mentioned such as model security, predictability, bandwidth needs, texture transfer, and so forth, another good reason is that different computers render images differently. An image from and AMD processor looks different from a frame from a Pentium which looks different from something rendered on a Mac. Color correcting individual shots pretty much needs to be done anyway. But color correcting on a frame by frame basis is just ridiculous.
And from an end user point of view you'd probably get a lot of boring frames anyway. Any large complex scene isn't rendered as one large complex scene. It's rendered as layers. That's what lets you actually render things without frying your computer. One layer would have Shrek on it. One would have Shrek's shadow on it. One would have Shrek's specular highlights on it. One would have Shrek's ambient shading on it. One would have reflections of Shrek in the environment. And that's if you're lucky enough to be rendering frames involving a main character and not some background element.
The real thing to do would be for a small studio or animator to write themselves a render virus that does the whole distrubuted rendering thing without telling the end user. Then use that on projects that have a less strict schedule so that if you're frames don't match up color-wise or a large group of people clean the virus off you have time to do things over.
In general the quality of computers and the public in whole aren't reliable for projects. That's why there are animation studios at all instead of just asking the random passerby to draw you a frame for your movie.
I use my floppy drive everyday at work and at home. I have tons of little scripts (that I'm always tweaking) which rarely top 20k. I refuse to burn a whole freakin CD just to store less than a meg or two of data.
I'm freelance too so I'm constantly having to copy these scripts over to new systems at the latest workplace. You can't always count on being able to find a zip drive.
I guess I could put them on my webserver but you can't always count on having a Net connection either.
I have two little black floppies that I've carried around for almost a year and have served me quite well.
The A/W books are worthless if you want to do anything interesting. I've read the MEL book for every version since 1.0 and found nothing really useful. I do keep the script editor open. I'm actually becoming quite an accomplished MEL programmer.
But it would have been nice to have examples more complex than "Hello World"
I like Maya, really I do. I do most of my work in Maya. But I await the day when they give you a choice in renderers. (yes, there is MTOR but IIRC that was only for IRIX) The Maya renderer is good for most things but there are areas where it falls short. I'd like to be able to choose my renderer based on what I'm rendering. To a certain extent I miss Houdini. It let you set up Render OPs for a large variety of renderers (RenderMan, bmrt, Mantra, mental ray, even ones you wrote yourself)
Without a doubt the most influential technology in the last century was cheap, accessable indoor plumbing. Who knows how many people it has saved from tragic cases of frostbite and puma attack.
Before indoor plumbing your choices were: 1)go outside 2)go in a bucket in the house
Neither are exactly conducive to a clear, uninterupted train of thought.
Slashdot Mirror
mentioned such as model security, predictability, bandwidth needs, texture transfer, and so forth, another good reason is that different computers render images differently. An image from and AMD processor looks different from a frame from a Pentium which looks different from something rendered on a Mac. Color correcting individual shots pretty much needs to be done anyway. But color correcting on a frame by frame basis is just ridiculous.
And from an end user point of view you'd probably get a lot of boring frames anyway. Any large complex scene isn't rendered as one large complex scene. It's rendered as layers. That's what lets you actually render things without frying your computer. One layer would have Shrek on it. One would have Shrek's shadow on it. One would have Shrek's specular highlights on it. One would have Shrek's ambient shading on it. One would have reflections of Shrek in the environment. And that's if you're lucky enough to be rendering frames involving a main character and not some background element.
The real thing to do would be for a small studio or animator to write themselves a render virus that does the whole distrubuted rendering thing without telling the end user. Then use that on projects that have a less strict schedule so that if you're frames don't match up color-wise or a large group of people clean the virus off you have time to do things over.
In general the quality of computers and the public in whole aren't reliable for projects. That's why there are animation studios at all instead of just asking the random passerby to draw you a frame for your movie.
-James
www.arcsecond.net
I use my floppy drive everyday at work and at home. I have tons of little scripts (that I'm always tweaking) which rarely top 20k. I refuse to burn a whole freakin CD just to store less than a meg or two of data.
I'm freelance too so I'm constantly having to copy these scripts over to new systems at the latest workplace. You can't always count on being able to find a zip drive.
I guess I could put them on my webserver but you can't always count on having a Net connection either.
I have two little black floppies that I've carried around for almost a year and have served me quite well.
-James
"Stop your whining and bleed like a man"
The A/W books are worthless if you want to do anything interesting. I've read the MEL book for every version since 1.0 and found nothing really useful. I do keep the script editor open. I'm actually becoming quite an accomplished MEL programmer.
But it would have been nice to have examples more complex than "Hello World"
-James
Please, I'm dying for a MEL reference book.
For those of you not familiar with it, MEL is Maya Embedded Language, the internal scripting language for Alias/Wavefront's Maya 3d software.
Teaching myself MEL from A/W's pathetic sample scripts, tutorials, and the error messages I kept getting was hellish.
-James
I like Maya, really I do. I do most of my work in Maya. But I await the day when they give you a choice in renderers. (yes, there is MTOR but IIRC that was only for IRIX)
The Maya renderer is good for most things but there are areas where it falls short. I'd like to be able to choose my renderer based on what I'm rendering.
To a certain extent I miss Houdini. It let you set up Render OPs for a large variety of renderers (RenderMan, bmrt, Mantra, mental ray, even ones you wrote yourself)
Without a doubt the most influential technology in the last century was cheap, accessable indoor plumbing.
Who knows how many people it has saved from tragic cases of frostbite and puma attack.
Before indoor plumbing your choices were:
1)go outside
2)go in a bucket in the house
Neither are exactly conducive to a clear, uninterupted train of thought.
-corvalin