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My name is Paul Greer, I work full time at BDH, making computer animation for the telly.
This is my main blog with news, work updates, new drawings, stories, comics, notebook pages, how tos, animations and link dumps. My more impulsive internet scrapbook is here.
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365 Day Sketch Project Update: 55-68

| Paul Greer

I suppose I’ve lost the “everyday” part of this project, but, you know life’s too short to get stressed about these things. The point is I am having a lovely time drawing stuff from (mostly) life, my sense of perception and observation has developed and sharpened, my skill with the various implements I am using has improved.

So I am going to keep going with it, even though I am breaking the rules somewhat (there are no rules).

Something that seems to be happening also is sometimes I will finish a drawing and think it’s not great but it gets just as much feedback across the networks as the others.

At the moment I have them automatically cross posting to Twitter and Tumblr. Still haven’t quite got the guts to fire them off to Facebook as well. Not sure why that is, I have always struggled with Facebook, and hate the idea of oversharing on there. But for Tumblr and Twitter I’ll overshare with no worries, which is odd because people who I am connected to on Facebook are more likely to be people I know “Away From Keyboard” as it were.

Anyway, as ever these are embeds from Instagram, you can follow me there if you want them straight off the page, if you catch my drift. I have posted the accompanying comment I posted it with, but you’ll have to click through if you want to read what other people have said. (Don’t bother if there’s only one though that’s usually me adding hashtags after the fact).

 

 

BBC Preview – War of Words: Soldier-Poets of the Somme – Bristol Festival of Ideas

Aside | | Paul Greer

The “big animation project” we were working on earlier in the year is being previewed at the Watershed on the 5th November.
The programme explores the stories of the writer soldiers who were present at the Battle of the Somme and at BDH we produced 10 animations illustrating, with respect, the poetry the soldiers produced, which are embedded in the documentary.
The event is free, but you do have to register here.
Maybe see you there.

Silliness

Image | | Paul Greer

image

I appear to be talking myself into making comics again. This could be, and usually is, a terrible idea.
If anyone can stop this silliness please send help.
Biro, fountain pen, montage and general moments of weakness.
Notebook: Amand

I’m also thinking I might start making the posts on this site shorter.

365 Day Sketch Project Update: 38-54

| Paul Greer

I’ve given myself a few weeks off, with the Big Clearout taking over pretty much every spare moment I have. It’s a shame because I would’ve like to have drawn many of the items we’ve been passing on as a record of past times. But the speed and quantity of things going meant that I just didn’t find the time to do it. Also tiredness.

On the River Mekong, Nong Khai, Thailand (1991)

Image | | Paul Greer

Clearing out the garage and the study ready for them to be demolished is proving a slow and emotional process. You find the strangest artifacts. This is me doing a “selfie ” in the nineties. Alone on a boat in the River Mekong (long story). The idea of travelling solo for months at a time is very far away from where I am now. That is not a bad thing.
Look, I’m doing my best Hunter S Thompson like an actual ****. Unfortunately one can’t really pull it off when one has the face of a baby.

Making Mental Ray for Maya 2015 work with Macintosh OS Mavericks (10.9)

Aside | | Paul Greer

As you may be aware if you follow me on Twitter we’ve been having some terrible trouble with rendering on Mental Ray for Maya after upgrading to the Macintosh Mavericks OS.

There seemed to be a conflict with multiple thread renders and the new Macintosh architecture.

We so far seem to have cleared the issue.

We completely uninstalled all parts of Maya, on the problem computers by dragging the Maya folder in the applications to the trash and then finding the Autodesk preferences folder in Library/Preferences(Library appears when you Alt-click the Go menu), and removing that too. Probably best keep a back up of that one.

Then do a fresh install of the new Maya 2015 Sp3.

It’s easier than uninstalling Mavericks anyways.

We had this in place for 3 days now and the constant hangs seem to be over.

Fingers crossed.

Edit: Scrub that. Still having freeze problems. Thinking of now striping the Mavericks machines to take them back to OS 10.8, as we are having no problems with them. If anyone else is making progress on this please let me know.

Edit 2: I tried CGBeige‘s script in the render farm, but it didn’t seem to stop the issue. So I have reverted to enabling “Overtime Kill Ratio” on Smedge (the software we use to managed our render farm). I set this to 3, so that if the work for the chunk goes 3 times over the work unit time it kills the chunk and starts again., which is good enough to kick it into gear and means I can sleep, without looking over the render farm all night.

Oh, and I have raised an official case ID with Autodesk, in case you were wondering.

Edit 3: Just found this post on Inside Mental Ray, there is an SP4, and they claim to have fixed it.

“We are glad to announce that we were able to remove the cause for freezes and crashes on Mac OS X version 10.9”

So we’ll see.