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)
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...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.
Displacement Using Bloat Effector in Messiah
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.
Behold - I Give You Messiah for Mac OS X
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:
Messiah on Mac OS X - Moving Proof
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.
QuickTime 7 is needed for this or anything that is able to play a H.264 codec.
Renderman vs MentalRay Comparison - Update
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.
Read More...Renderman vs MentalRay - the Uproar
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!”
Renderman vs MentalRay Comparison
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
Read More...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.
Is CG Dull and Boring? Yes! …And NO!
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.
Read More...Is CG Dull and Boring? Are We?
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
Read More...3D Rendering Choices
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.
Read More...