A Very Partial History in the Evolution of the Animator

 Today in Workspace we decided to move one of the machines that has lived under my desk to another room, and after some rearrangement and a removal of one large screen, We unobscured the direct view to the window. I immediately noticed a 12% upswing in my mood as the sunshine spilled in onto my blinking face. It also provides me with the option of  slight head turn to look at Far Away Things, a method suggested by many internet guru spanners to minimise the eye trauma suffered from working at close proximity to computer screens.

This sequence of events made me think back to my observation of the animator species during the course of the nineties. The decade began with the steadfast traditional animation techniques, light boxes and sealed, blacked out rooms where the precious things were moved very slightly frame by frame, or drawings carefully crafted, with, very often the curtains closed. Consequently animators were often pasty-skinned hunched-over morlocks with staring blank eyes and a tendency to euphoric inebriation at the animation festivals on meeting their fellow selves, as very often this was the only time they got out.

Mark Baker

As the decade developed and the computer was carefully introduced to workflows, from one festival to the next one could observe the increase in the tanned skin, the bright eyes, the straighter back, and a sense that these people were opening windows and going outside more. Some of them even took to surfing.

Nowadays one couldn’t really tell an animator from any other kind of general human just by looks alone.  Some would argue that that is a bad thing and computers are ruining everything. This partly true, of course.

Format shift news for RSS subscribers 

As anyone who follows me on RSS (haha!) will have noticed I have started making more microblog style posts on this feed on a daily basis. I have decided to do this so that some things I post on social media have a home here too. Somewhere between a backup and me having control of my own content. So you can get separate RSS feeds for this site, one to include the long read posts, ones categorised “macro”, and one for short posts titled “micro”. Frequency will on the macro will therefore be, at the very most, 2 or 3 times weekly.

Here they are:

From this site:

Microblog – miniposts, daybook, scrapbook.

Macroblog – News and longer posts,

Both – of the Above

Also:

LinkFeed – Everything I bookmark

Tumblr – (Proto-Scrapbook)

 

Adding a Secondary Microblog in WordPress

After a few days off at home I get to overthinking things, like how this website works for me and how it can improve the way I use the internet in general.

Background: Like many I often find myself spooling through web content, looking for I know not what. Now this has in the past actually added much to my life, new friends, unexpected ideas and new ways of doing things coming into my life because I discovered them in such a way.

However there is a balance and I would rather use more of the limited time I have on this good planet to make my own creative progress, still enjoying the benefits of the web, but to do that in a focused, limited and directed way once my affairs are in order.

This means, to me, spending and posting more here, on my internet home. I use and enjoy Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and love posting what I do in those places, but they are other peoples places not mine, and would rather I have those status updates, images, quotes and links posted here as well as there, so I have a record of them should any of those accounts become compromised and also so I have a searchable record of these things.

The Proposal: To create a secondary microblog within this website,  but also with the capability of separating it  in the rss subscription so friends who also follow me on social media won’t get the duplication and only receive macro/longread type posts they may not have already seen elsewhere.

Method: A greater organisation an delineation in posting. I have created two main categories. Firstly MACRO, which encompasses my news blog, and any update pertaining to what I have been up to, art I have made and things happening at BDH. There are 9 subcategories for this and they are:

  • 365 Drawing Project – A 365 daily drawing project begun in good faith, but thwarted by life, death, progress and other forces. I have since scaled it back to “regular” but I still aim to fulfil the 365 target.
  • Animated Journal  – “I had always liked the picture a day format, video diaries etc, and animation is, traditionally a long drawn out, painful process, so this was me trying to find a way to free it up and make it a bit more ephemeral. I should’ve just waited a few years for the smartphones to do it for me, but there you are.”
  • Event Diary – What’s happened. What’s happening. What may be happening in the future.
  • Notebook Pages  – “I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind’s door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends. We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget. We forget the loves and the betrayals alike, forget what we whispered and what we screamed, forget who we were.”
  • Personal Record – Diary, stories, personal updates, journal, histories.
  • Picture Stories – Comics, narrative images, story telling, sequential art.
  • Process Archive – How tos, Maya, CGI, work arounds, Ways of doing.
  • Smooth Criminals – Mastermind Group, heroes, mentors, friends.
  • Work Updates – Mainly things pertaining to my role as Head of CGI at BDH.

The second one is called MICRO, this will be a scrapbook of sorts, a research project, a gathering of links and artifact, juxtaposition of non sequiturs for future consideration, as much for my benefit as anyone elses. Within it there are 7 sub-categories as follows:

  • Note Taking – note taking method, master mind groups, daydreams, ticket stubs, daily pages, day books, sketch pads, tentative drawings, empty cities
  • Radiant Thinking – Creative logic, positive imaginings, brain food, associative machines, dynamic potentials, positive humanism, sexual politics, human rights
  • Story Mapping – Narrative method, mythical shapes, hysterical realism, literary maximalism, codified things, unauthentic representation.
  • Picture Literatures – Alternative Comics, Sequential visual narrative, photo stories, cave paintings. Little comics everywhere.
  • Imagined Spaces – Autodesk Maya, Arnold, Unity, virtual realities, 360 Video, computer graphics, rendering, augmented environments.
  • Broken Rhythms
  • Math – Number theory, abstract science, spacial quantities,
  • Flickery Lights – Unusual animation, things that move, experimental puppetry, stop motion, cinematographs.
  • Photo Ghosts – Real scans, photographic echoes, fictional memories, old fashioned film, compulsive transparencies, ethereal landscapes
  • Status Updates – notepad, blurtings, tweets, thoughts, discarded moments.

In addition to these will be the category of Daybook which is a home for longer form posts involving min and other peoples work, otherwise defying categorisation.

It is clear to me at this stage that many of the things I have posted here so far fall into these categories so I will be retrospectively allocating posts to the above for the help of navigating the archive.

 

“AEGP Plugin MayaImport: Error reading Maya file. ( 5027 :: 12 )”

One of the splendours of using After Effects and Maya together is being able to import cameras from one to the other.

I use this feature a lot and then the issue came with a scene I just working on. I tried many different things and eventually realised it was the scene that was triggering the problem. I wondered if it had picked up a glitch that AE didn’t like.

So my fix was, To make a new fresh scene, import the previously exported camera (the one AE refused) then to export it again from there. Then it worked.

EDIT: Ensure that the correct resolution is set in the render settings and the camera focal length also matches the original camera.

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

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.