Yes, I'm interested in the new 3DLabs chipset that was previewed in MAXIMUM PC...they're pricey though.
But, as a build-to-order they would be perfect for folks like the "Rebel Unit" up at ILM or my friends at The Orphanage who both run Maya and ElectricImage on Macs. I have to stick to doing my 3D on Windoze or Linux workstations until Apple convinces SESI to port Houdini to OSX.
Absolutely. I think they need to offer the top end of both the ATI and NVIDIA line. Apple needs FIREGL and QUADRO boards as build-to-order. Or they should re-examine why they're gung-ho on Maya for OSX. Their highest of high end configurations are still only offering gamer boards and drivers.
We've got the GF4MX in our editorial dual GHz PowerMac and we haven't had troubles with it. But I would so wish for a Quadro4 in my Macs.
re: drivers for Mac being better than Windows...I have to concur with you there. I have a couple dual Athlon Windows boxes with RADEON 8500s and even with the latest drivers they don't run OGL apps anywhere as good as my older Thunderbird box with a GeForce2GTS.
The 8500's 3D performance wipes the floor with the GeForce2GTS, for shaded and wireframe previews. But the ATI drivers don't handle the overlay planes of my app's GUI well at all. I've read that their workstation class RADEON has similar driver issues running workstation class apps, relative to NVIDIA hardware.
Quake performance kicks ass...but that was just supposed to be a side benefit. I'll most likely upgrade these boxes to NVIDIA hardware as soon as I can.
My Mac, however, has shown little problems with its ATI hardware. I've got an older B&W G3 that I've upgraded with a 500mHz G4 and RADEON and it works great. DVD and Quicktime performance much better than my faster Athlon with the GeForce2GTS.
No, all of the shorts are made by anime directors produced by anime studies. The only stretch on this would be the last piece, from Square. But it's still a Japanese company, even if it was made in Hawaii before Square, Honolulu became no more, and a Japanese director.
These articles about synthetic actors taking real actor's jobs or all-digital films being more cost effective or more time efficient than filmed films make me laugh. They show such a lack of insight or expertise in what they're actually about.
I'd hope a slashdot contributor would be a little more in the know but I guess you can't expect them to be any more on the money than the ignorant mainstream press.
"The two Guilds spend a lot of time looking out for the interests of their members, the people who actually create the content you watch, so I would say that they are within their rights to assert a Eurpoean-style 'moral right' to a work of art as its creator."
I'd go on a limb and say, particularly in the case of the Writer's Guild, they also make asses of themselves with the same anecdotal regularity. Case in point, it was the Writer's Guild that blocked Steven Soderberg from getting his just cinematographer credit on the film "Traffic". They were perfectly okay with his pseudonym taking the honors, for whatever fucktard reason. When he made "Ocean's 11" they gave him permission but he's decided to keep with the pseudonym when he acts as his own cinematographer.
Again, WGA example, the screenwriter brought in to do the necessary rewrites for "The Game" was barred from getting credit on the film though, in the mind of David Fincher he was the writer most responsible for the story filmed. In tribute he names the writer with characters in "Fight Club".
Maybe the writer wasn't guild. So what if he did the work? Why should James Cameron be forced to join the editor's union so that he can get an edting credit on his own film even though he's edited every film he's directed? Ridiculous.
The entertainment guilds have run much of commercial production out of America, helped weaken the post production industry as a whole and have mostly hurt (in the case of non-A level or markee actors) the "littlest" people in their ranks.
Then you can extrapolate from that: Do they even know enough about Windows to know they're wasting effort by NOT using their right mouse button for context sensitive pop-up menus?...Do they know enough about computers to have a preference to be using Windows in the first place or the brand of box they own?...Do they even really need a computer?...Do they really need as much computer as they have?
This is fun!
Actually, the average consumer is a Windows user and they're familiar with using more than one button on their mice.
;)
Re:Maya still has greater appeal on non-macs
on
Maya for Mac OS X
·
· Score: 1
All major 3D modeling and animation packages are available for Linux and have been for at least a year. Rendering too.
What's with this idea that this or that has to take over or it's considered a failure. How about just provide a functional alternative? A comfortable environment for using the tool you want to use?
Me, I'm still going to have to wait for this on my Mac because SESI doesn't look like it's porting Houdini anytime soon. I've no interest in Maya so I'll have to keep my AMD boxes around for a while.
The physics only look bad to the less than 1% of the audience that knows or cares anything about physics. Movies aren't reality, or, at least the ones where a question of FX physics would even come up likely aren't.
A more appropriate question would be, "are the physics portrayed in a particular film consistent with the tone of the film?" The zero-G explosions in "Star Wars" were absolutely appropriate. Would these same techniques be appropriate for "Pearl Harbor"? No. The film, more than Newton, should be taken into account.
You might make a suggestion like that to a director once. That things "don't work like that" is totally irrelevant. The director wants it. You do it. Or you find another job.
"Making backups of film copies is very expensive, especially if any restoration work is needed.Prints cost many thousands of dollars.Then you're also looking at generation loss (each time you copy the film the image on the copy has degraded somewhat).
Making backups of digital copies is cheap by comparison, and a copy is just as good as the original."
Digital copies to what? Tape? CD? DVD?
Digital tape decomposes much faster than proper film archival methods. CDs do too and so do DVDs. Many folks in the music industry had to wise up to the fact that DIGITAL as a savior was sold to them too early. Jeff Lynn nearly lost several tracks for his last ELO album because the digital tapes he'd recorded on but TEN YEARS ago were toast. He had one shot to get the tracks off of them before they were lost forever.
Also, the amount of data needed to store an entire film, digitally, at ARCHIVAL QUALITY (read 10bit log scan) would cost a mint. HDTV telecines is not, I repeat, not archival quality. Neither is an 8bit lut version of a film scanned at 2K.
Large capacity tapes aren't cheap. It would actually be more cost effective to back the film up onto hard drives and then store the drives. Most any other form of digital back up would be one, more or all of the following: slower, more expensive and much more prone to deterioration. All digital means are too new to really know longterm stability performance outside theory. They said CDs would last forever, remember? It was a lie.
Actually, most every large facility and many medium sized facilities are paying overtime now. All the majors do, in some way.
Some might say this was necessary to avoid unionizing the industry. But artists are compensated better now than even three years ago, largely. Every facility will be different and have perks that other places don't.
Rewards are relative. I worked 6+months (based on my timecard) in about two to two and a half months on "X-Men" to turn Senator Kelly into a puddle of water. I lost weight. I gained weight. I'm sure I lost a few hairs and greyed a few others. But seeing the shot screen in the finals reel to applause was an incredible feeling. Seeing the film in a theatre and feeling the reaction of the audience was fantastic. It made it all worthwhile to me. And it will exist for as long as that film exists. Those are my pixels. I call that rewarding.
...and it makes me less stressful over the fact that my pixels in "Sim0ne" will live as long, lol.
I'm sure Thad will have his own comments. But I'll say "no". There's nothing that's been done to date to suggest that it's possible in the near future. Nothing.
The best contemporary examples, and I think, best uses for a synthespian, is where a real actor would be in danger. Head replacement on stunt doubles ("XXX" has some incredible work from DD on this score) or fully digital stunt doubles will see the most dividends from work heading towards more and more realistic humans.
But synthetic actors for the sake of not using humans, and in a way that's totally convincing? Not in our lifetime.
The CG quality of recent films has NOT dropped. What has increased is the number of marginal films with CG quality that's reflective of their budgets getting sometimes twice the film budget for marketing, making them appear to be bigger films. Overall, quality has increased. Compare "Mummy 2", weak as it was, to the "Mortal Kombat" films some years back.
Almost every film will have its stronger and weaker shots. The same year some of these stinkers came out you also had "Pearl Harbor", which had some of the most transparently created digital effects shots in recent memory. Say what you like about the film (I've already said it all I'm sure) but the FX were as close to perfect as anything I've ever seen. It should have taken home the Oscar.
Where is the money going? Actors. One headline actor will get usually twice to three times the entire FX budget for a big Hollywood film. Most of a film's budget, more than 50% and sometimes approaching 80%, is spent "above the line". That means the principle cast, director, producer, etc. FX, crew and all of post-production is "below the line". And most big films spend more on marketing, sometimes much more, than above and below combined.
Yeah, while I know (in an online sense) Thad and agree with many of his insights, I'd have to say that there are many caveats with his statement on how "rough" it is as a CG artist.
I knew I wanted to do this since I was about fifteen and made it happen, though my own work and a little luck. I can't imagine doing anything else for a "job". But, all humility aside, I'm pretty good at what I do. The people who are good at what they do in this industry aren't wanting. I've never had to go "looking" for a job.
I'm eating balogna sandwiches while making my own indie film right now but I feel very secure in the knowledge that if things don't work out I can literally pick up the phone and be back in business. Gimme a couple days and I can work anywhere I want in the civilized world (and a few uncivilized places too).
What the industry doesn't need is more wannabes and folks that can't pull their own weight. There's stress (moreso for folks like Thad that have to wear the entrepreneur hat as well as FX artist), and there are many headaches in your future if you choose to accept this mission, but there are many rewards.
Right. It's a specialized tool for folks that use tools that largely work BETTER with a three button mouse. I'm surprised that MAYA for OSX doesn't support a 3-Button mouse. Just the thought of doing 3D animation and modeling with an one-button mouse makes my gums ache.
Yeah, you can use CTRL or ALT or APPLE buttons, but largely these button combos are already mapped to other functions. Since when is using two hands optimal over just one.
Plus, Quake on a one-button mouse gargles the fat sack of Satan, lol.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, I'm interested in the new 3DLabs chipset that was previewed in MAXIMUM PC...they're pricey though. But, as a build-to-order they would be perfect for folks like the "Rebel Unit" up at ILM or my friends at The Orphanage who both run Maya and ElectricImage on Macs. I have to stick to doing my 3D on Windoze or Linux workstations until Apple convinces SESI to port Houdini to OSX.
Absolutely. I think they need to offer the top end of both the ATI and NVIDIA line. Apple needs FIREGL and QUADRO boards as build-to-order. Or they should re-examine why they're gung-ho on Maya for OSX. Their highest of high end configurations are still only offering gamer boards and drivers. We've got the GF4MX in our editorial dual GHz PowerMac and we haven't had troubles with it. But I would so wish for a Quadro4 in my Macs.
re: drivers for Mac being better than Windows...I have to concur with you there. I have a couple dual Athlon Windows boxes with RADEON 8500s and even with the latest drivers they don't run OGL apps anywhere as good as my older Thunderbird box with a GeForce2GTS. The 8500's 3D performance wipes the floor with the GeForce2GTS, for shaded and wireframe previews. But the ATI drivers don't handle the overlay planes of my app's GUI well at all. I've read that their workstation class RADEON has similar driver issues running workstation class apps, relative to NVIDIA hardware. Quake performance kicks ass...but that was just supposed to be a side benefit. I'll most likely upgrade these boxes to NVIDIA hardware as soon as I can. My Mac, however, has shown little problems with its ATI hardware. I've got an older B&W G3 that I've upgraded with a 500mHz G4 and RADEON and it works great. DVD and Quicktime performance much better than my faster Athlon with the GeForce2GTS.
No, all of the shorts are made by anime directors produced by anime studies. The only stretch on this would be the last piece, from Square. But it's still a Japanese company, even if it was made in Hawaii before Square, Honolulu became no more, and a Japanese director.
These articles about synthetic actors taking real actor's jobs or all-digital films being more cost effective or more time efficient than filmed films make me laugh. They show such a lack of insight or expertise in what they're actually about.
I'd hope a slashdot contributor would be a little more in the know but I guess you can't expect them to be any more on the money than the ignorant mainstream press.
"The two Guilds spend a lot of time looking out for the interests of their members, the people who actually create the content you watch, so I would say that they are within their rights to assert a Eurpoean-style 'moral right' to a work of art as its creator."
I'd go on a limb and say, particularly in the case of the Writer's Guild, they also make asses of themselves with the same anecdotal regularity. Case in point, it was the Writer's Guild that blocked Steven Soderberg from getting his just cinematographer credit on the film "Traffic". They were perfectly okay with his pseudonym taking the honors, for whatever fucktard reason. When he made "Ocean's 11" they gave him permission but he's decided to keep with the pseudonym when he acts as his own cinematographer.
Again, WGA example, the screenwriter brought in to do the necessary rewrites for "The Game" was barred from getting credit on the film though, in the mind of David Fincher he was the writer most responsible for the story filmed. In tribute he names the writer with characters in "Fight Club".
Maybe the writer wasn't guild. So what if he did the work? Why should James Cameron be forced to join the editor's union so that he can get an edting credit on his own film even though he's edited every film he's directed? Ridiculous.
The entertainment guilds have run much of commercial production out of America, helped weaken the post production industry as a whole and have mostly hurt (in the case of non-A level or markee actors) the "littlest" people in their ranks.
And the MPAA...Jack Valenti is the devil.
Then you can extrapolate from that: Do they even know enough about Windows to know they're wasting effort by NOT using their right mouse button for context sensitive pop-up menus? ...Do they know enough about computers to have a preference to be using Windows in the first place or the brand of box they own? ...Do they even really need a computer? ...Do they really need as much computer as they have?
This is fun!
Actually, the average consumer is a Windows user and they're familiar with using more than one button on their mice.
;)
All major 3D modeling and animation packages are available for Linux and have been for at least a year. Rendering too.
What's with this idea that this or that has to take over or it's considered a failure. How about just provide a functional alternative? A comfortable environment for using the tool you want to use?
Me, I'm still going to have to wait for this on my Mac because SESI doesn't look like it's porting Houdini anytime soon. I've no interest in Maya so I'll have to keep my AMD boxes around for a while.
The physics only look bad to the less than 1% of the audience that knows or cares anything about physics. Movies aren't reality, or, at least the ones where a question of FX physics would even come up likely aren't.
A more appropriate question would be, "are the physics portrayed in a particular film consistent with the tone of the film?" The zero-G explosions in "Star Wars" were absolutely appropriate. Would these same techniques be appropriate for "Pearl Harbor"? No. The film, more than Newton, should be taken into account.
You might make a suggestion like that to a director once. That things "don't work like that" is totally irrelevant. The director wants it. You do it. Or you find another job.
"Making backups of film copies is very expensive, especially if any restoration work is needed.Prints cost many thousands of dollars.Then you're also looking at generation loss (each time you copy the film the image on the copy has degraded somewhat).
Making backups of digital copies is cheap by comparison, and a copy is just as good as the original."
Digital copies to what? Tape? CD? DVD?
Digital tape decomposes much faster than proper film archival methods. CDs do too and so do DVDs. Many folks in the music industry had to wise up to the fact that DIGITAL as a savior was sold to them too early. Jeff Lynn nearly lost several tracks for his last ELO album because the digital tapes he'd recorded on but TEN YEARS ago were toast. He had one shot to get the tracks off of them before they were lost forever.
Also, the amount of data needed to store an entire film, digitally, at ARCHIVAL QUALITY (read 10bit log scan) would cost a mint. HDTV telecines is not, I repeat, not archival quality. Neither is an 8bit lut version of a film scanned at 2K.
Large capacity tapes aren't cheap. It would actually be more cost effective to back the film up onto hard drives and then store the drives. Most any other form of digital back up would be one, more or all of the following: slower, more expensive and much more prone to deterioration. All digital means are too new to really know longterm stability performance outside theory. They said CDs would last forever, remember? It was a lie.
Actually, most every large facility and many medium sized facilities are paying overtime now. All the majors do, in some way.
...and it makes me less stressful over the fact that my pixels in "Sim0ne" will live as long, lol.
Some might say this was necessary to avoid unionizing the industry. But artists are compensated better now than even three years ago, largely. Every facility will be different and have perks that other places don't.
Rewards are relative. I worked 6+months (based on my timecard) in about two to two and a half months on "X-Men" to turn Senator Kelly into a puddle of water. I lost weight. I gained weight. I'm sure I lost a few hairs and greyed a few others. But seeing the shot screen in the finals reel to applause was an incredible feeling. Seeing the film in a theatre and feeling the reaction of the audience was fantastic. It made it all worthwhile to me. And it will exist for as long as that film exists. Those are my pixels. I call that rewarding.
I'm sure Thad will have his own comments. But I'll say "no". There's nothing that's been done to date to suggest that it's possible in the near future. Nothing.
The best contemporary examples, and I think, best uses for a synthespian, is where a real actor would be in danger. Head replacement on stunt doubles ("XXX" has some incredible work from DD on this score) or fully digital stunt doubles will see the most dividends from work heading towards more and more realistic humans.
But synthetic actors for the sake of not using humans, and in a way that's totally convincing? Not in our lifetime.
The CG quality of recent films has NOT dropped. What has increased is the number of marginal films with CG quality that's reflective of their budgets getting sometimes twice the film budget for marketing, making them appear to be bigger films. Overall, quality has increased. Compare "Mummy 2", weak as it was, to the "Mortal Kombat" films some years back.
Almost every film will have its stronger and weaker shots. The same year some of these stinkers came out you also had "Pearl Harbor", which had some of the most transparently created digital effects shots in recent memory. Say what you like about the film (I've already said it all I'm sure) but the FX were as close to perfect as anything I've ever seen. It should have taken home the Oscar.
Where is the money going? Actors. One headline actor will get usually twice to three times the entire FX budget for a big Hollywood film. Most of a film's budget, more than 50% and sometimes approaching 80%, is spent "above the line". That means the principle cast, director, producer, etc. FX, crew and all of post-production is "below the line". And most big films spend more on marketing, sometimes much more, than above and below combined.
Yeah, while I know (in an online sense) Thad and agree with many of his insights, I'd have to say that there are many caveats with his statement on how "rough" it is as a CG artist.
I knew I wanted to do this since I was about fifteen and made it happen, though my own work and a little luck. I can't imagine doing anything else for a "job". But, all humility aside, I'm pretty good at what I do. The people who are good at what they do in this industry aren't wanting. I've never had to go "looking" for a job.
I'm eating balogna sandwiches while making my own indie film right now but I feel very secure in the knowledge that if things don't work out I can literally pick up the phone and be back in business. Gimme a couple days and I can work anywhere I want in the civilized world (and a few uncivilized places too).
What the industry doesn't need is more wannabes and folks that can't pull their own weight. There's stress (moreso for folks like Thad that have to wear the entrepreneur hat as well as FX artist), and there are many headaches in your future if you choose to accept this mission, but there are many rewards.
Right. It's a specialized tool for folks that use tools that largely work BETTER with a three button mouse. I'm surprised that MAYA for OSX doesn't support a 3-Button mouse. Just the thought of doing 3D animation and modeling with an one-button mouse makes my gums ache.
Yeah, you can use CTRL or ALT or APPLE buttons, but largely these button combos are already mapped to other functions. Since when is using two hands optimal over just one.
Plus, Quake on a one-button mouse gargles the fat sack of Satan, lol.