Um, this is assuming that your PDF-to-paper path is correctly calibrated and measured.
Which it probably isn't.
This is what that money is paying for - a printout of the target that's guaranteed to be within a certain range of variability from the Right Colors. And to have the Right Aspect Ratio. And the Known Reflective Characteristics.
What you print out on your Epson or HP or whatever, probably using typing paper instead of photo paper, probably with color management off, is not going to work for precise calibration of a camera.
I did - but making it available like this gives me the suspicion that there won't be an Expression 4.
And whatever it appears as in the future, I bet there won't be a Mac version...
This probably also uses technology Microsoft got when they bought Creature House. They had two products: "Expression", a natural-media vector package (Expression : Illustrator:: Painter : Photoshop), and, more importantly, "Living Cels", an animation program that applied the same natural-media techniques involved in Expression to animation.
I miss Expression.
Did you actually watch the movie, or just collect the promo images? That movie was a perfect example of the 'Uncanny Valley' i action; the modelling and rendering was wonderful, but the animation was shit. It was mostly raw motion capture. The characters didn't breathe, they flailed their hands around stiffly like balls of meat at the end of their arms; they were moving corpses.
Watching that full-screen kiss closeup was really horrible - though that one actually had careful facial animation, my brain was thoroughly convinced I was watching corpses, not people, by that time.
As an American animator, all I can really say to this is "Welcome to the club, guys."
There was a period in the post-Lion King boom when animators were being paid like movie stars, Dreamworks and Warners and Fox were opening feature studios and creating competition for wages and lots of jobs. Things were good. Then everyone, including the Mouse, sabotaged themselves by just trying to duplicate Lion King over and over.
There are next to no feature animation jobs any more. There's Pixar's new 2D studio and there's Legacy. I think Dreamworks still has something in the pipe. 2D has been claimed dead by the executives because they killed it with endless meddling and second-guessing. 3D isn't the salvation - does anyone remember Disney's all-3D Dinosaur? - it's just the medium Pixar used to bring their well-crafted stories to life.
The only drawn animation jobs in the States are in TV cartoons, and it's only about 20 people per show - directors, character designers, storyboarders. The show goes out to who-knows-where. Canada, if you're lucky.
Flash production was a hope for about one year. It was going to let us make shows in-house, let animators actually pay their bills doing something like what they loved, because "flash is cheaper". Well... no. Now you just have the option of making an even cheaper show by shipping the work out of the States, to a place that uses Flash. Again, if you're lucky, you get a Canadian house to do the work - less communication problems, a common culture of what's seen as "good animation". It probably goes out to the Phillippines in most cases.
Programmers aren't the only people being fucked up the ass by "globalization". Animators have been screwed by it since, oh, the late sixties, before the fields most Slashdotters work in even existed.
Besides who wants a pink MP3 player anyway...women?
I mean, hey, a pink iPod Mini would match my hair, and that'd be pretty damn cool.
Re:What if you didn't like American Gods?
on
King Rat
·
· Score: 1
Poor Meiville. Rat is a far stronger book than Neverwhere, but the similar 'underside of London' theme shoves it perpetually into Gaiman's shadow. The only thing Meiville really has in common with Gaiman is being somewhat English, and a tendency towards horror-tinged dark urban fantasy - London is a major character in Rat, and the fictitious cities of New Crobuzon and Armada are very much major characters in Perdido Street Station and The Scar.
It's one of the better pieces of fantasy I've read in recent years, and I've been spending some time with some of the masterworks lately.
Gaiman's fantasy writing always feels hollow at its core to me. Works fine in comics, but there's something missing when he's not working with a visual artist.
This is something like the tenth tme I'm seeing discussion of MDI in the comments of this story.
Um, MDI is that thing Windows does, where all the windows a program spawns go into one huge grey-backgrounded window, right?
Because, you know, lots of graphics professionals use Macs, and, um, this doesn't exist on Macs, at all - Photoshop on a Mac manifests as a floating toolbar, an assortment of floating palettes, and one or more document windows floating above your desktop and any other programs you may have running.
Wanting MDI in the Gimp is an 'it should work like Windows' issue, not an 'it should work like Photoshop' issue. If MDI is part of your criteria for 'how Photoshop works', then the copy of Photoshop installed on my Mac 'doesn't work like Photoshop'.
French animated feature, very bizarre and entertaining. Lots more fun to look at than any American feature cartoon in recent memory. It reminded me why I got into animation in the first place.
OSX. All gates closed by default. *smirk*
And this is the security problem - that Aunt Marge has no clue that there are all these open doors on her Windows box. She just wants the damn thing to work, in a consistent and predictable manner.
Well... why do you need a password to run something on your own computer?
It's sitting right there in your home office. Behind at least one locked door. Maybe even a couple.
I mean, I have my machine set up to automatically log me in; I turn it on and there it is, ready to go. There's me, my room-mate, and nobody else. I trust my room-mate to stay off my machine; she trusts me to stay off of hers.
I'm a grown adult, sharing an apartment with someone I occasionally have sex with. I still reflexively hide personal discussions when she comes into my room, switch to 'safer' webpage if I'm looking at something weird... She does the same, really. And neither of us gets offended by it.
Privacy is good.
Do you also insist that every telephone conversation your kids have be in the same room with you? That you be able to read their diary at any moment?
I haven't read any of Noon's work, but I've read all the Banks I can get my hand on (don't forget the 'non-M' books, published under the name 'Iain Banks'; they're not inevitably SF as the 'M' books are, but they're also rich and surprising). Also, I'd suggest Michael Swanwick and Tim Powers. Both write similarly convoluted and packed novels.
And of course you've read Vernor Vinge's 'A Fire Upon the Deep' and 'A Deepness in the Sky', right? Those are also pretty heavy, with the realm being a major character...
I thought it was some kind of hidden subliminal significance, suggesting Important Links between the scenes the dots were in, or some kind of contest that would pop up when it was released on DVD.
This probably says more about the way my mind works than anything else.
I'm an artist; I've used a lot of different pens over time. One of the ones that's earned a permanant place in my pencil case is the Rotring ArtPen. It's a cartridge fountain pen, runs about $20 at an art store. I love it because it has a really nice balance; it almost vanishes as an interface between my hand and the paper.
Get the F, not the EF, as the EF will clog.
Unfortunately, I believe they may be discontinued. I have several.
Slashdot Mirror
Which it probably isn't.
This is what that money is paying for - a printout of the target that's guaranteed to be within a certain range of variability from the Right Colors. And to have the Right Aspect Ratio. And the Known Reflective Characteristics.
What you print out on your Epson or HP or whatever, probably using typing paper instead of photo paper, probably with color management off, is not going to work for precise calibration of a camera.
Well, created in the fifties, but popularized in the sizties...
I did - but making it available like this gives me the suspicion that there won't be an Expression 4. And whatever it appears as in the future, I bet there won't be a Mac version...
This probably also uses technology Microsoft got when they bought Creature House. They had two products: "Expression", a natural-media vector package (Expression : Illustrator :: Painter : Photoshop), and, more importantly, "Living Cels", an animation program that applied the same natural-media techniques involved in Expression to animation.
I miss Expression.
Tentacles are the new black.
Did you actually watch the movie, or just collect the promo images? That movie was a perfect example of the 'Uncanny Valley' i action; the modelling and rendering was wonderful, but the animation was shit. It was mostly raw motion capture. The characters didn't breathe, they flailed their hands around stiffly like balls of meat at the end of their arms; they were moving corpses. Watching that full-screen kiss closeup was really horrible - though that one actually had careful facial animation, my brain was thoroughly convinced I was watching corpses, not people, by that time.
As an American animator, all I can really say to this is "Welcome to the club, guys."
There was a period in the post-Lion King boom when animators were being paid like movie stars, Dreamworks and Warners and Fox were opening feature studios and creating competition for wages and lots of jobs. Things were good. Then everyone, including the Mouse, sabotaged themselves by just trying to duplicate Lion King over and over.
There are next to no feature animation jobs any more. There's Pixar's new 2D studio and there's Legacy. I think Dreamworks still has something in the pipe. 2D has been claimed dead by the executives because they killed it with endless meddling and second-guessing. 3D isn't the salvation - does anyone remember Disney's all-3D Dinosaur? - it's just the medium Pixar used to bring their well-crafted stories to life.
The only drawn animation jobs in the States are in TV cartoons, and it's only about 20 people per show - directors, character designers, storyboarders. The show goes out to who-knows-where. Canada, if you're lucky.
Flash production was a hope for about one year. It was going to let us make shows in-house, let animators actually pay their bills doing something like what they loved, because "flash is cheaper". Well... no. Now you just have the option of making an even cheaper show by shipping the work out of the States, to a place that uses Flash. Again, if you're lucky, you get a Canadian house to do the work - less communication problems, a common culture of what's seen as "good animation". It probably goes out to the Phillippines in most cases.
Programmers aren't the only people being fucked up the ass by "globalization". Animators have been screwed by it since, oh, the late sixties, before the fields most Slashdotters work in even existed.
Besides who wants a pink MP3 player anyway ...women?
I mean, hey, a pink iPod Mini would match my hair, and that'd be pretty damn cool.
Poor Meiville. Rat is a far stronger book than Neverwhere, but the similar 'underside of London' theme shoves it perpetually into Gaiman's shadow. The only thing Meiville really has in common with Gaiman is being somewhat English, and a tendency towards horror-tinged dark urban fantasy - London is a major character in Rat, and the fictitious cities of New Crobuzon and Armada are very much major characters in Perdido Street Station and The Scar.
It's one of the better pieces of fantasy I've read in recent years, and I've been spending some time with some of the masterworks lately.
Gaiman's fantasy writing always feels hollow at its core to me. Works fine in comics, but there's something missing when he's not working with a visual artist.
This is something like the tenth tme I'm seeing discussion of MDI in the comments of this story.
Um, MDI is that thing Windows does, where all the windows a program spawns go into one huge grey-backgrounded window, right?
Because, you know, lots of graphics professionals use Macs, and, um, this doesn't exist on Macs, at all - Photoshop on a Mac manifests as a floating toolbar, an assortment of floating palettes, and one or more document windows floating above your desktop and any other programs you may have running.
Wanting MDI in the Gimp is an 'it should work like Windows' issue, not an 'it should work like Photoshop' issue. If MDI is part of your criteria for 'how Photoshop works', then the copy of Photoshop installed on my Mac 'doesn't work like Photoshop'.
Also known as "Belleville Rendez-Vous".
French animated feature, very bizarre and entertaining. Lots more fun to look at than any American feature cartoon in recent memory. It reminded me why I got into animation in the first place.
OSX. All gates closed by default. *smirk* And this is the security problem - that Aunt Marge has no clue that there are all these open doors on her Windows box. She just wants the damn thing to work, in a consistent and predictable manner.
Well... why do you need a password to run something on your own computer?
It's sitting right there in your home office. Behind at least one locked door. Maybe even a couple.
I mean, I have my machine set up to automatically log me in; I turn it on and there it is, ready to go. There's me, my room-mate, and nobody else. I trust my room-mate to stay off my machine; she trusts me to stay off of hers.
I'm a grown adult, sharing an apartment with someone I occasionally have sex with. I still reflexively hide personal discussions when she comes into my room, switch to 'safer' webpage if I'm looking at something weird... She does the same, really. And neither of us gets offended by it.
Privacy is good.
Do you also insist that every telephone conversation your kids have be in the same room with you? That you be able to read their diary at any moment?
I'd call it "good". Genre is bogus.
I haven't read any of Noon's work, but I've read all the Banks I can get my hand on (don't forget the 'non-M' books, published under the name 'Iain Banks'; they're not inevitably SF as the 'M' books are, but they're also rich and surprising). Also, I'd suggest Michael Swanwick and Tim Powers. Both write similarly convoluted and packed novels.
And of course you've read Vernor Vinge's 'A Fire Upon the Deep' and 'A Deepness in the Sky', right? Those are also pretty heavy, with the realm being a major character...
I thought it was some kind of hidden subliminal significance, suggesting Important Links between the scenes the dots were in, or some kind of contest that would pop up when it was released on DVD. This probably says more about the way my mind works than anything else.
I'm an artist; I've used a lot of different pens over time. One of the ones that's earned a permanant place in my pencil case is the Rotring ArtPen. It's a cartridge fountain pen, runs about $20 at an art store. I love it because it has a really nice balance; it almost vanishes as an interface between my hand and the paper. Get the F, not the EF, as the EF will clog. Unfortunately, I believe they may be discontinued. I have several.