into an usable curve formula
https://www.geogebra.org/calculator
- enter the sparse data
- make a list out of it
- use a fitpoly(listname,3) function to return a curve and related formula
Stability.AI – Stable Diffusion 2.0 open source release
https://stability.ai/blog/stable-diffusion-v2-release
- New Text-to-Image Diffusion Models
- Super-resolution Upscaler Diffusion Models
- Depth-to-Image Diffusion Model
- Updated Inpainting Diffusion Model
Technicolor (MPC, Mikros, The Mill) shares sank 87% over four days
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/movie-effects-company-technicolor-now-144937131.html
https://www.reddit.com/r/vfx/comments/yyn1kx/the_buzzards_are_circling_technicolor/
“The increasingly bleak financial outlook of Technicolor Creative Services, parent company to MPC, Mikros and The Mill was announced by top execs on a hastily arranged shareholder conference call this week. In the call, TCS’s CEO and COO admitted that several factors are contributing to a much lower earnings forecast for 2022 than previously expected.
Among the reasons given was “persistent attrition” among employees. It was estimated by the execs that around 30% of employees at Technicolor had left in 2022 alone. Many of these employees include senior level creatives and sales workers responsible for drawing in big accounts at Hollywood movie studios.
The loss of senior level employees has also caused “efficiency” at the company to plummet to an estimated 50% with the reasoning given by execs being that less experienced employees left over at the company are now having to pick up the slack from the workers who quit. In other words, it now takes twice as many people to do the same work as before. Conditions, in the words of the COO, are “not improving.”
Reduced “efficiency” has also led to significant cost overruns on multiple shows, and has also resulted in missed deadlines for clients’ projects. In the call, execs lamented that missed deadlines have also caused their clients to reduce the amount of work awarded to MPC as their confidence in MPC’s ability to deliver has been diminished.
Trying to keep things positive, the execs mentioned that their strategy for 2023 would include a greater focus on KPIs (key performance indicators), although they declined to discuss them in detail, and a bigger push of work to India, despite the fact that India is already where a majority of their work is now done.”
Six Ways Your Brain Will Lie To You
https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbescoachescouncil/2021/03/17/six-ways-your-brain-will-lie-to-you
- Over-Generalization
- Emotional Reasoning
- All-or-Nothing Thinking
- Mental Filter
- ‘Should’ Statements
- Mind Reading
Solve them by:
- Observe and Become Aware of Your Thoughts
- Shift Your Perspective
“Reality” is constructed by your brain. Here’s what that means, and why it matters.
“Fix your gaze on the black dot on the left side of this image. But wait! Finish reading this paragraph first. As you gaze at the left dot, try to answer this question: In what direction is the object on the right moving? Is it drifting diagonally, or is it moving up and down?”
What color are these strawberries?
Are A and B the same gray?
Virtual Production Offers Real Savings For Studios Of All Sizes
Rob Legato, the award-winning FFX Supervisor whose work you may have seen in movies like Titanic, Avatar and The Jungle Book, is incredibly bullish on virtual production. At the Microsoft Production Summit, presented by NVIDIA NVDA +0.2%& Unreal Engine in Los Angeles, he reported that he recently did a movie with Ben Affleck and Matt Damon in twenty-four days, “Cutting down the days cut down the budget, and it’s amazing what a difference that can make. Productions can now do for $25 million what used to cost $100 million.”
Sony Pictures Entertainment Acquires VFX Company Pixomondo
“Under the deal, Sony has acquired 100% of Pixomondo. The company will continue to be led by CEO Jonny Slow, who will now report to Ravi Ahuja, Chairman of Global TV Studios and SPE Corporate Development.
It will maintain three LED soundstages and seven offices in the U.S., U.K., Germany and Canada.”
Cloud based render farms
https://all3dp.com/2/best-render-farm/
“Pricing varies between companies, with fee structures based on aspects like file size and minutes of rendering. Here, we’ve put together a list of 10 great render farms, with many offering a free trial or starting credit. And we’re not playing favorites: The 10 companies are listed in alphabetical order!”
Patrick McIntire – how much real money does a $25 million film that grosses $100 million at the box office make?
Patrick McIntire
Motion Picture Producer at Universal Pictures & Part Time Instructor at UCLA
“So how much real money does a $25 million film that grosses $100 million at the box office make? Not nearly as much as you think…
First off, the exhibitor (theatre chain) takes 50% on average of the box office receipts. So now your $100 million is down to $50 million. Then there’s the distribution fee, which domestically averages about 30% (in this case, about $15 million). This brings your $50 million down to about $35 million. But we’re not done yet…
P&A (marketing) averages roughly the same amount as the budget of the film worldwide, or about 60% of the budget domestically (US). This varies depending upon the performance of the project. But we’ll use the average (60% of $25 million (the budget) is $15 million). This is then taken from the $35 million, taking you down to $20 million roughly. A far cry from the advertised $100 million gross.
If the project was privately financed (equity investor or investors), they get first monies in and first monies out. At a $25 million investment, the remaining monies go directly to the investors. Leaving $0 initially for producers. Yes, ancillary rights will make up the losses (cable, streaming, airlines, etc.), but this is to show how a movie’s box office claims are not as they appear. Studio films with larger budgets see much higher costs and often don’t turn a profit at all. Profit sharing (backend) can be next to nothing if the film is a bomb. This is just an example and only takes into account domestic box office. But it’s meant to show how misleading a film’s advertising that claims $100 million at the box office can be. Gross receipts are exciting to share. Net receipts? Not so much.”
Comments:
“this equation needs add the variable that in the majority of studio film and tv projects, the taxpayers of the municipality where the production is based and posted pay up to 40% of the cost of the production in the form of a rebate and other financing incentives while the profits on the movie are taxed in another location usually chosen to minimize tax liability.“
#BrendanFraser is a righteous dude.
In November 2007 our paychecks stopped. I was the FX lead on #JourneyToTheCenterOfTheEarth for Meteor Studios in Montreal and was asked to convince my crew to stay and finish the picture with a guarantee we’d all get paid with overtime. We had a handfull of shots left.
As soon as we delivered the last shot, we were escorted out. It was two weeks before Christmas and we’d soon learn there was no money. Meteor was declaring bankruptcy.
They owed us 1.3 million dollars.
Variety put their best reporter on it and after many artists and support staff bravely came forward, I got this short terse email:
“The paper(Variety) has decided that another visual effects company going bankrupt, however sad, is really not news worthy at this time”
I kept trying to get help from the Hollywood press. I realized it wasn’t just Variety’s decision, no one wanted to touch the story. My guess was the studio had put pressure on them to bury it.
Finally, I made that rejection quote from Variety the headline of our own press release, and hired a PR company to release it. One artist, Eric Labranche, made a website for us to communcate with each other and vote, many others helped as well.
Then I tried to get the attention of Brendan Fraser, the star and executive producer of the movie. I called his “people” from IMDB pro. They said they’d tell him, they did not.
24 hours after the release, I got a threatening email from Variety and a call. I hung up. I then got a call from Les Normes the labor dept in Canada. They told me not to go to the press it would ruin our case. I hung up on them to. Then the phone rang again and it was this fast talking New York City gal with a heavy brooklyn accent. She was excited that I’d called Fraser’s people and had gotten no response from him.
It was page six of the Post, the gossip page, but we’d take it. She said the story would be live on the website within the hour. Exactly one hour later there it was: https://pagesix.com/2008/08/01/a-journey-in-search-of-pay/
My phone rang as I was reading the piece, a 212 area code, I answered to thank the girl, but a man answered and he said. “Is this Dave Rand?” I said “Yes”.
“This is Brendan Fraser, what the fuck is going on?”
He had no idea that artists were not paid on his movie. He listened intently, asked a lot of questions and promised he would call me regularly until this was solved.
First, he called the Post to tell all: https://pagesix.com/2008/08/03/to-the-rescue-2/
A vfx wave began to form. Branden kept his promise, he publically campaigned for us. The media, especially Variety, even started to cover our story. Thank you David Cohen.
We finally got 80% of our money almost 2 yrs later.
To quote the great Steve Hulett : “What runs the world isn’t what’s right, or who’s the richest, it’s leverage, and who has it.”
We’d had none, but Mr Fraser gave us wings.
He’s a righteous dude.
These days, I’m very selective, if I’ve chosen to work there you can bet they’re moving in the