I wanted to share this litte trick with you for quite a while now, but of course I have been busy and other things came in the way. They always do.

I work with my MacBook Pro at home and at the office. That is of course nice, because it is my only base of operations and I have everything in one place.

But do you know the feeling that you are working with your laptop at work and don’t want anyone to snoop around on it, because it also is your private laptop and has all kinds of personal stuff on it? I know I do.

Tags: screencast, workflow, tips

I have been hired at Pixomondo Images in Ludwigsburg to work as VFX Coordinator for some of their recent projects. This is an exciting opportunity. The company size is considerably bigger then most companies I have worked so far and I have to handle several smaller projects instead of one or two big projects. That is a new challenge and I am looking forward to master it in the coming weeks.

Being a part of Pixomondo makes me proud, as this is a very professional, yet cool company to work for. I have a chance to stay with them for a longer time if I am not messing up the first 1,5 test months. Wish me luck.

Tags: producing, vfx, pixomondo

It is official now. The production of "Prisoners of the Sun" has been put on hold. All employees and freelancers have been laid of as of 30th April 2008.

According to rumors, it seems the legal situation of the movie was not researched thoroughly before going into post production.

It is a pity, because we were at a stage, where all the pipelines were set up and we just started our first two full CG shots. We were actually starting to have some good old VFX fun. But not anymore. Now we have 20 people hunting for jobs again.

It really makes me sad to give up a great little company. We had a killer team. Thanks to all of you for being so great.

P.S.: If anyone has an open position for a compositor or VFX producer let me know.

Tags: vfx, producing, movies

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.

Tags: vfx, pipelines, workflow

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.

Tags: social

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.

Tags: vfx, 3D, jobs

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?

Tags: vfx, movies

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.

Tags: jobs, vfx, 3D

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.

Tags: 3D

Last week we spoke about naming conventions, which got inspired by a topic covered on Lifehacker and 43 Folders. A great start to a more streamlined workflow. But what good is a great filename, when you are unable to find your files in the chaotic folder structure you might have?

For exactly this reason we will talk about how to get an optimized folder structure for multi-media projects. I will obviously have a bias to look at it from a compositors/3D guys/VFX supervisors view, but I am also able to accommodate you editors and other departments.

What we will end up with is an understanding of what is important in a file and folder structure, so you are able to easily adjust the two templates, that we will discuss, to your needs.

Tags: workflow, tips

Last time I talked about the basic ingredients of a working naming convention, which got inspired by a topic covered on Lifehacker and 43 Folders. What to avoid — like never using the word “final” in any circumstances — and what to include — for example version numbers.

This time I will show you how to use this new gained knowledge and plug its elements together into a working template for a professional naming convention. Just read on to find out how it’s done.

Tags: workflow, tips

Remember Emilia? She did this song called “Big Big World” about 7 years ago:

Guess what? She is back, with her new song “Var Minut”, which means “Every Minute” and is the usual thing about love I guess. I can’t really tell though, because she is singing in Swedish and I don’t understand a single word of it. ;-)

Anyway, I was VFX Supervisor on set and also the main guy to do the VFX in post. Time was short — as always — so the quality is barely enough for TV but should be bearable for the web. There are 8 greenscreen shots and 7 fire-only shots that we had 5 days to work on.

Tags: vfx

special-testfinal3apreview5b

Do you know filenames like this? Or even worse, do you still use them? I did too. But I learned how to avoid these ugly names that no one can decipher 5 minutes later. And in this two parts series — that got inspired by a topic covered on Lifehacker and 43 Folders — I will show you how you can get a clean working naming convention, too. Just read on. It will take less then 5 minutes — promise.

Tags: workflow, tips

I was on set last week and I felt like back in school again. People preparing lamps and set pieces, just like preparing for a school fest.

I have this feeling more often lately when talking to my colleagues. A feeling like a teenager at play. Like me and my buddy writing a script and discussing how we solve this issue and approach that scene. A feeling of adventure, of doing something like the big guys.

It is like I have no idea what I am doing, but so do all the others. The only difference between now and then being, that it is our daily job and we get paid for it. Is that good or bad?

We get to play our favorite game, sure, but on the other hand we call ourselves professionals and charge money for playing around, pretending to have a clue.

Do you know that feeling? What do you think about this, let me know in the comments.

This is just a quick, very quick! demonstration of using the Messiah “Bloat” effector to displace a sphere. The Bloat effect has a procedural shape driving the displacement which is been animated. One advantage is that it can be seen in real time in a viewport and its dynamic.

• Bloat-Video
• Bloat-Video 02
• Bloat-Project File

Tags: tips, 3D, Messiah

We met our new interns today and they all seemed very nice. One of them made a little bad impression though. Not only was he new in the company, but he also made bold statements about his future work. And he had never touched that area before, so what he said was either over the top or just wrong. Both things made him look like an arrogant guy or someone who has no clue at all (I am not sure which one fits better).

Tags: tips

It seems like a niche market that had to be filled sooner or later. After Apples decision to quit the development — and with it the support and maintenance — of shake with version 4.1, there is a big hole in the support area of shake. Of course, there are the normal forums like fxshare (formerly highend2d) or cgTalk, but for deep down support it is always nice to have the developers at hand, because only they know, what really goes on inside the code.

Well, I was not the only one who had that thought. Billy Woody, the primary support engineer from Apple, said goodby to Apple and hello to the shake community. He will be supporting shake users from his new base at shakesupport.com.

Tags: vfx

Yes, you understood it correctly. Messiah is able to run on the new Intel Macs. And I am not talking about BootCamp here fellows. I am talking about not having to restart your Mac to run Messiah. Being able to check mail or work in your favourite Mac application and simultaneously running the 3D character animation software Messiah. Don’t believe me? Here is the proof:

Tags: Messiah, Mac, 3D

Here you go guys. A screencapture for all of you who want to see the actual speed of this baby.

I captured at 800×600, but had it also running at 1680×1050 with no noticable difference in speed.

At first the scene (generously offered by Wiliam Eggington - it is a WIP, so don’t look at the animation itself, ok?) runs in MetaNurbsed geometry. Later I have it un-MetaNurbsed, and that run basically realtime. Even with QuickTimes running in the background.

• Demo-Video

QuickTime 7 is needed for this or anything that is able to play a H.264 codec.

Tags: Messiah, Mac, 3D

As so many people from the MentalRay community seem to have a big problem with my motion blur test - and only that is seems, they don’t even see the parts, where I said good things about MentalRay - here is a small update with new images and the supposedly faster Rapid Motion Blur of MentalRay.

Tags: 3D

Well, guess what? As I already thought it would happen, some people don’t seem to like the conclusions of my test. Zealots are so easy to predict and so hard to please.

• “You cannot do it like this. Testing the renderers with a simple teapot in the scene is totally unfair!”
• “You didn’t use the right MotionBlur Settings, that is unfair!”
• “You didn’t tweak MentalRay right, there is way more to tweak to make it faster!”
• “Sure Renderman is great, but Renderman for Maya is a completely different product. You can’t compare that!”

Tags: 3D

Finally I found the time to do my little Renderman - MentalRay comparison. I used Maya 6.5 on a Mac OS X - which comes with MentalRay 3.4.1.5 and the Pixar Renderman for Maya plugin version 1.2 evaluation.

As test scenes, I used the tutorial scenes that come with the Renderman for Maya plugin. I am aware, that this might be a bit unfair to MentalRay, but my reasoning is that the features I tested should work in both renderers and the test scenes where not specifially pro Renderman anyway. I also tweaked the scenes to get the best out of Renderman and MentalRay, so as to not penalize either one.

The tested features where:

• Displacement
• Motion Blur
• Instances (as a side effect of the Motion Blur test)
• Depth of Field
• Fur and soft shadows
• Reflections
• Global Illumination

For a side by side comparison of rendered output and rendertimes please download the following PDF → Renderman vs MentalRay comparison

Update: MasterZap over at cgTalk pointed me to a few shortcomings in my tests. First he is of the opinion, that I should have used MentalRay’s “Rapid Motion Blur”. Every time I tested this feature, I either got artefacts or it was not significantly faster, so I just didn’t use it here. Second, he points out that MentalRay has something similar to Renderman’s DeepShadow Maps. I forgot about them completely. My bad.

Tags: 3D

Is CG dull and boring. I asked this question in my last post. Well, since then I have seen a recent production called “Elephants Dream“, it is the first big project released, completely done with open source software, in particular Blender, the open source 3D suite. It shows that Blender is able to produce nice stuff, but it also validates my thoughts concerning dull CG.

First, I didn’t get the story. That might not be my fault, but I was never a fan of these artistic movies. Have something to say? Better make sure people understand, what you are saying. Have nothing to say? Then shut up! But that is just me.

Second, the movie is everything I talked about last time. It tries to look realistic, but fails in doing so. And because it fails, all it’s flaws become all the more obvious. Sad but true. I was distracted by the stiffness of the characters all the time. And I mean not only in motion, but also in the looks. The makers tried to be so true to nature, that everything feels like true…plastic.

Tags: 3D

The Doncaster Road End blog has posted about the Infernal video we re-did for the world cup (you can read about it in one of my older posts). In their post they review several songs that were… er… well… mutilated to make a quick buck of the world cup. “From London to Berlin” actually made a reasonable standing. Thanks guys!

I am aware that this was no high quality piece, but believe me, it was at least a challenge from the technical side. And I actually think it works better then the original version. In this new one the story tells better and clearer.

Anyway, thanks for the review.

Tags: vfx

Keith Lango has an interesting article on his blog concerning CG pictures/movies and how they have become boring. Keith is of the opinion that the CG look has kind of worn of. We no longer have the “wow” moments when watching a nice full CG movie. And I must say I know what he means.

Nowadays every guy in the backrow knows about 3D and VFX and that it isn’t a secret art. And that kind of pisses me off. I liked to do magic with pictures. I love the expression on the faces of people watching my (or any cool stuff for that matter) and be completely blown away by the uniqueness or pure beauty of effects. Maybe I am a nerd, but it was fun.

Today all we do is making stuff realistic. Yeah! Bring it on! Let’s do stuff like we see it every day without CG!

I have only one word for that: boring

Tags: 3D

There are a lot of nice rendering choices out there. The range goes from free - like Aqsis, Blender or Yafray - to bundled renderers that come with the 3D package of choice - Maya software renderer or Lightwave come to mind - to seperate high-end renderers - like MentalRay (although that comes bundled with a lot of big players nowadays) or Renderman. Which one to choose? And which one is actually affordable? That is indeed a tough question. The guys at ZAON studios have a nice overview of what makes a renderer good. It is all about what the renderer is supposed to be used for. Nothing more nothing less.

In the case of Fridthjof Film, we need a renderer that is able to be as fast as possible, while doing a great job with fine detail. Flickering is one of the major issues we deal with. As we are working with Maya, MentalRay seems to be the logical choice, but it is damn slow when it comes to make fine details really smooth. MentalRay doesn’t allow to adjust the pixel sampling independent from the sampling of shaders, which makes us increase overall render time when we only needed to increase the render time of one parameter - and that in the long run increases the render times into unacceptable regions. Sad but true.

Tags: 3D

I thought it is time to show a little of the work we have done so far. All videos should play fine in Quicktime player version 7, but might also run in earlier versions, I didn’t test that.

The first project or a thing that is still in development, but is already used in production, Monika and I are developing a template for magazine commercials. This short clip shows a rendertest I did, which was also used to show off to potential customers.
→ Car Magazine Test

The next two clips are show two projects we did both last week. The first shows a 3D CD-Cover for the Soccer Worldcup’s theme song Bob Sinclair’s “Love Generation”.
→ CD Commercial

The second is a remake of the Infernal video “From Paris to Berlin”, which we remade for the Worldcup into “From London to Berlin” with a cartoon caricature of Wayne Rooney of the English top players.
This was a real challenge, because we had to re-create the whole thing without the source materials. We only had the final product in uncompressed quality and a few Maya scene files. Quite a challenge for a one week project. What do you think about it Udo (if you ever see this)?
→ Music Video “From London to Berlin”
→ Original Version “From Paris to Berlin”