Light emission in Cycles
To make an object emit light you use an emission shader. Go to the materials tab on the properties editor, then add a new material and change the shader from the default diffuse to emission.
Search Results for: unity
Blender For Noobs – Learn Blender in an hour
Common Blender 3.x keyboard shortcuts
Common Blender 2.x keyboard shortcuts
By Blender for Noobs!
Mouse Navigation:
Select = Right mouse button (unless you set it to use the left mouse button)
Dolly = Middle mouse button
Pan = Shift + Middle mouse button
Zoom = Mouse scroll wheel
Menus:
T = Object Tool Shelf (toggle)
N= Properties Tool Shelf (toggle)
Shift + A = Add object menu
Window views:
Numpad 1 = Front view Numpad Ctrl + 1 = Back view
Numpad 3 = Right view Numpad Ctrl + 3 = Left view
Numpad 7 = Top view Numpad Ctrl + 7 = Bottom view
Numpad 5 = Orthographic and perspective views (toggle)
Ctrl + Up arrow = Full screen view (toggle)
Ctrl + Alt + Q = 4 window split view
Functions:
Undo = Ctrl + Z
Redo = Ctrl + Shift + Z
Save = Ctrl + S
Object/Edit mode = TAB (toggle)
Select/Deselect all = A (toggle)
Box select = B
Box deselect = B, then Middle mouse button
Circle select = C
Circle deselect = C, then Middle mouse button
Delete = X
Toggle Solid view and Wireframe view = Z
Toggle Solid view and Render preview = Shift + Z
Render = F12
Modeling/Object Manipulation:
Extrude = E
Grab/Move = G
Edge Loop = Ctrl + R
Rotate = R
Merge = Alt + M
Scale = S
Duplicate = Shift + D
Maya setup in 2.80+
https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/130342/maya-viewport-navigation-in-2-80
Blender keymap for busy Maya / Unity / Substance Designer users
https://gist.github.com/bitinn/22f6fefe026d8d9e83468864edb8f835
Apply/resolve constraints
https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/1013/kind-of-apply-for-a-clamp-to-constraint
Search for “Apply Visual Transform”
Camera movements
https://all3dp.com/2/blender-how-to-move-the-camera/
shift+`
W or S move forward/backwards
A or D move left/right
Q or E move up/down
Add keyboard shortcuts
Go to Edit->Preferences
Select Keymap on the left side
Expand 3d View (or interested location)
Expand 3d View (Global)
Scroll to the bottom of the list and click “Add new”
Avoid rendering in a new window.
You can set the Display Mode for the actual rendering in Preferences under Interface/Temporary Windopes. If you’d like to get the old behavior back, set it to ‘Image Editor‘ or ‘Keep User Interface’ and save preferences.
Proportional transformation by numbers
By left-clicking and dragging down on the sliders you can select and edit the values for multiple axes simultaneously
Light power emitted through an element in Cycles
https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/45209/what-kind-of-units-does-the-cycles-emission-strength-use
https://blendergrid.com/learn/articles/cycles-physically-correct-brightness
The emission shader strength value is Watt/m^2
The unit is Irradiance – radiant flux emitted by a surface per unit area (watt per square meter).
Irradiance is a radiometric “corresponding” unit to Illuminance (also known as Lux), which is a photometric unit measured in lumen per square meter.
Radiometric units are based on physical power, that means all wavelengths are weighted equally, while photometric units take into account the sensitivity of human eye to different wavelengths.
The weighting is determined by the luminosity function (which was measured for human eye and is an agreed-upon standard).
Converting Irradiance and Illuminance:
There is a different conversion factor for every wavelength, so the spectral composition of light must be known to make the conversion.
At the most sensitive wavelength to the human eye the conversion factor is
1.0 W/m2 = 683.002 lumen/m2 # at wavelength = 555nm (green)
That means the irradiance (power) to make 1 lumen is at it’s minimum at this wavelength (just 1.464 mW/m2).
Luminous efficiency is then the ratio between the actual number of lumens per watt and the theoretical maximum.
Incandescent light bulb has a luminous efficiency of 2% which is very poor. It’s because lot of it’s irradiance is only heat which is not visible. The luminosity function is zero for wavelengths outside the visible spectrum.
Control text through drivers and the animation node tree
https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/31814/how-to-drive-text-based-off-of-a-value
Driving custom properties
Rendering when using Animation Nodes
import bpy
for step in range(0, 40):
bpy.context.scene.frame_set(step)
bpy.data.scenes[“Scene”].render.filepath = ‘D:/render/image.jpg_%d.jpg’ % step
bpy.ops.render.render( write_still=True )
If we turned back the evolutionary clock, would a species similar to humans come to dominate the Earth again?
www.bbc.com/future/story/20190709-would-humans-evolve-again-if-we-rewound-time
American palaeontologist Stephen Jay Gould proposed : What would happen if the hands of time were turned back to an arbitrary point in our evolutionary history and we restarted the clock?
Gould reckoned that humanity’s evolution was so rare that we could replay the tape of life a million times and we wouldn’t see anything like Homo sapiens arise again. His reasoning was that chance events play a huge role in evolution.
Put simply, evolution is the product of random mutation.
Experimental evolutionary biologists do have the means to test some of Gould’s theories on a microscale with bacteria.
Many bacterial evolution studies have found, perhaps surprisingly, that evolution often follows very predictable paths over the short term, with the same traits and genetic solutions frequently cropping up. There are evolutionary forces that keep evolving organisms on the straight and narrow. Natural selection is the “guiding hand” of evolution, reigning in the chaos of random mutations and abetting beneficial mutations. This means many genetic changes will fade from existence over time, with only the best enduring. This can also lead to the same solutions of survival being realized in completely unrelated species.
What about the underlying physical laws (ie: gravity) – do they favour predictable evolution? At very large scales, it appears so.
This means that the broad “rules” for evolution would remain the same no matter how many times we replayed the tape. There would always be an evolutionary advantage for organisms that harvest solar power. There would always be opportunity for those that make use of the abundant gases in the atmosphere. And from these adaptations, we may predictably see the emergence of familiar ecosystems. But ultimately, randomness, which is built into many evolutionary processes, will remove our ability to “see into the future” with complete certainty.
This AI is so good at writing that its creators at the open source OpenAI won’t let you use it
edition.cnn.com/2019/02/18/tech/dangerous-ai-text-generator/index.html
OpenAI researchers fed the following Lord-of-the-Rings-style prompt to the system: Legolas and Gimli advanced on the orcs, raising their weapons with a harrowing war cry.
The computer composed this appropriately violent addition:
The orcs’ response was a deafening onslaught of claws, claws, and claws; even Elrond was forced to retreat. “You are in good hands, dwarf,” said Gimli, who had been among the first to charge at the orcs; it took only two words before their opponents were reduced to a blood-soaked quagmire, and the dwarf took his first kill of the night.”
The company’s decision to keep it from public use is the latest indication of a growing unease in and about the tech community about building cutting-edge technology — in particular AI —without setting limits on how it can be deployed.
Amazon and Microsoft in particular have voiced their support for legislation to regulate how facial recognition technology can and can’t be used. And Amazon investors and employees (as well as a dozens of civil rights groups) have urged the company to stop selling its face-recognition technology, Rekognition, to government agencies due to concerns it could be used to violate people’s rights.
The Public Domain Is Working Again — No Thanks To Disney
www.cartoonbrew.com/law/the-public-domain-is-working-again-no-thanks-to-disney-169658.html
The law protects new works from unauthorized copying while allowing artists free rein on older works.
The Copyright Act of 1909 used to govern copyrights. Under that law, a creator had a copyright on his creation for 28 years from “publication,” which could then be renewed for another 28 years. Thus, after 56 years, a work would enter the public domain.
However, the Congress passed the Copyright Act of 1976, extending copyright protection for works made for hire to 75 years from publication.
Then again, in 1998, Congress passed the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act (derided as the “Mickey Mouse Protection Act” by some observers due to the Walt Disney Company’s intensive lobbying efforts), which added another twenty years to the term of copyright.
it is because Snow White was in the public domain that it was chosen to be Disney’s first animated feature.
Ironically, much of Disney’s legislative lobbying over the last several decades has been focused on preventing this same opportunity to other artists and filmmakers.
The battle in the coming years will be to prevent further extensions to copyright law that benefit corporations at the expense of creators and society as a whole.
gamasutra – The cost of games
www.gamasutra.com/blogs/RaphKoster/20180117/313211/The_cost_of_games.php
Think of the whole industry as a mature market. We’re running out of platforms shifts that reset costs.
Get good at systemic design, design for retention, design for community. Basically, think like an MMO developer. Yeah, that means designing everything as games as a service.
Embrace procedur-ality.
But also embrace brand-building and marketing, because you ain’t gonna survive without it. This market is going keep getting more crowded.
Acting Upward
A growing community of collaborators dedicated to helping actors, artists & filmmakers gain experience & improve their craft.
Active effectiveness vs passive kindness’ struggle in Macchiavelli’s theories applied to production
1- You should never believe that your opposition does not know their business. Do not take any project lightly.
2- Acquire fame as able, not as good.
3- To know how to recognize an opportunity in any struggle benefits you more than anything else.
4- Make your opposition suspect their own instruments in whom they confide.
Do not commit to any one solution.
5- Guard those places better by which you think you can be hurt less.
6- Don’t keep beside you either too great lovers of passiveness or too great lovers of passion.
7- Act so your opposition do not know how you want to organize your plans. But organize your team so they can support each other independently on the plan.
8- Never lead your team into a project unless you are assured of their commitment and confidence in the result. Discipline counts more than passion. Testing a plan helps with final results.
9- Train your team to get used to difficult situations and circumstances.
10- What benefits the opposition harms you and what benefits you harms the opposition.
11- Carefully detail your opposition and objective and plan accordingly.
12- Nature creates very few talents, but dedication and training make many.
13- Always, always consider and reserve resources for a plan B.
14- Keep your team focused until the results are obtained.
15- Organize a team so that is not specialized but flexible in all ventures. But always be clear on assigned tasks.
16- Counsel about options with many, but discuss details with few.
17- Never commit yourself to a specific task in a large project, unless necessity compels you or opportunity calls.
18- Do not rush but take a moment to analyze unexpected issues.
19- Love peace but be educated on how to be bold and move forward.
warontherocks.com/2016/12/machiavellis-rules-of-war/
Photography basics: Why Use a (MacBeth) Color Chart?
Start here: http://www.pixelsham.com/2013/05/09/gretagmacbeth-color-checker-numeric-values/
https://www.studiobinder.com/blog/what-is-a-color-checker-tool/
In LightRoom
in Final Cut
in Nuke
Note: In Foundry’s Nuke, the software will map 18% gray to whatever your center f/stop is set to in the viewer settings (f/8 by default… change that to EV by following the instructions below).
You can experiment with this by attaching an Exposure node to a Constant set to 0.18, setting your viewer read-out to Spotmeter, and adjusting the stops in the node up and down. You will see that a full stop up or down will give you the respective next value on the aperture scale (f8, f11, f16 etc.).
One stop doubles or halves the amount or light that hits the filmback/ccd, so everything works in powers of 2.
So starting with 0.18 in your constant, you will see that raising it by a stop will give you .36 as a floating point number (in linear space), while your f/stop will be f/11 and so on.
If you set your center stop to 0 (see below) you will get a relative readout in EVs, where EV 0 again equals 18% constant gray.
In other words. Setting the center f-stop to 0 means that in a neutral plate, the middle gray in the macbeth chart will equal to exposure value 0. EV 0 corresponds to an exposure time of 1 sec and an aperture of f/1.0.
This will set the sun usually around EV12-17 and the sky EV1-4 , depending on cloud coverage.
To switch Foundry’s Nuke’s SpotMeter to return the EV of an image, click on the main viewport, and then press s, this opens the viewer’s properties. Now set the center f-stop to 0 in there. And the SpotMeter in the viewport will change from aperture and fstops to EV.
Control a path’s vertices in After Effects
Create a ‘stroke only’ shape layer with four points using the pen tool – with RotoBezier mode on (or rmb on the path attribute and convert to rotobezier).
Window menu > Create Nulls from paths.jsx
Select the path in the shape layer – note: the path itself, not the path group.
Click the ‘Points follow Nulls’ button in the above dialog.
This will give you four nulls you can now animate. The path points will follow those nulls.
The Rotobezier mode will give you a more natural ‘automatic’ curvature to the path.
You can then use expressions on each null to move the curve points around.
https://community.adobe.com/t5/after-effects/connect-dots-in-a-curved-way/td-p/10115221?page=1
Looking Glass Holographic Display
https://docs.lookingglassfactory.com/making-holograms/making-great-holograms
Iphone Portrait
https://lookingglassfactory.com/tutorial/portrait-mode-photoslookingglassfactory.com
Unity tutorial
https://learn.lookingglassfactory.com/tutorials/getting-started-with-unity/
Unity and DepthKit
Aquariums
https://lookingglassfactory.com/holograms/holo-quarium
Best Freelance Websites to Find Skilled Contractors for custom developer jobs
https://www.inc.com/drew-hendricks/10-best-freelance-websites-to-find-skilled-contractors.html
Fiverr
Fiverr is the world’s largest marketplace for digital services. Fiverr enables you to browse the selection of freelancers offering services, and to place orders in just one click. A service offered on Fiverr is called a Gig.
Freelancers Services. Receive no-obligation quotes from reviewed, rated & trusted Experts in minutes.
Toptal’s approach makes it a definite outlier compared to conventional platforms, as it’s geared towards custom-matching vetted, senior software engineers to clients with serious, compelling tech projects. Toptal is highly selective about its freelancers (roughly 3% acceptance rate), and offers a no-risk trial period on every engagement. Toptal’s impressive client list speaks for itself (Airbnb, J.P. Morgan, Zendesk, and more).
With an escrow system that allows you to authorize payment releases once milestones are hit, Upwork.com offers an enormous pool of freelancers for everything from legal work to finance and management (including a few hundred thousand software developers).
With a membership program and a complimentary “Work Room” where you can oversee progress, define milestones, etc., Guru is a great option if you find yourself constantly in need of help on miscellaneous small jobs.
Freelancer is awesome for small businesses, and with over 15 million users, you’re sure to have hundreds of proposals from eager freelancers to compare in no time. It also allows you to post projects as contests and review large volumes of submissions while only paying for the one you like most.
In addition to its large talent pool, Staff.com is an open platform, so you can also find employees on other sites and use its services to handle billing, time tracking, etc. Unlike the other platforms here, it’s geared more towards full-time engagements.
If you need an on-site freelancer, Craigslist is a great way to find freelance talent in your community. Although you might have to read through a large volume of resumes, posting a job is inexpensive, and you can include specific application instructions to help weed out people who just apply to jobs at random.
Daniele Tosti Interview for the magazine InCG, Taiwan, Issue 28, 201609
Interview for the magazine InCG, Taiwan, Issue 28, 201609
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– First of all can you introduce yourself to our audience, who you are, how you join this part of industry? Can you talk about your past experience as VFX artist?
My career started on a late Christmas night in the middle of the 1980s. I remember waking up to the soundtrack of Ghostbusters playing off from a new Commodore 64 console. My older brother, Claudio, left the console in my room, as a gift. And I was hooked.
Since that moment I spent any free time available to play with computer technology and in particular computer graphic. Eventually this evolved into a passion that pushed me to learn the basic techniques and the art of all related to computer graphic. In a time when computer graphic at consumer level was still in its infancy.
My place would be filled with any computer graphic magazine I could put my hands on. As well as the first few books. A collection that at some point grew to around 300 books. From the making-of movie books. To reference books. To animation books. And so on. My first girlfriends were not too thrilled about sharing the space in that room.
This passion, as well as the initial few side jobs creating small animated videos and logos for local companies, eventually gave me enough confidence in my abilities and led me into my first professional job. As a computer graphic technician, driving lead and credit titles for one of the first few private national TV stations in Italy. Not necessarily a striking but a well paid job.
The fact that I could make money through what I loved the most was an eye opener in my young life. It gave me fuel to invest even more of my time in the art and it did set the fundamentals for a very long career than has spanned over 20 years, across TV productions, commercials, video games and more recently feature movies.
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– Can you introduce us about your current company?
After leaving Italy I started working for some of the most recognized Studios around the world, and eventually for facilities such as Disney Features, Sony Imageworks, Moving Picture Company. During that period I had the fortune to serve along world level talents and supervisors, who helped me refine both my technical and artistic skills. This while also investing my time into learning about management and training cycles.
I started sharing some of this personal knowledge and production experience throughout the world with ReelMatters Ltd.
But eventually those extra skills allowed me to reach my dream in 2008, when I joined the team at Weta Digital in Wellington, New Zealand, to help on James Cameron’s Avatar.
Weta has since been my family and the source of my pride. The level of expertise, passion and vision among the crew at Weta is inspirational and clearly visible in any project we work on. We all tend to thrive on perfection here and continuously pushing quality well beyond standards. One of the reasons why Weta is still at the forefront of the VFX industry nowadays.
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– What sort of movie had you participated before? Out of all movies what was the most challenging that you had encountered?
Due to my early, self thought, home training, it became easier for me to be involved with CG animation productions first. On that front, my best memories are working on Sony Imageworks’ “Surf’s Up” as well as on Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson’s “The Adventure Of Tintin”. Movies which both raised the bar for CG environments and character animation.
Most recently I have seen myself more involved with live action features, such as: “Avatar”, “Rise Of The Planet Of The Apes” and “Dawn Of The Planet Of The Apes”, “The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey” and “The Hobbit: The Battle Of Armies”, “Iron Man Three”. All the way to Jon Favreau’s Walt Disney production: “The Jungle Book”.
Each production has its own level of complexity and it is hard to make comparisons. Having some basic training has been fundamental for me to be able to see these features to delivery, while being flexible enough in sorting out those unique daily trials.
Feature production overall is an unique challenge itself. You do need a solid understanding of both technology and human nature to be able to find solutions which are applicable to a constantly moving target, across the life of a project. Often under a commercially driven, delivery pressure. And while working along a multitude of different unique talents.
It is quite a life changing experience, worth the pages of a best selling book. Where each chapter has its own plot.
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– How do you co-operate with other special effect artist in order to create realistic effect?
While there is an incredible amount of high class talent in the feature production business, no production is ever done by just an individual. It’s always the product of a constant collaboration that flows from the brain of visionary directors to the hands of skillful visual artist, and back.
Providing the perfect backdrop for this collaboration is what usually makes some productions more successful than others.
In that context. Creativity is the true fusion of the best ideas shared by this pool of minds, independently from which level of production you are at.
Management’s job is to feed and support this fusion, not to drive it.
And the working environment is one that allows trust and respect between all parties, while avoiding mechanical routines.
In other words. No piece of hardware or software will make a visually pleasant picture by itself unless someone infuses it with a soul. As George Sand once said “ The artist vocation is to send light into the human heart.”.
And to paraphrase Arthur C. Clark, I believe that a true collaboration between visionaries and artists is what makes “any sufficiently advanced (CG) technology indistinguishable from magic”.
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– What does it mean to you to create a good quality effect?
Any good CG effect that you would call as such is an effect that live for its purpose. Which most of the time is to support the action or the plot at hand.
In a live action feature, I tend to be in awe when the effect is helping experiencing that perfect Suspension Of Disbelief. Which is, the willingness to suspend logic and criticism for the sake of enjoying the unbelievable.
As soon as any effect breaks from its purpose or it is not up to the task at hand, your brain will tend to over analyze the visuals and, as such, take you away from the overall experience.
It is interesting to see that movies such as Jurassic Park are still holding their ground nowadays. Where more modern vfx productions tend to look dated very quickly. From that point of view, it appears to me that a quite a common mistake today is to overcompensate visuals with camera work, digital grading and computer generated work for the sake of the effect, more than to serve the story and the truth of the moment.
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– If it is possible for you to share tips about creating good quality effect?
1- The generalist at heart.
One question that I get quite often during my seminars is what should new vfx artists focus on. Is it specializing on a tool? Or learning a discipline? Or mastering a specific skill?
It is a fact that higher level Studios tend to hire people with well defined talents that fit in specific operational labels. In this way it is easier for them to fulfill recruitment numbers and satisfy production’s immediate needs.
What happens after wards, when you start working as a VFX artist, is not always as well defined. The flexible nature of feature production cycles and delivery deadlines is often a catalyst for a multitude of variations in an artist’s work life. Especially on the post-production side of a digital pipeline. For that reason, I notice that people with more generic skills, with an ability to adapt to new processes and a genuinely open nature tend to fit in better and last longer throughout various projects.
The exception here being artists with dedicated PHDs and/or masters of a very specific domain, which makes them highly specialized in the VFX crowd and able to have a niche of their own.
Looking at the software or hardware side of things, technology is still progressing on a daily basis. And will continue doing so. To this extent, many facilities rely on proprietary technology. Thus specializing on a single tool, without learning the CG art’s basics, is also a dangerous game to play. You may end up being obsolete along the program you have learned. Or, in the best case, having a very limited number of facilities you can apply to.
What I suggest as a general rule to young VFX artists is to focus their energies in learning all that constitutes the basis of a successful career in computer graphic, along with improving their natural talent. So. From understanding modeling. To lighting and color. From rigging to animation. From procedural cycles to FX mechanism.
Doing so, building the knowledge necessary not only to satisfy a possible recruitment position, but also to be able to interact with people with different talents in a large facility. And as such, have enough confidence to quickly help and fit it in the bigger picture, which often forms these complex production pipelines.
On that note, competition for very few spots in a large studio is also a challenge when combined with trying to win the attention of a busy HR office or of a busy VFX Supervisor.
When applying for a VFX position, it is quite beneficial to have a very clear introduction letter, which simply states in one line the discipline you are applying for. That being for example: modeling, animation, texturing, shading, … But never indicating more than one discipline at the time. Then in the body of the introduction letter describe that, if need arises, you could also help covering other positions which fit along your skills.
Finally, supporting your application with a very short demo reel (one minute top, possibly less) that shows and clearly labels your very best work in the main discipline you are applying for and clarifies your side skills, wherever those are applicable. To this extent, if you are interested in multiple disciplines, it is highly recommended to prepare multiple introduction letters and related demo reels to satisfy each separate application.
2-What constitute the best production pipeline.
There is always a lot of pride in winning accolades in the VFX industry. And deservedly so. The amount of energy, investments, time and talent required to achieve such a task is, to say the least, overwhelming. Very few Studios and individuals have the sensibility,
experience and organization to pull that feat.
In support of these cycles, there is also a lot of new technology and specialized tools which continuously push the boundaries of what is achievable in computer graphic on a daily basis. To the point that I am confident the majority of senior VFX people in the industry would agree that we are still at the beginning of this exploration, in many ways.
Where a painter is looking for an intimate inspiration to fill in his lonely blank canvas, with a brush and a small collection of colors at his disposal. CG is often the product of a perfect balance between a crowd of ambitions, thousands of frames, a multitude of digital gadgets and a variety of complex mediums.
The combination of new visions and new science is also what makes organizing these complex VFX tasks an expensive challenge in itself, worth the efforts of the most influential CTOs and producers around the world.
A challenge well described in a white-paper about The Status Of Visual Effects written by Renee Dunlop, Paul Malcolm, Eric Roth for the Visual Effects Society in July 2008.
Between the pages, the writers detail a few of the biggest obstacles currently affecting production:
– The difficulty to determine who is in charge of certain creative decisions.
– Directors and Producers’ mixed approach to pre and post visualization.
– The lack of consistency and resources between pre, mid and post production.
– A lack of consistency throughout pipelines, mainly due to the impact of new technologies.
Most of the time, this translates into a very costly, “brute-force” solution workflow. Which, in its own, destabilize any reasonable software production schemes that Studios are willing to invest into.
While a collection of good stable software it’s a fair base for any visual effects venture, I firmly believe that to defy these challenges the core of any VFX pipeline should be a software agnostic one.
All CG elements should be able to be translated effortlessly across tools, independently from their original disciplines’ unique requirements.
And, more than the compartmentalized organization used in other markets, the key structure of this pipeline should focus on the flow of data and the quality of the inventory.
The rest is important, but not essential.
By achieving such a system, the work environment would prove to:
. Be flexible enough to maintain integrity across platforms and departments.
. Allow modifications to the software infrastructure without affecting deliverables.
. Accept various in house and external content.
. And deliver quality without jeopardizing speed.
Overall and independently from the approach, the support of flow of data and of inventory quality is for me a critical element that would help any production survive under the majority of modern, commercial delivery stress requirements.
This framework would help maintaining productivity stable even with continuous changes in a feature’s vision and objectives.
Finally, it would help training the modern VFX artist not to rely on those unique tools or solutions which are software centric and bound to expiry when new technology arises. Thus keeping skills and talent always applicable to the task at hand, to the long lasting benefit of the production studio.
To support such a mechanism, facilities should consider researching and investing into :
. A stable, software independent, browser based, asset and shot manager.
. A solid look development structure.
. A software independent, script based, rendering management solution.
And an asset living in this environment should sport basic qualities such as:
. being version-able
. being hash-able
. being track-able
. being verbose
. being software and hierarchic relation agnostic
. being self-contained
. supporting expandable qualities
. supporting temporally and shading stable procedural decimation
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– Can you give a word of inspiration to those who wish to participate as VFX artist
If anyone is willing to notice it or not, the vast majority of top grossing movies coming out every year are now filled with special effects created by a new wave of craftsmen who share their talent all around the world.
We are living in a period where the new DaVincis, Botticellis and Galileos live their life, comfortably seating in front of a computer. Creating a new art form which converts ones and zeros into a visually pleasing virtual reality. All this while offering their artistry away from language, race and belief barriers.
The knowledge required to achieve such a task is still a mix of an incredible amount of disciplines.
From biology and zoology, to physics and mathematics. From sculpting to painting. From astronomy to molecular chemistry.
It is an incredible opportunity to have a working career, learning about all aspects of life, while creating a new Suspension Of Disbelief
Reducing the File Size of IOS Builds
https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/iphone-playerSizeOptimization.html
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/34076280/app-size-too-big-ios-unity-3d
https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/ReducingFilesize.html
https://support.unity3d.com/hc/en-us/articles/208412186-IL2CPP-build-size-optimizations
http://answers.unity3d.com/questions/1149641/very-large-ios-build-size-unity-5.html
http://answers.unity3d.com/questions/357667/why-is-my-ios-app-size-an-order-of-magnitude-large.html
Sensitivity of human eye
http://www.wikilectures.eu/index.php/Spectral_sensitivity_of_the_human_eye
http://www.normankoren.com/Human_spectral_sensitivity_small.jpg
Spectral sensitivity of eye is influenced by light intensity. And the light intensity determines the level of activity of cones cell and rod cell. This is the main characteristic of human vision. Sensitivity to individual colors, in other words, wavelengths of the light spectrum, is explained by the RGB (red-green-blue) theory. This theory assumed that there are three kinds of cones. It’s selectively sensitive to red (700-630 nm), green (560-500 nm), and blue (490-450 nm) light. And their mutual interaction allow to perceive all colors of the spectrum.
http://weeklysciencequiz.blogspot.com/2013/01/violet-skies-are-for-birds.html
Sensitivity of human eye Sensitivity of human eyes to light increase with the decrease in light intensity. In day-light condition, the cones cell is responding to this condition. And the eye is most sensitive at 555 nm. In darkness condition, the rod cell is responding to this condition. And the eye is most sensitive at 507 nm.
As light intensity decreases, cone function changes more effective way. And when decrease the light intensity, it prompt to accumulation of rhodopsin. Furthermore, in activates rods, it allow to respond to stimuli of light in much lower intensity.
The three curves in the figure above shows the normalized response of an average human eye to various amounts of ambient light. The shift in sensitivity occurs because two types of photoreceptors called cones and rods are responsible for the eye’s response to light. The curve on the right shows the eye’s response under normal lighting conditions and this is called the photopic response. The cones respond to light under these conditions.
As mentioned previously, cones are composed of three different photo pigments that enable color perception. This curve peaks at 555 nanometers, which means that under normal lighting conditions, the eye is most sensitive to a yellowish-green color. When the light levels drop to near total darkness, the response of the eye changes significantly as shown by the scotopic response curve on the left. At this level of light, the rods are most active and the human eye is more sensitive to the light present, and less sensitive to the range of color. Rods are highly sensitive to light but are comprised of a single photo pigment, which accounts for the loss in ability to discriminate color. At this very low light level, sensitivity to blue, violet, and ultraviolet is increased, but sensitivity to yellow and red is reduced. The heavier curve in the middle represents the eye’s response at the ambient light level found in a typical inspection booth. This curve peaks at 550 nanometers, which means the eye is most sensitive to yellowish-green color at this light level. Fluorescent penetrant inspection materials are designed to fluoresce at around 550 nanometers to produce optimal sensitivity under dim lighting conditions.
Life advice upon turning age 30 from the president of YCombinator
http://qz.com/394713/life-advice-upon-turning-age-30-from-the-president-of-y-combinator/
Short version:
1) Never put your family, friends, or significant other low on your priority list.
2) Life is not a dress rehearsal—this is probably it.
3) How to succeed: pick the right thing to do
4) On work: it’s difficult to do a great job on work you don’t care about.
5) On money: Whether or not money can buy happiness, it can buy freedom, and that’s a big deal.
6) Talk to people more.
7) Don’t waste time.
8) Don’t let yourself get pushed around.
9) Have clear goals for yourself every day, every year, and every decade.
10) However, as valuable as planning is, if a great opportunity comes along you should take it.
11) Go out of your way to be around smart, interesting, ambitious people.
12) Minimize your own cognitive load from distracting things that don’t really matter.
13) Keep your personal burn rate low.
14) Summers are the best.
15) Don’t worry so much.
16) Ask for what you want.
17) If you think you’re going to regret not doing something, you should probably do it.
18) Exercise. Eat well. Sleep.
19) Go out of your way to help people.
20) Youth is a really great thing.
21) Tell your parents you love them more often.
22) This too shall pass.
23) Learn voraciously.
24) Do new things often.
25) Remember how intensely you loved your boyfriend/girlfriend when you were a teenager? Love him/her that intensely now.
26) Don’t screw people and don’t burn bridges.
27) Forgive people.
28) Don’t chase status.
29) Most things are ok in moderation.
30) Existential angst is part of life.
31) Be grateful and keep problems in perspective.
32) Be a doer, not a talker.
33) Given enough time, it is possible to adjust to almost anything, good or bad.
34) Think for a few seconds before you act. Think for a few minutes if you’re angry.
35) Don’t judge other people too quickly.
36) The days are long but the decades are short.
apertus – open source cinema
The goal of the community driven apertus° project is to create a variety of powerful, free (in terms of liberty) and open cinema tools that we as filmmakers love to use.
I’m Phil Tippett, stop-motion animator, director, dinosaur supervisor. And the status of VFX.
http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1r5h9b/im_phil_tippett_stopmotion_animator_director
LA Animator:
What, in your opinion, is broken in the current VFX workflow? What things would you like to most see change?
Endless revisions?
Disconnect between Director and artists/VFX facility?
Bidding process? etc?
Phil Tippet:
In the olden days, producers knew what visual effects were. Now they’ve gotten into this methodology where they’ll hire a middleman – a visual effects supervisor, and this person works for the producing studio. They’re middle managers.
And when you go into a review with one of them, there’s this weird sort of competition that happens. It’s a game called ‘Find What’s Wrong With This Shot’. And there’s always going to be something wrong, because everything’s subjective. And you can micromanage it down to a pixel, and that happens all the time.
We’re doing it digitally, so there’s no pressure to save on film costs or whatever, so it’s not unusual to go through 500 revisions of the same shot, moving pixels around and scrutinizing this or that.
That’s not how you manage artists. You encourage artists, and then you’ll get – you know – art. If your idea of managing artists is just pointing out what’s wrong and making them fix it over and over again, you end up with artists who just stand around asking “OK lady, where do you want this sofa? You want it over there? No? Fine. You want it over there? I don’t give a fuck. I’ll put it wherever you want it.”
It’s creative mismanagement, it’s part of the whole corporate modality. The fish stinks from the head on down. Back on Star Wars, Robocop, we never thought about what was wrong with a shot. We just thought about how to make it better.
This resonates with the VES 2008′ Status Of VFX white-paper written by Renee Dunlop, Paul Malcolm, Eric Roth for the Visual Effects Society in July 2008. A critical effort in educating the production world on the status of the current use of visual effects:
“While digital visual effects have opened the door wide to tremendous opportunity, those working in the
pipeline are still jostling to claim their place in the process.
Though it is understandable that different crafts want to protect their own territory, safeguarding
the old ways of doing things often gets in the way of creating partnerships.
· An oft-heard concern raised by Art Directors and Production Designers has been a lack
of consistency throughout the pipeline and the impact new technologies used by VFX
artists will have on their work. However, the fact is that part of a VFX Supervisor’s
responsibility is to maintain communication with DPs and Art Directors to ensure that
the final product reflects what those parties wanted.
· Often it is difficult to determine who is in charge of certain creative decisions that
overlap craft boundaries.
· There are cultural and generational factors to consider. A lot of Directors don’t want to
commit to what the shot’s going to be until they’re in post. However, many younger
Directors are very open to manipulating images early on.
· On many, if not most, projects, Art Directors and DPs are often on another project and
no longer accessible to VFX artists after the shoot. Unfortunately, this is when VFX
Supervisors are finalizing their work in post, which impacts the work done earlier by
other craftspeople.
Yet another factor is time. As studios continue to push for shorter production periods, putting
together the perfect pipeline becomes increasingly difficult. As Alex Funke, Visual Effects
Supervisor and DP says:
“In a perfect world, the live action would be shot first, the miniatures would
shoot second and then the digital effects would assemble and enhance the
whole mix. But it doesn’t usually happen that way. It’s more likely that the
miniatures will be shooting along with the live action, and the digital artists will
be trying to get rough assemblies of shots done so they can find out just how
much work they will have to do.””
…
“Some of these cultural changes need to begin within the visual effects community itself.
As VFX Supervisor and former Visual Effects Society Board Chair Jeffrey A. Okun noted:
“In our earnest desire to get a seat at the ‘adults table’ of the business, we have
been engaged in a 30-year publicity campaign to make everyone aware of what
we do and how we do it. In this process we have focused on the success stories
and hidden away the terrible truth of how we got to those successes. As far as
the public, most directors and producers are concerned, they are not at all aware
of how time and hands-on intensive the process really is. What we need to do is
begin telling the painful truth.””
…
“Visual effects artists need to bring other practitioners into the VFX production process as part of
the education process. Unfortunately, this often proves difficult because of long-standing
territorial issues. As productions are shared throughout the international production community,
consistency and quality can be difficult for Department Heads to monitor.”
…
“As anyone with even a modicum of experience in the entertainment industry knows, nothing
ever changes unless producers can be convinced that it’s in their best economic interest. That
said, visual effects professionals have a very convincing argument to make with producers
about the need to re-evaluate the impact of VFX on the bottom line.
Roughly 20 out of the top 25 highest grossing films of all time are visual effects films. Visual
effects typically take 25-50% or more of an entire show’s budget, an estimate that is often
admitted as low. In animated films, that number is far higher. Clearly, the work, the creative
product, and the practitioners of the visual effects industry all have an enormous impact on the
producers’ bottom line and the show’s eventual success in the marketplace.
Essentially, if visual effects artists are included in decision making up front, productions costs
will drop because the VFX artists can help streamline the production path in telling the
Director’s story. They can be instrumental in offering more choices that help guide and
generate better creative and production decisions and, therefore, a more efficient production
schedule.”
The 40 Hour Work Week
In my experience, a 40 hour work week is a benchmark of the most effective teams. They have work-life balance. They have buffer to respond to opportunity and to deal with crunches.
http://motionographer.com/2011/10/12/worklife-the-40-hour-work-week/
To The Members Of The VES From Jeffrey A. Okun
It has been just over one month since our industry reached what I called a “tipping point,” which intensified on the heels of the Oscars. In an effort to be responsive to a beleaguered community and sincerely offer our leadership, we issued an open letter calling for increased subsidies in California and a public VFX Congress. In the days and weeks since then, visibility on the changing visual effects industry has increased dramatically. And during that time, we have received a good deal of feedback on our suggestions – both positive and negative.
Given what we have learned, I want to underscore a few important points:
VISUAL EFFECTS INDUSTRY Bill of Rights
http://www.visualeffectssociety.com/visual-effects-industry-bill-of-rights
The Situation Today The global visual effects industry is in transition. Because visual effects now play a central role in today’s feature films, television programming, animation, video games, commercials and virtually all forms of entertainment, they have become critically important to the entertainment industry.
How to become an apps developer in a few easy steps
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/gamesblog/2009/feb/10/gameculture-apple
http://www.webdesignerdepot.com/2009/11/the-ultimate-toolbox-for-iphone-development/
http://www.readwriteweb.com/mobile/2010/12/30-plus-tools-for-building-your-own-mobile-app.php
The developer of iShoot quit his day job after earning $22,000 a day at the top of the App Store charts. Here’s what you have to do to be next…
Maya Curve history on polys
One last old tutorial relocation…
