The only insurance I have is for my photographic gear (which I depend on to make a living) and my iPhone.
Normally I wouldn't bother taking insurance out on a mobile, but the iPhone is pretty easy to lose and expensive to replace. Now one could easily say,"Well, just take good care of your mobile so you don't need insurance." With the best will in the world though, accidents happen - even to otherwise very careful people. That's life.
Earlier this year I did indeed lose my iPhone. No problem though - I quickly obtained a police reference number, visited the store I bought my iPhone from, and walked out ten minutes later with a brand new one! And iTunes had already backed up my data. Within twelve hours of losing my phone I was back in business as if nothing had happened. The cost of insurance was nothing compared to the full cost of replacing the iPhone.
These days HD content is more likely to be recorded onto a high end digital video format like HDCAM. Many of the cameras are descended from the old DigiBeta camcorders seen on news cameramens' shoulders. There are also cameras such as the Sony F23, Thomson Grassvalley Viper, the Panavision Genesis and the Arri D20 which bear a closer resemblance to those from the world of film. These are mostly used on features, commercials and music videos.
He's not exactly what I would call an "untried director." His background is in high-profile commercials, particularly ones featuring photoreal mecha such as the dancing Citroen transformer. His showreel is very, very impressive (check out his documentary-style short film "Alive in Joburg".)
And here's the problem: as an actor you are ultimately required to do what someone tells you to. You are little more than a living marionette.
I think this is the difference between a good actor and a bad actor; it is also the difference between a good director and a bad director.
In the creation of a story, there are many points at which it can be significantly shaped and reshaped: Conception, treatment, script, director's interpretation, actor's interpretation, editing. There are probably more too. This is how the writer's origin vision is almost always nothing like the finished product.
A mediocre actor may be little more than a pawn for the director - walk there, say this, do that. A good actor though will reflect on his own life experience and seek inspired ways to color his performance. If the writer has done a good job and produced an interesting character, then the actor may not have to work so hard; otherwise he may have to strive and fill in the gaps the writer has left.
A mediocre director will likely be more concerned with the logistics of production than the telling of the story or the performance of the actors. He may try to duplicate exactly the vision of the story running in his head, trying to achieve the same results with his actors. It is all to easy for him to start barking commands, treating his actors like pawns. But a good director will guide his actors' efforts by stimulating their imaginations, giving them permission to try promising approaches and helping them shift into a certain mind-state. He judges their performance so they don't have to. The result may not match his pre-conceived vision, but by the same token, it will hopefully be more believable and interesting.
To be honest, I do not entirely understand the great fuss over the fate of the Hubble telescope. It has had a long and immensely successful career probing the reaches of the universe, but it is getting old.
I guess many people think that once the Hubble is gone, there will be nothing to replace it. But the Next Generation James Webb telescope has been in development for years, and is currently scheduled for deployment in 2011. With this in mind, decomissioning the Hubble doesn't seem such a tragedy.
Now I will grant that $30,000/year in loans is going to be expensive to pay off. However if you go to a school that charges that much, you should be smart enough, and dedicated enough that paying it off is no problem after you graduate.
I totally agree. However, there is a scenario that I find somewhat troubling. I hold up my hands now and claim to have no solution, but I thought I should just raise it:
Ok, so you pay the fees, graduate and pursue a career within your field. A couple of years go by. You are now a dramatically different person to the naive, studious high school kid who chose that course. What you once loved now feels as though it is slowly killing you, little by little. You know what you really want to do, but to do so means throwing everything you have already done behind you.
When you were earning solid money, it seemed as though those debts were manageable. Now it will take a long long time in your new field to match what you were previously earning.
One may be point out that you should have chosen a different course, or switched while at university, but hindsight is 20/20. You genuinely believed back then that you would spend the rest of your life devoted to you Major. It always seemed odd when others smiled and shook their heads when you told them this.
My take on this dilema: That's unfortunately (?) the way life is. But then again, no one is going to stop you changing your own future. You simply have to ask yourself what standard of living you are prepared to tolerate. If eating out at restaurants, buying Starbucks coffee and filling your shelves with DVDs is more important than your longterm fulfillment, then that's your choice.
The techniques behind Endorphin could indeed be incorporated into a crowd simulation system such as Massive. But it should be stressed that Endorphin draws from a field of research established by many people across the world.
There already exists a sizable body of work on mixing artificial life with rigid body dynamics. Even back in 1994, people like Karl Sims were evolving their own rigid body creatures
You also want to check out Craig Reynolds (who also did lots of work on flocking)
One of the toughest challenges Natural Motion face is integrating their software in existing VFX pipelines. Many Slashdotters will already know that Linux is the OS of choice in the world of cutting edge visual effects. One issue is that Endorphin is Windows only, meaning an additional box must be placed under the operator's desk.
A more serious problem is that you cannot create your own virtual stuntmen - you have to rely on the skeletons, physiques and behaviors they supply (you cannot evolve or construct your own.) When Endorphin was first released, you needed a seperate piece of software (for example, MotionBuilder)to retarget the motion from Endorphin back onto your own characters. Thankfully though they have now implemented their own "dynamic retargetting" algorithms which smooth the workflow considerably.
To integrate it into Massive, they would need to expose the Endorphin engine as a set of libraries. However, from what I understand, Endorphin was designed from the ground up to be a stand-alone application. That after all is Natural Motion's business plan. One then wonders how easy it would be to expose an API, considering the software was never meant to be integrated into another package at all.
In its current form, Endorphin is really good for quickly generating libraries of variations which can then be fed into more traditional motion blending engines. If for example you have a crowd of people who are all falling to the ground, it can be prohibitively expensive to motion-capture enough variations to make it realistic. But with Endorphin, you just perturb the forces applied over and over again. In the end, that's their market - others are free to draw upon the underlying body of research and implement their own systems.
Unfortunately the off-the-shelf fur that comes with Maya leaves a lot to be desired. It still takes a tremendous amount of R&D effort to create a production-quality fur system. That is, a fur system with powerful, predictable grooming tools, tweakability and the ability to pass any piece of information you may desire into the renderer. I doubt it would be practical to do something like Stuart Little using Maya fur!
Although rendering quality is extremely important so are the grooming methods. Despite the fact that photoreal fur has been around for quite a few years, it is still very difficult to work with. While we desire total control over the grooming, we also wish for the natural randomness and messiness of the real world. Hair can become matted, stick to other hairs and bits of skin, clump together and so on... It then has to move realistically and collide with other hairs and anatomy.
Sony Imageworks, ILM and no doubt many other effects houses use some sort of guide curve approach where hairs inherit the shapes of nearby control curves. This is a very robust, predictable way of going about things. It is also very handy to be able to add and remove vertices from these control hairs so you can have both short, stubbly hairs and long, flowing ones. An alternative method used by PDI on Shrek was to imagine the overall shape of the hair, and manipulate this volume. Some very nice braiding effects can be achieved using this method.
Although it is possible to list a whole slew of algorithms to solve each step within a fur system, much care is needed to develop one that is interactive and flexible. For example, you may not like a certain hair and wish to remove it; alternatively you may like to add some individual rogue hairs. These changes then have to be fed back into the pipeline.
For rendering, it is extremely useful to pass values from the modeller into the shaders. Base and tip colours are the most obvious quantities, but if you are doing slick hair, then you may desire a shininess parameter. When clumping wet hair, you may also like a vector pointing from the "spine" of the clump to each hair within it (useful for rendering the surface of the water droplet.) So tools are required for adding new attributes to the fur and driving values through it.
Maya fur does not approach this level of control. It uses a rather exotic approach involving "attractors" (much harder to do the same sort of grooming as plain-old guide curves) and can only handle certain special quantities. Although this may have changed in Maya 5.0, it can only handle polygon and NURBS geometries (no subdivision surfaces, which are gaining increasing favour among effects companies.) There is rather fragile Renderman backend which is obtained seperately from Pixar but you really have to start plowing through it's source code if things go wrong. (The backend is provided partly as an example of how to write Maya to Renderman exporters!)
So there you have it: Although companies like Sony Imageworks and ILM have fantastic looking fur, bear in mind it has likley taken them millions of dollars and huge film projects to drive their development. There is nothing simple about fur I'm afraid.
If you are the maintainer of a library, bug fixes can be quickly rolled out without requiring your users to recompile their programs. Of course, binary compatibility must be maintained.
It's also very useful if you want an existing program to pick up an alternate version of the library without affecting others. In your wrapper script, simply add a new directory to the start of the LD_LIBRARY_PATH environment variable. Admittedly, in an evironment where people are used to recompiling their programs, this is not too much of a problem. On other platforms though, a level of redirection can be very useful.
ILM does not have 10000 employees. Last time I looked, they maxed out at about 1200.
I conceed that the figure I quoted was an upper bound plucked from some half-remembered conversation! I jumped over to the ILM site and found out that they do indeed employ a core staff of 1200. Nevertheless, during particularly busy times, I would have no problem believing that figure could multiply.
To say that Soho does not have anywhere near the staff or talent is also inaccurate- between CFC, Mill, and Cinesite alone the staff count probably tops 1000.
As far as talent is concerned, I didn't mean to imply there was a gaping chasm between London and America. There are indeed lots of gifted artists working in Soho. I was instead referring to the "armies of worker bees", who are vital for handling the sheer volume of work a major effects job necessitates. This is compounded by the demand for high-quality in the finished product.
Also, we probably need to qualify what we mean by "staff". The film effects industry is very nomadic and freelancer driven. Understandable considering that films require large numbers of people during production but none afterwards. It is essential for such facilities to expand and contract as needed.
That said, it is also in each company's interests to keep hold of talent for future projects. I suppose there are many sides to this. Some may argue that this is not strictly necessary; as long as the project is attractive, a company will always be able to find the appropriate people. Others may counter, that in such a competitive industry, where individuals can make such a difference, it is vital to grab as many aces as you can. Neither side is strictly right or wrong.
Finally (IMHO) though "nimble" is not a word anyone would use to describe ILM, they do pretty good work with armies of low paid worker bees. Having been an employee and/or client of all of the aforenamed companies, though, even the "small" ones in Soho fall a bit short in the nimble department.
I think we are seeing an important test of nimbleness right now, which will no doubt extend over the next couple of years.
Couple of reasons:
1. Software. Photorealistic Renderman has been the main workhorse for highend 3D rendering. Mental Image's Mental Ray is now looking sufficiently mature to give Renderman a good run for its money in many areas. Indeed, ILM have signed a deal with Mental Images to help develop the package further. Alias|Wavefront have also chosen it to be the official renderer for Maya. We will see how industry adapts to the larger choice of rendering packages.
2. It could be said that the advent of modern, CGI-rich blockbusters has advertised the VFX industry to a greater number of people than ever before. At the same time the "barrier to entry" is getting lower. Affordable home PC hardware is now sufficiently powerful to run even the latest graphics applications. It is also easy to get hold of "personal learning editions" of software which a few years ago cost $15,000. Given all this, and the proliferation of 3d animation schools, I feel there are as many people as ever trying to get into the industry. Personally, I think this is great - those who have the determination and potential have easier access to the tools of the trade. However, there are others who feel this is simply breeding a generation of kids who think pushing buttons in the latest piece of fashionable software IS animation. So the question is: Is there actually more useful talent available? If so, then it should be easier for the Soho VFX companies to build even larger, stronger teams.
In fact, quite a number of visual effects companies were involved in both Potter films. For the second film, work was farmed out not just to ILM, but also a number of companies belonging to London's Soho VFX scene.
While ILM worked on Dobby and the Quiditch match, facilities such as The Moving Picture Company produced the opening sequence, the Flying Ford Anglia, the Whomping Willow and the snake in the duelling scene. Mill Film (who won an oscar for Gladiator) did the spiders. I imagine other Soho companies such as Framestore CFC made significant contributions too, but alas my memory escapes me - corrections and additions welcome!
Over the past few years, Soho has been winning an increasing amount of film work. Double Negative, for example, did the effects for Pitch Black, Enemy at the Gates and Below. They currently have something like four jobs on as we speak. CFC (Computer Film Company, as it was then known) have done, among many other things, the effects for Blade2. Other projects farmed out among the Soho companies include Tomb Raider and the latest Bond film, Die Another Day.
Special effects cost a lot of money and, alas, are not as simple as pushing a few buttons and making the computer do the work. It involves vast numbers of talented people working together. To give you an idea, big facilities such as ILM employ many thousands of people, who all have their own speciality. Soho combined has just a fraction of that. This explains why the work for Potter and other films is farmed out to many companies and not just one. The upside, for the film studios, is that it is much more cost effective. After all, an effects company with a staff of 300 is a lot more nimble than a company of 10000. In an industry where the goalposts are always changing (new software, new techniques, new practices etc) this can be an important consideration.
Slashdot Mirror
Normally I wouldn't bother taking insurance out on a mobile, but the iPhone is pretty easy to lose and expensive to replace. Now one could easily say,"Well, just take good care of your mobile so you don't need insurance." With the best will in the world though, accidents happen - even to otherwise very careful people. That's life.
Earlier this year I did indeed lose my iPhone. No problem though - I quickly obtained a police reference number, visited the store I bought my iPhone from, and walked out ten minutes later with a brand new one! And iTunes had already backed up my data. Within twelve hours of losing my phone I was back in business as if nothing had happened. The cost of insurance was nothing compared to the full cost of replacing the iPhone.
- Andrew
These days HD content is more likely to be recorded onto a high end digital video format like HDCAM. Many of the cameras are descended from the old DigiBeta camcorders seen on news cameramens' shoulders. There are also cameras such as the Sony F23, Thomson Grassvalley Viper, the Panavision Genesis and the Arri D20 which bear a closer resemblance to those from the world of film. These are mostly used on features, commercials and music videos.
Except we are talking Neil Blomkamp here.
He's not exactly what I would call an "untried director." His background is in high-profile commercials, particularly ones featuring photoreal mecha such as the dancing Citroen transformer. His showreel is very, very impressive (check out his documentary-style short film "Alive in Joburg".)
I think this is the difference between a good actor and a bad actor; it is also the difference between a good director and a bad director.
In the creation of a story, there are many points at which it can be significantly shaped and reshaped: Conception, treatment, script, director's interpretation, actor's interpretation, editing. There are probably more too. This is how the writer's origin vision is almost always nothing like the finished product.
A mediocre actor may be little more than a pawn for the director - walk there, say this, do that. A good actor though will reflect on his own life experience and seek inspired ways to color his performance. If the writer has done a good job and produced an interesting character, then the actor may not have to work so hard; otherwise he may have to strive and fill in the gaps the writer has left.
A mediocre director will likely be more concerned with the logistics of production than the telling of the story or the performance of the actors. He may try to duplicate exactly the vision of the story running in his head, trying to achieve the same results with his actors. It is all to easy for him to start barking commands, treating his actors like pawns. But a good director will guide his actors' efforts by stimulating their imaginations, giving them permission to try promising approaches and helping them shift into a certain mind-state. He judges their performance so they don't have to. The result may not match his pre-conceived vision, but by the same token, it will hopefully be more believable and interesting.
This article investigating dubious comments appeared shortly after the Win2k source code was leaked.
To be honest, I do not entirely understand the great fuss over the fate of the Hubble telescope. It has had a long and immensely successful career probing the reaches of the universe, but it is getting old.
I guess many people think that once the Hubble is gone, there will be nothing to replace it. But the Next Generation James Webb telescope has been in development for years, and is currently scheduled for deployment in 2011. With this in mind, decomissioning the Hubble doesn't seem such a tragedy.
I totally agree. However, there is a scenario that I find somewhat troubling. I hold up my hands now and claim to have no solution, but I thought I should just raise it:
Ok, so you pay the fees, graduate and pursue a career within your field. A couple of years go by. You are now a dramatically different person to the naive, studious high school kid who chose that course. What you once loved now feels as though it is slowly killing you, little by little. You know what you really want to do, but to do so means throwing everything you have already done behind you.
When you were earning solid money, it seemed as though those debts were manageable. Now it will take a long long time in your new field to match what you were previously earning.
One may be point out that you should have chosen a different course, or switched while at university, but hindsight is 20/20. You genuinely believed back then that you would spend the rest of your life devoted to you Major. It always seemed odd when others smiled and shook their heads when you told them this.
My take on this dilema: That's unfortunately (?) the way life is. But then again, no one is going to stop you changing your own future. You simply have to ask yourself what standard of living you are prepared to tolerate. If eating out at restaurants, buying Starbucks coffee and filling your shelves with DVDs is more important than your longterm fulfillment, then that's your choice.
There already exists a sizable body of work on mixing artificial life with rigid body dynamics. Even back in 1994, people like Karl Sims were evolving their own rigid body creatures
You also want to check out Craig Reynolds (who also did lots of work on flocking)
One of the toughest challenges Natural Motion face is integrating their software in existing VFX pipelines. Many Slashdotters will already know that Linux is the OS of choice in the world of cutting edge visual effects. One issue is that Endorphin is Windows only, meaning an additional box must be placed under the operator's desk.
A more serious problem is that you cannot create your own virtual stuntmen - you have to rely on the skeletons, physiques and behaviors they supply (you cannot evolve or construct your own.) When Endorphin was first released, you needed a seperate piece of software (for example, MotionBuilder)to retarget the motion from Endorphin back onto your own characters. Thankfully though they have now implemented their own "dynamic retargetting" algorithms which smooth the workflow considerably.
To integrate it into Massive, they would need to expose the Endorphin engine as a set of libraries. However, from what I understand, Endorphin was designed from the ground up to be a stand-alone application. That after all is Natural Motion's business plan. One then wonders how easy it would be to expose an API, considering the software was never meant to be integrated into another package at all.
In its current form, Endorphin is really good for quickly generating libraries of variations which can then be fed into more traditional motion blending engines. If for example you have a crowd of people who are all falling to the ground, it can be prohibitively expensive to motion-capture enough variations to make it realistic. But with Endorphin, you just perturb the forces applied over and over again. In the end, that's their market - others are free to draw upon the underlying body of research and implement their own systems.
What exactly do you mean by "'third wall' feeling of the movie"? Did you actually see Troy?
In the end, CGI is simply a tool. The reason they used computers to generate the crowds was because of economic and logistical necessity.
Unfortunately the off-the-shelf fur that comes with Maya leaves a lot to be desired. It still takes a tremendous amount of R&D effort to create a production-quality fur system. That is, a fur system with powerful, predictable grooming tools, tweakability and the ability to pass any piece of information you may desire into the renderer. I doubt it would be practical to do something like Stuart Little using Maya fur!
Although rendering quality is extremely important so are the grooming methods. Despite the fact that photoreal fur has been around for quite a few years, it is still very difficult to work with. While we desire total control over the grooming, we also wish for the natural randomness and messiness of the real world. Hair can become matted, stick to other hairs and bits of skin, clump together and so on... It then has to move realistically and collide with other hairs and anatomy.
Sony Imageworks, ILM and no doubt many other effects houses use some sort of guide curve approach where hairs inherit the shapes of nearby control curves. This is a very robust, predictable way of going about things. It is also very handy to be able to add and remove vertices from these control hairs so you can have both short, stubbly hairs and long, flowing ones. An alternative method used by PDI on Shrek was to imagine the overall shape of the hair, and manipulate this volume. Some very nice braiding effects can be achieved using this method.
Although it is possible to list a whole slew of algorithms to solve each step within a fur system, much care is needed to develop one that is interactive and flexible. For example, you may not like a certain hair and wish to remove it; alternatively you may like to add some individual rogue hairs. These changes then have to be fed back into the pipeline.
For rendering, it is extremely useful to pass values from the modeller into the shaders. Base and tip colours are the most obvious quantities, but if you are doing slick hair, then you may desire a shininess parameter. When clumping wet hair, you may also like a vector pointing from the "spine" of the clump to each hair within it (useful for rendering the surface of the water droplet.) So tools are required for adding new attributes to the fur and driving values through it.
Maya fur does not approach this level of control. It uses a rather exotic approach involving "attractors" (much harder to do the same sort of grooming as plain-old guide curves) and can only handle certain special quantities. Although this may have changed in Maya 5.0, it can only handle polygon and NURBS geometries (no subdivision surfaces, which are gaining increasing favour among effects companies.) There is rather fragile Renderman backend which is obtained seperately from Pixar but you really have to start plowing through it's source code if things go wrong. (The backend is provided partly as an example of how to write Maya to Renderman exporters!)
So there you have it: Although companies like Sony Imageworks and ILM have fantastic looking fur, bear in mind it has likley taken them millions of dollars and huge film projects to drive their development. There is nothing simple about fur I'm afraid.
- Relyx
If you are the maintainer of a library, bug fixes can be quickly rolled out without requiring your users to recompile their programs. Of course, binary compatibility must be maintained.
It's also very useful if you want an existing program to pick up an alternate version of the library without affecting others. In your wrapper script, simply add a new directory to the start of the LD_LIBRARY_PATH environment variable. Admittedly, in an evironment where people are used to recompiling their programs, this is not too much of a problem. On other platforms though, a level of redirection can be very useful.
ILM does not have 10000 employees. Last time I looked, they maxed out at about 1200.
I conceed that the figure I quoted was an upper bound plucked from some half-remembered conversation! I jumped over to the ILM site and found out that they do indeed employ a core staff of 1200. Nevertheless, during particularly busy times, I would have no problem believing that figure could multiply.
To say that Soho does not have anywhere near the staff or talent is also inaccurate- between CFC, Mill, and Cinesite alone the staff count probably tops 1000.
As far as talent is concerned, I didn't mean to imply there was a gaping chasm between London and America. There are indeed lots of gifted artists working in Soho. I was instead referring to the "armies of worker bees", who are vital for handling the sheer volume of work a major effects job necessitates. This is compounded by the demand for high-quality in the finished product.
Also, we probably need to qualify what we mean by "staff". The film effects industry is very nomadic and freelancer driven. Understandable considering that films require large numbers of people during production but none afterwards. It is essential for such facilities to expand and contract as needed.
That said, it is also in each company's interests to keep hold of talent for future projects. I suppose there are many sides to this. Some may argue that this is not strictly necessary; as long as the project is attractive, a company will always be able to find the appropriate people. Others may counter, that in such a competitive industry, where individuals can make such a difference, it is vital to grab as many aces as you can. Neither side is strictly right or wrong.
Finally (IMHO) though "nimble" is not a word anyone would use to describe ILM, they do pretty good work with armies of low paid worker bees. Having been an employee and/or client of all of the aforenamed companies, though, even the "small" ones in Soho fall a bit short in the nimble department.
I think we are seeing an important test of nimbleness right now, which will no doubt extend over the next couple of years.
Couple of reasons:
1. Software. Photorealistic Renderman has been the main workhorse for highend 3D rendering. Mental Image's Mental Ray is now looking sufficiently mature to give Renderman a good run for its money in many areas. Indeed, ILM have signed a deal with Mental Images to help develop the package further. Alias|Wavefront have also chosen it to be the official renderer for Maya. We will see how industry adapts to the larger choice of rendering packages.
2. It could be said that the advent of modern, CGI-rich blockbusters has advertised the VFX industry to a greater number of people than ever before. At the same time the "barrier to entry" is getting lower. Affordable home PC hardware is now sufficiently powerful to run even the latest graphics applications. It is also easy to get hold of "personal learning editions" of software which a few years ago cost $15,000. Given all this, and the proliferation of 3d animation schools, I feel there are as many people as ever trying to get into the industry. Personally, I think this is great - those who have the determination and potential have easier access to the tools of the trade. However, there are others who feel this is simply breeding a generation of kids who think pushing buttons in the latest piece of fashionable software IS animation. So the question is: Is there actually more useful talent available? If so, then it should be easier for the Soho VFX companies to build even larger, stronger teams.
- Relyx
While ILM worked on Dobby and the Quiditch match, facilities such as The Moving Picture Company produced the opening sequence, the Flying Ford Anglia, the Whomping Willow and the snake in the duelling scene. Mill Film (who won an oscar for Gladiator) did the spiders. I imagine other Soho companies such as Framestore CFC made significant contributions too, but alas my memory escapes me - corrections and additions welcome!
Over the past few years, Soho has been winning an increasing amount of film work. Double Negative, for example, did the effects for Pitch Black, Enemy at the Gates and Below. They currently have something like four jobs on as we speak. CFC (Computer Film Company, as it was then known) have done, among many other things, the effects for Blade2. Other projects farmed out among the Soho companies include Tomb Raider and the latest Bond film, Die Another Day.
Special effects cost a lot of money and, alas, are not as simple as pushing a few buttons and making the computer do the work. It involves vast numbers of talented people working together. To give you an idea, big facilities such as ILM employ many thousands of people, who all have their own speciality. Soho combined has just a fraction of that. This explains why the work for Potter and other films is farmed out to many companies and not just one. The upside, for the film studios, is that it is much more cost effective. After all, an effects company with a staff of 300 is a lot more nimble than a company of 10000. In an industry where the goalposts are always changing (new software, new techniques, new practices etc) this can be an important consideration.
- Relyx