I’m not that into giving away secrets but BDH have shared the BAFTA submission compilation for our work on Countdown to Life. So now you can make your own babies.
Y’know, like, virtual ones.
(F)
Countdown To Life / BAFTA Awards compilation
maya
#CountdownToLife: The Extraordinary Making of You
At BDH I was part of the team that worked on The Countdown To Life, a three part series produced by BBC Science in association with the Open University, exploring some of the latest research into understanding of human development, from conception to birth. With a complex pipeline, an imaginative and groundbreaking approach and with an array of the latest technology and software, the BDH team produced hundreds of shots of spell binding imagery illustrating the remarkable transformations that take place during those early stages.
Episode One transmits tonight (Monday 4th September 2015) on BBC2 and will subsequently be available on the iPlayer.
The Ocean Wants You Today
Last night was the BBC2 premier of the first episode of Atlantic. At BDH we had the honour of providing some graphics for this fantastic eye feast. Now available on the iPlayer I’m sure.
Dino Death Match
National Geographic have uploaded an image gallery from one of the dinosaur shows we worked on. Some of the compositions on the stills they have chosen are a bit unusual, and they seem to have upload everything twice, but they still look marvellous to me.
War of Words: Soldier Poets of the Somme – Broadcast Scrapbook
I wanted to write some stuff about this programme sooner, but the events previously documented in this blog (which all began on the afternoon of broadcast) meant it’s taken me some time to take stock and collect all the things that happened as a result of the show going out.
As I have mentioned before, “War of Words: The Soldier Poets of the Somme” was a 90 minute BBC Arts documentary, directed by Sebastian Barfield that sought to reconnect the history and the landscape of the notorious 1916 Battle of the Somme with the extraordinary poetry and literature that it inspired. At BDH we created content graphics to help illustrate the history and also animations (which I was involved with) to accompany the poetry. We had a great team on the job, and working on it was a moving and wonderful experience.
This post is partly a scrapbook for my purposes to collect some of the information, posts and reactions that went out on social media, in a Storify style, so I might be updating it as and when I come across more of them. Also be warned, this post is mostly embeds from Twitter, so if you are reading this on anything else that the actual webpage they might format weirdly.
You can see a clip from the show via the BBC here, this part concerns the removal of lice eggs from clothing and Isaac Rosenberg’s Louse Hunting.
There was a preview screening of the programme at the Watershed on the 5th November. Afterwards Peter Barton, Jean Moorcroft Wilson, Sebastian Barfield, Jeremy Banning and Richard Van Emden discussed the programme, the poets and how they shaped the way people remember the Great War. That discussion is available to hear on Soundcloud here:(direct link).
Sebastien Barfield wrote some words on the BBC blog about the show.
This is a link to a discussion of the programme on Military History Online, quite fascinating in itself.
“The Somme In Seven Poems” was a short that BDH produced which anthologised just the poetry animations themselves. That went onto the iPlayer a week before the broadcast, and got some lovely responses from people, especially on Remembrance Day.
Here is a trailer BDH produced for the short.
Obviously in the modern age, people can watch the show at anytime once it goes on the iPlayer so these tweets are not really in chronological order. I just went through the hashtags and search options retrospectively and grabbed some of the most interesting ones.
https://twitter.com/FWWMiscellany/status/533763935141638145 https://twitter.com/ArcanePub/status/535732918468235264The whole programme has been taken down from the iPlayer now but I have heard bits are on YouTube somewhere, you’ll have to search for that yourself, if you feel so inclined.
BDH have produce a VR app that contains the animation for The Kiss one of the poems featured on the show. This works on Google Cardboard and is available on Google Play and iTunes.
“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.
Human Universe
At BDH I was recently a small part of the awesomeness that was the CGI and graphics team on The new Professor Brian Cox series Human Universe.
It begins, with the first episode “Apeman-Spaceman” this evening (Tuesday 7th October) on BBC TWO.
We previously worked on the Wonders of the Universe and Wonders of Life with the same team.
Coaxing grumpy render farm into compliance with restarts, deleting preferences, reinitiating licenses, flute playing & beguiling folk dance.
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.
Paul Greer 