‘L’appel du vide’ – The call of the void

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This is a strange feeling I have. The call of the void is that feeling of wanting to jump when you’re at the edge of a cliff, or to hop in front of a car. And of course no one would actually do it. We’ve all felt it. I’m feeling it now with my job.

I love my work, my colleagues are great, the job is great, and of course the call of the void makes no sense. Maybe I want to go work on my game? But first, a word from our sponsors:

Angry Postman Games

HAHA!

I’m probably just doing too much. There’s a lot on my plate right now and my game is suffering for it. What makes it worse is that it’s my first game, it’s supposed to be bad, it’s supposed to be over and done with so that I can learn. But here I sit about two years later with a Teddy bear that runs around and kills ghosts. I suppose it’s not that bad. It’s fine. I’ll get it done, I’m going to aim for the end of the year!

A New Home Theater PC.

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I’ve been a big advocate of the post satellite era in this country.  Call me a rouge, call me a pirate, call me whatever you want, but I want my content when I want it.

I got rid of DStv a few years back and I haven’t missed it at all!  I replaced my satellite and decoder with a Raspberry Pi and a large hard drive running XBMC.  Now that was a great experience up until a point because formats were getting a bit larger.  I then replaced that with a R990 MXQ TV Box from takealot and that thing failed me miserably because the sound kept dying and refused to passthrough the digital sound (Nothing against takealot, they’re awesome!).

I decided “SCREW THIS!” and I’ve embarked on making a proper media computer for my TV.  I’ve been doing a lot of planning and finally decided on combining two projects that I’ve always wanted to do.  The first being an oil cooled machine which is very impractical but very cool looking.  The second being a fish tank with some proper fish in it.  You can already see the gears ticking away.  So the basic plan is to have the computer in a perspex case, filled with oil, then submerged (Not the top though) into the fish tank, with fish swimming around it.  I found inspiration in this video.

So I ended up getting the fish tank first and a bunch of fish.  The fish are now chilling in the tank, very happy, and they’ve lasted for about two weeks now without issues.  This first photo is before I put the fish in waiting for the water to cycle:

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And then here is the placement of the fish tank:

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The next things I got were the components of the computer.  Nothing special:

Chip:  i5 4460 (With stock cooler)
Board:  ga-b85m-hd3-a
RAM:  2×4 Gig  1600MHz (Very low profile)
PSU:  RX-450
Main HDD:  Samsung 850 EVO 120 Gig

I put all the bits together on a desk to test it all out and install my operating system.

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Everything turned out fine so I moved it downstairs to the living room to test it live.  If you’re wondering where the keyboard is, there isn’t one, technically.  I’m using a Rii 25 remote control.  Worked right off the bat, even let me use it in the bios!  So the parts are now sitting loose under my TV running just fine.  The hottest I’ve seen the chip get is about 42 degrees.  I also tested out the passthrough of digital audio and that works fine as well!

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For the actual computer case I designed a perspex box to fit the motherboard and hold a few stones at the bottom for the HDD and PSU to sit on.  If anyone wants the designs, just mail me:

Computer Case

The last thing I need now is mineral oil and some screws.  I’m going to take a drive to Builders Warehouse this evening to see if what I hear about them having mineral oil is true.

I must say that I’m very satisfied with the performance of the machine running Kodi (Used to be called XBMC) on Windows 10.  Once I’ve got it all submerged with everything plugged in and running I’m going to post a video.  Until then I’m going to take some of the fish’s stones and dry them out to put into the bottom of the perspex case.  Email me with ANY questions and I’ll be glad to help.

I have nothing new to say

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I haven’t written in a while, so this is a post for the sake of posting. Let’s see what flows from my head; maybe I should find something to piss me off – that always works 😉

Ah I’ve thought of something. Time…

I’m sitting with a strange situation in my mind. I’m currently working on a ton of green screen footage and it’s turning out OK. Really it isn’t bad but I know it could be better. Then on the other hand my deadline is looming, I’ve decided to settle for what I’ve got for the sake of finishing. But here’s my problem – could I have done better given the time I’ve had? Could I?? I don’t know; it’s entirely possible that I’m missing some simple step that could make things better. I could easily blame the footage; for a lot of the shots I wasn’t on set and the green is all over the place. I now have to crunch the matt so much I lose fine details and that upsets me. I know what to do to fix it but I don’t have the time. And it’s not like I have a week to do a single shot, I’ve got 62 shots to do in four days.

My biggest problem is my idealism and my perception of the “real industry” out there that I somehow don’t feel a part of.  I’ve seen some amazing local stuff done by a team of 25 people in three months and for some reason I still feel bad that my one week project all on my own can’t compete. In between that I’ve still got to make templates, fix show databases, and convert files…

I should stop bitching and make a change. I am the master of my own destiny. I can’t keep having little pity parties for myself and blaming production for my lack of involvement on set and that I can’t split myself into three people. So bottom line (And I read this on some stupid Facebook post) is I should sit down, decide what I want, and make a plan.

Another Car render, but this time much more fun.

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No rant today. This is just an update on some of my little projects. After my last Buick that I just couldn’t decide on I stuck with a new car, and renderer, rather than playing around. Like I said before my fluids are still a mess, but they’re MUCH better. Maya fluids in Arnold is a no go (I’m missing something I’m sure) because they just take years!! I think next I’m going to try to get FumeFX working with my Arnold version. I hear good things about it.

So first off, here’s my playblast. I animated the car using Craft Director, and did four basic camera moves. I then pulled the playblast of each into After Effects to test out a cut and that then gave me a good idea of what frames to render rather than rendering 200 frames x 4 cameras.

 

This is the full render and I added some sound of my own. Took a little bit of hunting but I found some guy on YouTube with the same Ferrari doing a donut, so that worked out perfectly. This was comped in Nuke 8 and the grade in After Effects. I’m proud of myself, I pulled in my 3D scene through FBX with some nulls attached to the lights, and then used their 3D positions to place the flares with Optical Flares.

 

And what’s happening with me? My eyes are starting to wonder; I’d like to get my reel properly done and see what is out there internationally. I’ve got Weta and ILM on my radar but who knows. I can only hope that I won’t be too much of a small fish in a big pond again.

I found some Transformers models and I was keen on using them for something new, but that isn’t happening because they’re terrible. It’s mostly outside shells and none of the bits and pieces. So scrap that idea. Maybe I’ll do something more along the lines of VFX and make something build itself onto my arm a la Iron Man. We’ll see. I may just go crazy into the detail of the mechanism… I’ll try not get carried away again.

I’m tired… But look what I finally decided to finish!

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So there’s 16 minutes left until the video gets converted on Vimeo… so let’s rant… or something.

What you’ve got here is a good example of lack of direction and vague final goals. I did learn a lot though. I’ve learned that you can’t practically render Maya Fluids with Arnold, that Maxwell is pretty… VERY pretty – but there must be a better choice out there, and that Mental Ray is probably the best thing for Maya Fluids.

I also reinforced my rant that I always have about scripts, storyboards, shot lists, and basic pre-prod stuff. When I started this I had a vague idea of this car running down a road and doing a wheel spin donut type of movement. What a laugh. So I took a car, set up shaders, put it in an environment (learned a lot about proxies), hit render and that took forever. I put it in Maxwell, did shaders, put it in a studio setup, rendered and it took forever. Some of the render times I had shot up to 20 hours a frame. Now that’s ridiculous.

Another thing that this taught me is that you can’t really use a single renderer for everything, not REALLY. I’ve been shifting over to Arnold and using it for my last few productions (professional things at work) and it has so far proven the best in terms of realism, speed, and ease of use. Problem with it though is when I render Maya fluids in Arnold (especially the large puffier clouds) then it takes so long that I would have waited until Christmas. I’m obviously missing something. The same fluid took at most an hour per frame in Mental Ray and looks good.

Moving on…

My little YouTube channel is ready to go. I’ve got a good microphone, tracking hat is ready, show body is all set up, now I must just add content and post my first video.

I recently got a call from a new client to do some logos for an event of theirs due in three days. Obviously wasn’t a problem, two days before the event they suddenly wanted a three minute animation with what was essentially a two page script. An animated power point if you will. Needless to say things didn’t go to plan and they scrapped the animation on the day; they did like the logo animations as far as I know. We actually had time for previews and changes for those. I don’t know what happened on their side that this got left to the last minute so I can’t blame them for the insane deadline. I’m sure I’ve said this before, but pre-prod and proper brief and planning seem to be held in a very low regard, maybe not in the country but definitely in my experience in this city. I have to start putting my foot down, and stop saying yes to everything that comes my way. If us pixel jockeys don’t set the right standard and procedure then things inevitably fall apart. I suppose you could say this is my fault then… hahaha!!

On the same note I’ve also got this director that likes to sit next to me while I work. Who does that? Whoever you let do that, that’s who, stupid, Charl! I’ve actually been ranting with this guy about the lack of planning, shot lists, etc., and he’s concocted all sorts of elaborate explanations for why he has to sit with me while I work. Lack of planning, that’s why.

If I don’t stop now I’m going to make myself angry, I’m already cranky having had such little sleep.

From one project to the next

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So this car finally has about 5 hours left to render. Either I don’t know what I’m doing or this car has something about it that makes the renders take FOREVER. Anyway, it’s nearly over, I’m thinking of redoing the smoke in FumeFX for Max (Because I can’t get it for Maya). But we’ll see.

My next project, dear readers (All two of you), is a YouTube channel.

Image

I modelled that mask in Maya as a start using some reference from the movie, then pulled it into Zbrush where I did the final sculpting, UV’d in Headus (The new version is fantastic by the way) and then rendered in Element 3D. Didn’t see that one coming did you!!? LOL.

I’ve made myself a hat, a cowboy hat, to track my head movement. It’s polystyrene so it won’t move and I’ve used a permanent marker to place tracking markers all over. Done a test and it worked well.

I’ll only be putting stuff up later on once I’ve got the channel started. I’ll do a making of.

Trying something new… again.

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If anyone at all is following this I’m sorry for changing my mind so often… not really…

So in my search for a new renderer I came across a vastly lengthy post on FXGuide http://www.fxguide.com/featured/the-state-of-rendering/

It has been my aim from the beginning to find a renderer that is physically plausible and doesn’t take a lot of twiddling to get a good look. With Mental Ray I would render using all sorts of tricks to get a good look, like occlusion, Global Illumination and Final Gather and all of these aren’t really how light actually works. This is what brought me back to Maxwell. As nice as Maxwell is, it’s not really conducive to quick and easy changes bar the lighting with its fancy fancy multi-light feature. Some of you out there in the bigger VFX houses will probably laugh at this, but more often than not I’ll have a client sit with me and ask for less reflections, more ambient light, less of a shadow, etc. and I just can’t do that with Maxwell without breaking everything into layers and shooting the already expensive render time through the roof. So now I’ve got a dilemma on my hands, on one hand I want physically accurate, on the other hand I want flexibility to basically break physics to keep client happy. So now what?

In comes Arnold. Through all my reading and video tutorials I’ve downloaded it seems to have the best of both worlds as well as being popular amongst the bigger VFX houses out there. It renders similarly to Maxwell but it’s not such a hardcore light simulator as such. It has these things called Arbitrary Output Variables (AOVs) that let you output everything my clients like, and then some; all this at very little extra render time. The main settings are also sample based like in Maxwell, up the samples and balance with the ray depth until you’re happy with the quality. I haven’t 100% switched over yet, but it looks promising. Environment wise it is a little ahead of Maxwell 2.7 (Their previous version) in terms of fog, atmosphere, and fluid effects. You turn it on and the lights in your scene light it up. I’m still confused about the reason for separate reflection and glossy reflection shader settings, but I’m sure I’ll figure out why soon.

In the mean time I’ve redone my car in Maxwell and it’s going to render for another four days, so I’m not starting that over. My original Mental Ray render was taking a good 20 hours a frame. Either I did something wrong or the amount of plants and geometry was just crazy… the Maxwell render has no such plant life – it’s in a studio. Yeah yeah it’s cheating but it looks good. It’s only a reel intro, I must stop faffing and do a new project.

Right now it’s lunch time… off to MacDonald’s 🙂