Opaque3D | Blog

hello people.

Just a quick note. I am moving to a new blog hosted at wordpress.com

The reason why I am moving is because I did something nasty to this blog and I now have a bunch of duplicate posts everywhere. I know nothing about php and whatnot, so I don’t have the knowledge nor the will to fix it.

My new blog is: http://nemirc.wordpress.com/

See you over there

Well, I am writing this from "Windows Live Writer", hehehe. This is the first time I use this thing so we’ll see how it goes. It drawed my attention the fact that I could use it to write posts to be uploaded directly to my blog (supposedly). We’ll see if it really works as expected…

Ok, the image is supposed to appear to the left. Anyway, just a little update. I got the Softimage|XSI demo the other day, and I installed it a couple of days ago. The navigation and all is pretty similar to that in Maya, but some stuff is just weird (for example, the materials editor). I know that since it’s a new program I have to get used to it, specially since I am too used to the way maya works and looks.

Anyway, I have the rest of the month to explore this software. In the meantime I am still dealing with work and the short film. BTW, I have a new update on the main character. She’s fully clothed now, and I will work on her hairstyle and texturing this weekend. More on that when I have something to show.

This is some sort of a rant against those who thing that animators and their software are some sort of mandrakes, always with a trick under their sleeves.

It always gets me when people are excessively ignorant. I read something on the newspaper the other day, and the columnist was talking about how wonderful computer animation was, because with the click of a button you could create an army of tens of thousands of warrior. Mind me… I’ve been using Maya for several years now, and I still haven’t found that button that creates the army.

That’s the reason for this blog’s entry title. People sometimes are so dumb they think we have some sort of infinite library of assets that allows us to pretty much drag-and-drop. Yeah, I know it’s easy to have the Gollum and Witchking primitive inside Maya. I am pretty sure they must have been some real big time savers for Peter Jackson. And let’s not forget about the Cloverfield monster and parasite primitives. I really have to thank Alias (and now Autodesk), Avid, SideFX, Newtek and such, for developing such amazing software that allows us to come up with the next blockbuster film in less than a freaking week.

It’s amazing to have all those “create terrain”, “create ocean”, “create human”, “create elephant”, “create lion”, “create hurricane”, and ”create army” buttons. It’s because of all those buttons that we can create such amazing work with one single mouseclick.

“Some guy” told me he wanted a fully featured animated 30 sec commercial by the end of the week, but that he needed at least a 4 second shot by next morning… Well, easy, all I have to do is load up that Environment from my extensive library of pre-made assets, then load up the characters and then plug the USB to my nose so the computer generates all the animation on the fly by reading my mind.
Idiot…

Ok… rant’s over.
I will only ask the next person that comes up with something that stupid to please show me where that “Create tens of thounsands soldiers” button is, but I can’t find it. He/she can even borrow my computer if he/she wants, as long as I am told where that freaking button is.

This is just a quick post regarding something that has brought a lot of grief to my heart and mind and everything else.

I know it is difficult when friends take different paths and all, although sometimes we know we will be seeing them some day.

However when some of them dies, things are a little different. Yesterday I was informed that a friend of mine had killed herself over a year ago. The thing is that since she lived abroad, it wasn’t till yesterday that I was told so. Not only me, but all of us didn’t know till just a couple of weeks ago.

We would write each other from time to time but one day she just didn’t answer anymore. That seemed a little weird but since she didn’t answer anymore I didn’t write anymore either.

Now I know why I never got any more messages.

And right now I am still just waiting to wake up because I just can’t believe this actually happened.

Well, long time no post…

I guess I should begin this post by saying that I haven’t had any more wrist pains for the last months. I can pretty much say that the painful therapy (believe me… it WAS painful) and never using a mouse again did the trick. This brings me to the new wacom thing.

Well, it turns out that the tablet I had bought (a Genius PenSketch) was not as good as I expected it to be. We can say that after 8 months the damn thing just died on me. As you can imagine, that kinda made me rethink my life, so I ended up getting a wacom intuos. I keep thinking I should have gotten the intuos to begin with, but it’s not like I can simply go back in time.

A couple of months ago, my old computer also died. It seemed like a signal to get a new one (actually, I didn’t have a choice). I have a lot of new software in my hands, so I figured I should get a computer that would take advantage of all that. In the end I got a Dell Precision and it works perfectly.

I kept my old monitor so I am working on dual monitors now. The only “problem” is that the Sony monitor looks extremely uncool next to the Dell flat panel, hehe.

A few months ago, I came up with this “brilliant” idea to open an animation studio in my country. We are what you could call a “garage studio” (although we are still missing the garage…). However, even if we are small (3 guys and counting) we’ve come up with a few decent works. The difficult part is to sell something that few will buy, because animation is pretty new here. There are not even a handful companies that do that kind of work, and yet the amount of work is not THAT big (so no World of Warcraft Coke commercials for the time being…).

Another not so brilliant idea was me writing a book. Ever since I met James Faure Walker on SIGGRAPH 2006 I grew interested in writing. I’ve been working on that story for a little over a year, and after a lot of rewrites I am finally reaching a point where I DO like what I write. My word count so far is a little over 80 thousand words, and I still have 2 more chapters to go. Who knows, maybe you will see my book in a bookstore near you soon… or maybe not…

Well, that’s pretty much what I have to say as a “comeback”. See you around.

Well it finally came to pass. I’ve developed that stupid sickness for too much modeling and keyframing… Well, in a way I figure that was expected so it didn’t catch me completely off guard, lol. Anyway, I’ve continued working on future publications for Renderosity, but I have barely done anything new in 3D. It seems it will take me a while to “create breathtaking 3d” again.

The good thing is that my condition is not so serious, so I don’t need an operation. I still had to go through therapy and most of the pain has gone away. I hope I will be able to get back to work in no time

Hello and welcome. I am opening this blog to publish real-time (almost, hehe) updates on what I am currently working. Whether it’s about cool techniques or tech stuff (or not so tech stuff), I will be posting it here.

Consider this a “WIP blog”