"I'm not entirely sure what people think that CGI animators, TDs and so on do all day. Just push a button and out comes a film?"
Shit dude, that made me laugh. heh:) I don't think most people are aware that even Motion Capture requires lots of work to get right.
If anybody's curious about why an animator needs reference, go check out the making of Discovery Channel's Walking with Dinosaurs. There's a bit where they have a skeleton of a bizarre Pterdactyl like creature, but no idea how they thing could have walked. They had to video tape a guy walking bird like on crutches (you have to see it to understand it) in order to get an idea of how these birds might have moved.
It's also a very entertaining look into that series. If you have any interest in visual FX at all, check it out.
"But you're correct *sigh* in that there's a whole industry built around people who do care what the "stars" are doing off-screen. That industry is effectively a marketing arm of the movie industry --"
That has it's plus sides, though. CNN made damn sure to let me know that Jason Priestly mangled himself up in an idiotic car stunt That was one of the brighter parts of my day.;)
"That's not why professional football players claim to deserve high pay. They claim to deserve high pay because they can run and kick a ball better than anybody else in the country."
Nope. He deserves high pay because he's directly responsible for the ridiculous amounts of money his play brings in. He wouldn't be demanding 5 mill if they were raking in only 1/10th of what they are now.
It's kinda like the ridiculous amount of money big name actors get. The movie studio's not paying $20 million dollars for extreme high quality acting, they're paying that much because they're betting more people will go see the movie if Harrison Ford is in it. It's about audience draw.
It's an art. If an animator can make his character expressive without mimicking somebody, then he also knows how to act. For all intents and purposes, he is an actor.
The same could be said for a puppeteer. Frank Oz is a legend. I have faith that computers will be able to simulate a broad range of things. But those simulations do not tell interesting stories without a human in the pipeline. If a computer can emote like a human, doesn't it start to become human?
Yep, I hope so too. Im really concerned, though, that I'd still be missing a lot. I'm playing with Linux today, and it's not half bad, but it is very rough in areas.
Hopefully Adobe follows suit, though. I do heaps o stuff in After Effects and Photoshop. Gimp's not bad, but Adobe still has it beat. I don't know of any AE clone on Linux.
"And would it be fast enough to be practical for weekly TV shows? (or daily, in the case of soaps)"
Oh it could do that, but as I said a human needs to drive at some point. At best, CG will become very fancy puppets. There's nothing wrong with that, but puppets aren't exactly making actors nervous. Heck, it didn't even happen in Greg the Bunny. Heh.
"I think you're foolish to think that actors will NEVER be replaced."
I think you're foolish to think that computers will be able to entirely and completely eradicate the need for creative thought. Even if they can 'mimic' a brain, being human is all about experience. Any human will be able to create an idea that the computer could not. For that reason, even a creative computer could not possibly satisfy 100% of the demand for creativity.
"you'll only have to pay some animators and storywriters and maybe a director, not actors, staff, caterers, background actors; you won't have to flex around the laws to have kids working,"
Acting is an art form, not a science. Have Jim Carrey do Fire Marshall Bill, then have Robin Williams do Fire Marshall Bill. You will get two very funny performances, but you will not get two identical performances.
"...what will happen to all the people like the background characters, costume makers, construction, caterers, cameramen, model makers, casting companies, etc."
Why do people who come up with questions like these always think in the most ridiculous extremes? "One day, there'll be no need for actors!"
Well, I'll tell you something: I'm a CG animator. There'll ALWAYS be a need for actors. We don't just make stuff up out of thin air, we need REFERENCE to know how to make a character do something. We'll always need costume designers, afterall, CG characters are not naked. (Not to mention that cloth simulation is a bitch.) We'll always need construction people to build practical models. If anything, it helps with the texture generation and lighting rig.
Face it, we can't simulate reality without something real to base it on. Don't believe me? Look at all the miniature work that went into Episode 2. They could have done that all in CG, but they didn't. Think about it.
Trust me dudes, nothing is going to disappear. Despite the mass market appeal of movies, we still have opera, we still have plays, we still have circuses, and we still have a very diverse market. There is no 'one genre to rule them all', so don't worry about it.
All that's happening with the new technology coming out is we're getting better tools to let our imaginations make it to the screen. It's an accessory, not a replacement.
Yep. That's good news. It means that I'll be able to set up a Linux renderfarm. I'm not a big fan of Linux as a workstation, but I'd LOVE to be able to use them as render servers.
I also run an apache webserver on Redhat. I'm a Linux newb but I am very happy with it. Just to be clear, I'm not anti-Linux, it just isn't useful for me right now. My sig's directed at Linux zealots, not the Linux Community.
Well, I don't understand the JAA 768 or XPA 117 references, but I can tell you of a similar coincidence:
I went to Thomas Alva Edison elementary school. The license plate one of my my teacher's cars was "TAE - 072". (Not sure about the 072 part...) Weird that a teacher's license plate has the same acronym of the school he worked for!
Of course, TAE could have lots of meanings to differnt people though, couldn't it? TAE could have been the initials of his cousin for all we knew. Still, though, it was an interesting conincidence.
"That's not to say it wasn't generous of him to refuse to patent his inventions, but I can understand why a person whose income depended on their inventions would want to patent things."
Back then, though, he didn't run the risk of having his invention totally bastardized by a single entity. I'm not sure he'd take the same stance today. If anything, he'd patent his inventions just to keep corps from getting too large.
Of course, this is all speculation. Iventions were a very different animal then. It was hard to invent something that could be distributed around the country.
"The only problem with it is that potentially the parent company can really mess things up, as Apple managed to do, which is what drove me to Linux in the end."
That possibility ALWAYS exists. Fortunately, though, Newtek doesn't appear to be so arrogant. Arguably, though, Mac has regained some ground. Is OSX interesting to you? (Never been a Mac guy, so I'm curious if Apple regained some respect with you lately...)
"t's the idiots who don't even understand Linux that are the most vocal and adamant about it."
Yeah, I think you're right. I'd add to it, though, that they have no idea what kinda stuff I do in 3D. Pity really. Linux users and Lightwave users have a great deal in common. Heh.
Heh yeah. "Im a ChickenHawk, and I only eat Chickens."
Re:Using Linux in all aspects from the ground up .
on
Penguin Airlines
·
· Score: 1, Troll
"A well trained agent could get information faster than with any fancy point and click UI."
'Fancy point and click UI's have advantages that keyboards don't have, and vice versa. I know DOS really well, and I'm able to take advantage of that to fly around Windows. But, not everything can be done easily from a keyboard. Don't forget that not every agent is 'well trained'. There's still the matter of giving the user clues as to what he/she needs to do in order to make the computer do what they want.
Microsoft and Apple both understand this and give you very helpful pointers. You can click on File and hit Open, or you can Alt+F then O. If you click on File, you'll see that the O in Open has an underscore in it, thus familiarizing yourself with productivity enhancements of the app you're using.
The short version of what I'm saying is that one isn't 100% superior to the other, so don't treat them that way. The mouse and the keyboard (as well as text and graphics) compliment each other, they don't compete with each other.
My comment that started this thread was not a 'Linux doesnt have a UI so nobody can do any work' joke, it was a "Linux doesn't give enough visual clues to the user" joke. The 'I didnt see that command had a vowel' joke made after my post was funny as hell because even in the text side of Linux this is true. Linux has a wonderful helpfile system, but the command to call it is a little cryptic. 'Man'. It's not 'manual', it's 'man'. So the mapping is a bit broken here. You have to remember the short form of manual, as opposed to just remembering manual. That's a huge UI problem with Linux, it isn't very helpful if you don't have the commands you need to use memorized. That's a bit different from a graphical UI that shows you what options you have available for you to use at any given time.
I think this is a legitimate criticism of Linux. I really hope more attention is paid to this aspect of it in the near future. The OS is very sophisticated and extremely flexible, but it needs a lot of evolution in the user-experience department in order to win a larger market share. Is this important to the Linux Community? Oh I dunno. What could it possibly hurt, though?
Re:Using Linux in all aspects from the ground up .
on
Penguin Airlines
·
· Score: 2
"and the point that i was making is that there are plenty of gui tools in linux so you don't have to use the command line if you don't like it"
I know, I've used it. heh.
" how, exactly, does a windows user get around bsod's that (s)he doesn't like?"
Win9X (95, 98, Me...) are awful and BS all the time. Win2k almost never Bsod's. When it does, it's a driver making a bad call.
Let me put it to you this way: I've never had an overnight or over the weekend process interrupted because of Windows stability or lack of. It's been quite reliable. Lotsa places that use Win2k for LW rendering farms will tell you a similar story. That's why I find BSOD jokes about as interesting as 'Dan Quayle is stupid!' jokes.
That was definitely one of the more interesting responses I got. I'm not anti-free software. Actually I use Opera. I'm the type of guy who runs around and looks for new ways to improve productivity, and that's how I landed on Opera. All because it has an MDI interface heh.
Funny thing is, Lightwave users are not really in a different world from Linux users. Comparing Lightwave to 3D Studio MAX is very much like comparing Linux to Windows. Lightwave is very much supported by the community. A good chunk of the plug-ins I have are free little apps that people write and give away. A good deal of LW's evolution came from it's users! Sadly, this isn't so true with MAX. It's very much like Lin vs. Win, where LW's Lin and Max's Win.
That's one of the reasons it really bugs me when the Linux zealots (note: I did NOT say Linux users in general) give me shit about running Win2k and liking it.
"For some of us, it's great. It makes my life a lot easier on the desktop, but that's just because of my own personal uses, as yours are obviously different."
The average Linux user understands this, I think, and doesn't bug me about it. However, there are people who are so anti-MS that they can't see past their own nose. That's where a good chunk of the heat I've taken comes from. They think I'm crippling myself using Windows and have no concept of the idea that I'm actually kicking mucho butto with it.
Slashdot Mirror
"Most "professionals" don't use the stock Lightwave renderer anyway"
ooooooooooooooooooooooookay.
"I'm not entirely sure what people think that CGI animators, TDs and so on do all day. Just push a button and out comes a film?"
:) I don't think most people are aware that even Motion Capture requires lots of work to get right.
Shit dude, that made me laugh. heh
If anybody's curious about why an animator needs reference, go check out the making of Discovery Channel's Walking with Dinosaurs. There's a bit where they have a skeleton of a bizarre Pterdactyl like creature, but no idea how they thing could have walked. They had to video tape a guy walking bird like on crutches (you have to see it to understand it) in order to get an idea of how these birds might have moved.
It's also a very entertaining look into that series. If you have any interest in visual FX at all, check it out.
*pfft* Like I really care what an AC who doesn't understand humor thinks. Heh.
"...people still watch the news specifically for the weatherman..."
Well, to be fair, the local weathergirl here has big knockers.
"But you're correct *sigh* in that there's a whole industry built around people who do care what the "stars" are doing off-screen. That industry is effectively a marketing arm of the movie industry --"
;)
That has it's plus sides, though. CNN made damn sure to let me know that Jason Priestly mangled himself up in an idiotic car stunt That was one of the brighter parts of my day.
"That's not why professional football players claim to deserve high pay. They claim to deserve high pay because they can run and kick a ball better than anybody else in the country."
Nope. He deserves high pay because he's directly responsible for the ridiculous amounts of money his play brings in. He wouldn't be demanding 5 mill if they were raking in only 1/10th of what they are now.
It's kinda like the ridiculous amount of money big name actors get. The movie studio's not paying $20 million dollars for extreme high quality acting, they're paying that much because they're betting more people will go see the movie if Harrison Ford is in it. It's about audience draw.
It's an art. If an animator can make his character expressive without mimicking somebody, then he also knows how to act. For all intents and purposes, he is an actor.
The same could be said for a puppeteer. Frank Oz is a legend. I have faith that computers will be able to simulate a broad range of things. But those simulations do not tell interesting stories without a human in the pipeline. If a computer can emote like a human, doesn't it start to become human?
Yep, I hope so too. Im really concerned, though, that I'd still be missing a lot. I'm playing with Linux today, and it's not half bad, but it is very rough in areas.
Hopefully Adobe follows suit, though. I do heaps o stuff in After Effects and Photoshop. Gimp's not bad, but Adobe still has it beat. I don't know of any AE clone on Linux.
Little help?
"And would it be fast enough to be practical for weekly TV shows? (or daily, in the case of soaps)"
Oh it could do that, but as I said a human needs to drive at some point. At best, CG will become very fancy puppets. There's nothing wrong with that, but puppets aren't exactly making actors nervous. Heck, it didn't even happen in Greg the Bunny. Heh.
You make an excellent point. For some reason, artists seem to be the only ones who understand that.
Computers can do all kinds of lovely simulations, but human creativity is an integral part of making animation interesting.
Wish I could mod you up.
"I think you're foolish to think that actors will NEVER be replaced."
I think you're foolish to think that computers will be able to entirely and completely eradicate the need for creative thought. Even if they can 'mimic' a brain, being human is all about experience. Any human will be able to create an idea that the computer could not. For that reason, even a creative computer could not possibly satisfy 100% of the demand for creativity.
"you'll only have to pay some animators and storywriters and maybe a director, not actors, staff, caterers, background actors; you won't have to flex around the laws to have kids working,"
Acting is an art form, not a science. Have Jim Carrey do Fire Marshall Bill, then have Robin Williams do Fire Marshall Bill. You will get two very funny performances, but you will not get two identical performances.
"500 years ago people would say, you think the earth is round?? Probably not..."
There's also people who believe that today. Nothing ever dies out.
"...what will happen to all the people like the background characters, costume makers, construction, caterers, cameramen, model makers, casting companies, etc."
Why do people who come up with questions like these always think in the most ridiculous extremes? "One day, there'll be no need for actors!"
Well, I'll tell you something: I'm a CG animator. There'll ALWAYS be a need for actors. We don't just make stuff up out of thin air, we need REFERENCE to know how to make a character do something. We'll always need costume designers, afterall, CG characters are not naked. (Not to mention that cloth simulation is a bitch.) We'll always need construction people to build practical models. If anything, it helps with the texture generation and lighting rig.
Face it, we can't simulate reality without something real to base it on. Don't believe me? Look at all the miniature work that went into Episode 2. They could have done that all in CG, but they didn't. Think about it.
Trust me dudes, nothing is going to disappear. Despite the mass market appeal of movies, we still have opera, we still have plays, we still have circuses, and we still have a very diverse market. There is no 'one genre to rule them all', so don't worry about it.
All that's happening with the new technology coming out is we're getting better tools to let our imaginations make it to the screen. It's an accessory, not a replacement.
Yep. That's good news. It means that I'll be able to set up a Linux renderfarm. I'm not a big fan of Linux as a workstation, but I'd LOVE to be able to use them as render servers.
I also run an apache webserver on Redhat. I'm a Linux newb but I am very happy with it. Just to be clear, I'm not anti-Linux, it just isn't useful for me right now. My sig's directed at Linux zealots, not the Linux Community.
Well, I don't understand the JAA 768 or XPA 117 references, but I can tell you of a similar coincidence:
I went to Thomas Alva Edison elementary school. The license plate one of my my teacher's cars was "TAE - 072". (Not sure about the 072 part...) Weird that a teacher's license plate has the same acronym of the school he worked for!
Of course, TAE could have lots of meanings to differnt people though, couldn't it? TAE could have been the initials of his cousin for all we knew. Still, though, it was an interesting conincidence.
We'd all be saying the same thing if Gore was in office.
It's kinda like arguing over which movie is better, Dante's Peak or Volcano.
"I'm a ChickenHawk, and I only eat Chickens!" heh.
"That's not to say it wasn't generous of him to refuse to patent his inventions, but I can understand why a person whose income depended on their inventions would want to patent things."
Back then, though, he didn't run the risk of having his invention totally bastardized by a single entity. I'm not sure he'd take the same stance today. If anything, he'd patent his inventions just to keep corps from getting too large.
Of course, this is all speculation. Iventions were a very different animal then. It was hard to invent something that could be distributed around the country.
"The only problem with it is that potentially the parent company can really mess things up, as Apple managed to do, which is what drove me to Linux in the end."
That possibility ALWAYS exists. Fortunately, though, Newtek doesn't appear to be so arrogant. Arguably, though, Mac has regained some ground. Is OSX interesting to you? (Never been a Mac guy, so I'm curious if Apple regained some respect with you lately...)
"t's the idiots who don't even understand Linux that are the most vocal and adamant about it."
Yeah, I think you're right. I'd add to it, though, that they have no idea what kinda stuff I do in 3D. Pity really. Linux users and Lightwave users have a great deal in common. Heh.
heh damn I wish I had a mod point. :)
Heh yeah. "Im a ChickenHawk, and I only eat Chickens."
"A well trained agent could get information faster than with any fancy point and click UI."
'Fancy point and click UI's have advantages that keyboards don't have, and vice versa. I know DOS really well, and I'm able to take advantage of that to fly around Windows. But, not everything can be done easily from a keyboard. Don't forget that not every agent is 'well trained'. There's still the matter of giving the user clues as to what he/she needs to do in order to make the computer do what they want.
Microsoft and Apple both understand this and give you very helpful pointers. You can click on File and hit Open, or you can Alt+F then O. If you click on File, you'll see that the O in Open has an underscore in it, thus familiarizing yourself with productivity enhancements of the app you're using.
The short version of what I'm saying is that one isn't 100% superior to the other, so don't treat them that way. The mouse and the keyboard (as well as text and graphics) compliment each other, they don't compete with each other.
My comment that started this thread was not a 'Linux doesnt have a UI so nobody can do any work' joke, it was a "Linux doesn't give enough visual clues to the user" joke. The 'I didnt see that command had a vowel' joke made after my post was funny as hell because even in the text side of Linux this is true. Linux has a wonderful helpfile system, but the command to call it is a little cryptic. 'Man'. It's not 'manual', it's 'man'. So the mapping is a bit broken here. You have to remember the short form of manual, as opposed to just remembering manual. That's a huge UI problem with Linux, it isn't very helpful if you don't have the commands you need to use memorized. That's a bit different from a graphical UI that shows you what options you have available for you to use at any given time.
I think this is a legitimate criticism of Linux. I really hope more attention is paid to this aspect of it in the near future. The OS is very sophisticated and extremely flexible, but it needs a lot of evolution in the user-experience department in order to win a larger market share. Is this important to the Linux Community? Oh I dunno. What could it possibly hurt, though?
"and the point that i was making is that there are plenty of gui tools in linux so you don't have to use the command line if you don't like it"
I know, I've used it. heh.
" how, exactly, does a windows user get around bsod's that (s)he doesn't like?"
Win9X (95, 98, Me...) are awful and BS all the time. Win2k almost never Bsod's. When it does, it's a driver making a bad call.
Let me put it to you this way: I've never had an overnight or over the weekend process interrupted because of Windows stability or lack of. It's been quite reliable. Lotsa places that use Win2k for LW rendering farms will tell you a similar story. That's why I find BSOD jokes about as interesting as 'Dan Quayle is stupid!' jokes.
That was definitely one of the more interesting responses I got. I'm not anti-free software. Actually I use Opera. I'm the type of guy who runs around and looks for new ways to improve productivity, and that's how I landed on Opera. All because it has an MDI interface heh.
Funny thing is, Lightwave users are not really in a different world from Linux users. Comparing Lightwave to 3D Studio MAX is very much like comparing Linux to Windows. Lightwave is very much supported by the community. A good chunk of the plug-ins I have are free little apps that people write and give away. A good deal of LW's evolution came from it's users! Sadly, this isn't so true with MAX. It's very much like Lin vs. Win, where LW's Lin and Max's Win.
That's one of the reasons it really bugs me when the Linux zealots (note: I did NOT say Linux users in general) give me shit about running Win2k and liking it.
"For some of us, it's great. It makes my life a lot easier on the desktop, but that's just because of my own personal uses, as yours are obviously different."
The average Linux user understands this, I think, and doesn't bug me about it. However, there are people who are so anti-MS that they can't see past their own nose. That's where a good chunk of the heat I've taken comes from. They think I'm crippling myself using Windows and have no concept of the idea that I'm actually kicking mucho butto with it.