Apologies if we have missed anyone on the Christmas card list. Things have been a tad up and down recently with the situation with Mum, poets going out, the funeral, the build going on and what not.
But Dad’s with us for Christmas now and the children are all in their new rooms, so it’s all systems go.
Hope all is well with you and yours and that everyone has a wonderful time over the holidays.
Love
The Greers.
x
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.
I have several books on the go at once. I like print best, but these days it’s good to have a Kindle book on the phone for emergencies and an audiobook in the car. I read a lot of comics as well, it should be noted, though I can never get enough of them.
Recently finished:
Boxers/Saints by Gene Luen Yang (x) – I have mentioned this here before. Wonderful, beautiful, simple, complex. A very personal, magical realist take on the horrific events that unfolded in China at the turn of the century. It’s in two volumes so he could present a story from either side. The cross over like Moon Knight and Hulk. It made me want to read the Bibliography. Yes, basically.
The Mighty Avengers, Vol.5: Earth’s Mightiest (x) – I’ve been getting these superhero collections out for my son and pre-reading them to see if I approve. This was a bit complex for him, and not because the plot was difficult, but they’re using this form where each image is like an oil painting, but with huge amounts of text per panel. I would say it took me about twice as long to read a page of this as it would to read a page of prose. But, you know, I’m probably not in the target demographic. Also, someone needs to go back to Drawing Ladies school, sorry. Jeez.
Essential Avengers, Vol. 9 (x) – Again, proof reading this for the younglings. This is the era of stuff I probably read when I was their age. They both found it difficult to read. The removal of the colour destroys a lot of the composition, and flow, if these had been draw in black and white they would’ve used more black. Also the attitudes and culture in them is far too antiquated for a 10 year old. Why is everything like this? Makes you realise the world is making progress. But again interesting from my perspective, this contains the origin story of Quicksilver and Scarlet Witch, and the Vision just cracks me up. They really need to think about that colour thing when they reprint though. This stuff is meant to be for kids. HELP THEM.
The Push Man and Other Stories by Yoshihiro Tatsumi (x) – Interesting from a technical point of view of layout and story structure, execution of plot in short form etc. But, yes, content bleaker than bleak. the violence, hatred and misogyny drips off the page and kinds of nullifies any benefit mentioned earlier. Wasn’t prepared to recommend it to anyone I know. In the preface Tatsumi asks not to judge him on these early works alone. Almost interested enough to see what else he did, maybe.
My Man Jeeves by PG Wodehouse (x) – Ashamed to say this is my first Wodehouse. It’s taken me a while to get past the poshness. But worth it. Very pleasant. Although I felt slightly mugged by the stories about some other dude who also happens to have a butler.
Currently reading: Slaughterhouse Five (x), Written on the Body (x), The Brothers Karamazov (x), A Game of Thrones (x).
1. Honeyblood
Heard this tune when walking past the radio at work, I only heard a few seconds and I was completely hooked. The album’s great (buy it). This track is called Choker, been listening to it a lot.
“This song is loosely based on a short story by Angela Carter called ‘The Bloody Chamber’.
Mostly, it’s about not letting anybody **** you around, even when they are trying to kill you. **** that ****.”
(via)
True to form I discovered them days after they had played Bristol. Curses.
2. Playlists/Cassettes
I recently met a old and dear friend of mine, who I do not see enough of. We used to communicate with compilation tapes. So when he came over he brought a CD of stuff he was listening to. So I made one for him. I had completely forgot about he process of this, the rise and fall, does this song work well before that one, do those three tracks work well together. Listening to it over and over to see if it worked.
Does anyone do that anymore, apart from DJs. It’s a beautiful thing. We got Spotification and even iTunes before that eating that decision process up for us. I know there’s places like 8tracks still around for this, but still.
3. Facebook can be useful
I recently reposted 70/365 on my Facebook and it inspired an exchange of how it could be be transferred into film. These two classics were posted as a steer for the concept.
and Feeling My Way by Jonathan Hodgson
4. Boxers/Saints
Recently read Boxers/Saints by Gene Lueng Yang. It’s a two volume magical realist semi-history of the Boxer Rebellion in China in 1899. Each book is told from a different perspective. It’s very personal and manages to say a lot about history and what is remembered underneath the story itself which is compelling.
5. Somebody App
I’m not sure if I have mentioned this here before. Artist and writer Miranda July made a messenger app that, instead of sending a text direct to the recipient, will locate someone nearby using GPS and then gets them to pass on the message verbally. You can give instruction for emotional tone, and so on.
The actual app is here: http://somebodyapp.com/
and there is a rather crazy short on how it can be used here:
I’m currently on Android, so you can’t try on me.
6. Sprautumn
..and I decided to put my face on all my profiles, not sure if it’ll make people relax because I’m obviously a human or give them the spooks. I call it my Bat Country Portrait.
7. I remembered Vine
Then I forgot it again.
Coxy is still on telly. Don’t miss it.
There’s nothing like the arrival of a new interesting social media thing to get people talking about talking.
Ello kind of blew open this last week, taking the creators by surprise slightly. I got myself and invite from a dear internet friend, and there’s only one way to find out if you look like something. It could be better than bad.
Turns out I do quite like it.
There’s a lot of speculation and discussion as to whether its the Facebook Killer prophecy speaks off, or just another Diaspora. Google+ was a Facebook Killer for about 2 days and that had Google behind it.
You can’t buy cool though.
Ello’s first inhabitants were the creatives, artists, writers and weirdos (and I mean that in the nicest possible way) we all love and adore, there weeks before anyone else. Then, because of it’s most righteous indie web aspirations it also has provided a landing pad for those fleeing Facebook as a result of its banning accounts without users genuine names (immediately alienating large areas of the LGBT community for one).
And they say they won’t advertise at you or sell your data, which is nice, but has many wondering how it will pay for itself, suggesting the big sell out is inevitable, or has already happened.
I’m hopeful it won’t. But it does have me wondering why we all just don’t post to our own sites all the time anyways, instead of socially mediating and handing all our content to someone elses website.
Makes me think I should be using this more.
Maybe I will.
Or maybe I’ll see you on Ello.
(Something that does work nicely on Ello is gifs, the one above is over 2mb and it went up and played no problem).
The building work began this week and the many weeks of hard work clearing the garage and the existing extension ready for demolition payed off as we put the last box of random items that didn’t fit anywhere else into the car minutes before the demolition of part of the house began.
I’m not sure what our ratio for reduction was, we had some storage space, we sold a lot, assimilated various bits into the rest of the house and into the shed, but there was a lot that we had to lose.
It was very much a loaded process for us as each item seemed to hold another branching tree of memories. One example being a cardboard box which we had been keeping some paper work in, once cleared I picked it up ready to dismatle it for recycling, only to read the label and find it was the box that delivered the toys for my eldest’s first birthday, many years ago.
Notes from lost loved ones, postcards from the other sides, keep sakes from when we had time to keep stuff.
Some of the most difficult things to go through were artwork of various kinds. Especially the children’s, we have three so there were large quantities which we had to reduce or else we would not have had any room to live.
Then there was our own artwork, a constant stream of surprises, as we discovered forgotten box after forgotten portfolio. We tried a loss rate of 2:1 (thus keeping about a third of what we had).
So I was quite pleased with myself when I managed to reduce a very large plastic container of art, comics, notebooks, animation drawings into this suitcase.
It’s nice to lose some of the lazy stuff I could see in there, you could easily tell if a hand was drawn from looking properly or just drawing an approximation of a hand preprogrammed in.
I’m reasonably pleased with what is left.
I suppose I ought to digitize some of this stuff and put it on the site here. If it stands up.
Speaking of standing up, the garage this picture was takenin just a few days ago isn’t anymore.
Exciting times.
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.
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.
I’m taking courage and inspiration from Mary Hamilton’s Blogging Principles and giving this thing a proper go. Just 10 years to late, s’all.
Firstly, my employer BDH has posted a new showreel of our work. It’s less heavy on the natural history this time. There’s a few peaks at the animations we created for the forthcoming BBC documentary “War of the Words: Poets of the Somme” and quick shot of a digital enhancement of my beautiful beautiful face (keep ’em peeled for that).
Friend, fiend and colleague, Tim Willmott started a Facebook page for his zany visual experiments, it’s called The Secret Stuff Laboratory. You should like (follow?) it. Mine too, while you’re at it.
I bought this track of off Bandcamp by The Parlour Trick, a musical collaboration between Meredith Yayanos (aka @Theremina) and Dan Cantrell. They do fantastic dreamy music, it makes me want to animate stuff to it.
I had a half day at work because the plumber was coming round. He finished early so I had a spare 2 hours, so I bit the daffodils and saw the new Godzilla movie. I was going to wait for the DVD release after the traumatic experienece of 1998, but I couldn’t stand the idea of everyone else seeing it whilst I sat grumpy in the corner. The craft and CG is amazing (obvs). I don’t really want to give it a full review because I don’t like spoilers.
If anyone can do anything half as good as this with the property, then give me a call.
I might give that Pacific Rim a go soon.
Ok, that’s that for now, I clicked all the buttons so this’ll get pinged to all the platforms, that’s what you do these days isn’t it?
Paul Greer 