How to Work Efficiently
A lot of times I hear people complaining how slow this or that program is. “shake is so slow”, “motion is total crap” or “why is this taking so long?”
Well, guess what, there is actually a solution to it. And the magic word is workflow. We are working on pretty heavy projects most of the time. HD material (even if the output will be PAL in the end) or lots of layers or 3D layers. All that stuff is by definition slow. Especially if you work in a more complex setup then one or two layers. Add to that, that we are working in a network based environment and you get a workflow slow as molasses.
Read More...How to Behave as New Guy - I Guess, I Wasn't the Only One
I just found an article on the BusinessWeek site entitled “How Not to Be the Obnoxious Newcomer”. It seems that author Liz Ryan has also stumbled over one too many of those annoying people that waltz in on their first day and step on everybody’s toes, just like I did a while ago when I wrote “If you are a newbie, don’t act like a pro!”.
Liz thinks:
There’s no doubt that every organization has a few best practices to share. As the new kid on the block, you can share what you’ve learned elsewhere and make a real contribution to your new employer’s operations. But if you lend that expertise in such a way that people roll their eyes and drift away when you enter a conversation, you’re not helping anyone—even worse, you’re setting yourself up to have negative credibility with your peers.
Cinema 4D Artist Wanted
Hello dear readers, my friend and mentor Udo is searching for a Cinema 4D artist for 4-6 weeks in Munich.
Requirements are
- Required
- Cinema 4D knowledge with experience in TV broadcasting workflows is required
- nice to have
- shake experience
- 3D tracking experience
For more info look at the full article.
Read More...Parallels 3 and Messiah on Mac Revisited
Today I tested out the new Parallels 3 with Messiah again, just to see if there are any improvements with the new 3D support. To my surprise it wasn’t the speed improvements that made the biggest impact on me — it was the mouse support. It finally works! No more shooting objects into space or having no control over the attribute boxes. It just works.
Now all I need to find out is, why OS X sometimes locks up my dongle and how I can make Parallels mount the dongle again. If any of you know about this issue, then please let me know, because the Parallels support team sucks (meaning they have yet to reply to any of the mails I sent them)
Solo - a Danish Documentary
Hello everyone, I have to make a completely selfish plug for a movie I worked on lately. It is called Solo and is about Jon, the first winner of the Danish Popstars show. I don’t speak a word of Danish — well, at least not enough to fully understand the movie — but the critics seem to love it and it is a big success for us so far.
Me and my team worked on several things, some which made it into the final movie and some which ended up on the cutting floor. We had some nice effects and compositings in there, but the director decided that it is a documentary not an effects movie. A good decision if you ask me, although it is a pity the effects never me it into public.
What is left is a few name removals from signs and some other invisible effects to increase the quality of the material like degraining or resizing and reframing, etc.
We are shipping the DVD which has English subtitles (Yay! I finally can understand what I contributed to!!!) over the company website and through the normal DVD stores beginning of June. So just grab a copy and make the success even bigger, will ya?
Largest Lawsuit Against Spammers Ever
Seems like we are finally getting somewhere with our fight against spam. Project Honeypot — to which I am a proud contributor — finally has collected enough data about spammers to file a huge lawsuit against those lowlifes that make your inbox choke every day. I know they certainly do it with my inbox. I receive about 200-500 spam mails per day. Luckily my spam-filter is top notch, so it requires only about 30 seconds a day where I think about spam.
You can help Project Honeypot too if you have a website or blog or — even better — own a webserver or hosted account that allows you to donate a MX entry. It doesn’t cost anything is virtually maintenance free and doesn’t strain your bandwidth. But it helps the fight against spammers. So it is a no-brainer, right?
Just hop over and sign up for your account, so you can help fighting spam, too.
Yikes!!! Is It End of April Already??
Oh boy, I guess this blog has fallen asleep and died slowly without me noticing. Sorry for that. I was (again) buried in work and didn’t feel the urge to sack even more on my plate. Bad me, I know. But that is just how it is with my blogging rhythm I guess. I won’t go an apologize for it anymore. There is no point in it. It is just how this blog works I guess. For the next days I will try to care about it again.
Anyway, I still have a few unpublished articles which I intend to make public. So keep looking for them in the next few days.
Eggington Productions Is Hiring for a TV Series
Hi everyone, I know I have been absent for while (again). It just seems to happen in my life every few weeks. I guess that is just how this blog will work.
Anyway, my friend William Eggington of Eggington Productions is in the pre-production phase of an animated CG TV series. For the final production he is looking for animators, riggers, texturing and shading artist, TD’s, compositors… well, basically the whole pipeline of CG productions.
Read More...Twitter for Colloquy
I don’t know if you already know this service called Twitter. It can be described as a IM independent status message, so you can notify people of your current doings if you like.
Coda Hale created a Quicksilver action to post conveniently to Twitter. Ted Leung thought it would be nice to have Growl notifications in the mix and Matt Matteson thought it needed a bit more sparkle by adding iChat support. Well, now I add two more options to the mix.
Read More...Maya 8.5 Brings an Intel Version to the Mac - Update
As you can see, Autodesk finally made a Universal Binary (a native Intel version for you non-Mac heads) of Maya, one of the leading 3D all-round-packages on the market. They announced it two days ago here.
I can’t wait to test out the speed increase to the PowerPC versions. Let’s hope that this also means we finally get a little bit of goodness from the plugin developers, who neglected the Mac platform totally. I always described using Maya on a Mac like sitting in front of a closed candy store until now. What good is it to have the candy store (Maya), if you cannot get at the candy (because there are no Mac versions of the plugins)?
UPDATE: I finally installed the new version between two projects. The difference is amazing. In my current project the rendertimes where 1:47min per frame with MentalRay. Now they are 25sec per frame. That is just nuts!!! 3D is finally fun again.
Playing Wii Is Hell
Well, not the actual playing, but beware of waking up on the next morning after you had 5 hours of fun playing Wii Sports and Play. They should sell it with a big red warning sticker that says: ”Geeks beware!!”
Or in other words: I feel every muscle. Hehe.
Man this console is pure fun and everyone should get one. Honestly. The one thing they missed is some exercises to warm you up, because that could seriously help with avoiding suddenly feeling muscles you never knew you had. Man I have gotten untrained I think I will go and caress my hurting body a bit. Maybe play a bit more Wii ? They say training is the best treatment against sore muscles, don’t they?