We’ve launched a brand new website, courtesy of our friends at refresh.cz, with some latest finished projects showcase, including our new demoreel. Head over to duber.cz and leave a comment if you like, hell, even if you don’t like the new site. 
Thanks for watching!
I don’t think I have to praise regular expressions here, however, I wanted to point out one extremely useful case where regular expressions were pretty much the single most useful, fastest and not so obvious choice in my 3ds Max pipeline.
The thing with 3ds Max is that regular expressions are foreign to MAXScripters and they don’t usually use them. I too am more used to regex in Python or IronPython than MAXScript. However, since we do have access to .NET in MAXScript, we can use its Regex class inside MAXScript.
Why I’m mentioning this and why could it be useful to you? I bumped into a little issue with my pipeline’s handling of rendered files. They assume to be exactly the same as I set them up in 3ds Max, which is logical and correct. However, since I started using Deadline’s SMTD script for submitting my files to the render farm, which takes care of handling the path remapping and storing, it also accidentally took care of letter casing. So, in the end, my render files were being saved all upper cased: “\\SERVER\PROJECT\RENDERS\ABC.EXR” instead of what I set in the Render Dialog: “\\SERVER\Project\Renders\ABC.exr”. The reason was simple, I used simple MAXScript substituteString() method to re-map my local paths to my server, UNC, paths and I converted everything to upper case just in case I got a mismatch:
substituteString (toUpper srcPath) @"D:" @"\\RAMMSTEIN\__UNMANAGED_PROJECTS__"
I just updated to the final release of Deadline 5.1 after beta testing it for a few months and I couldn’t recommend any other render manager more. If you’re still on Deadline 5 or prior, this update is highly recommended! Especially since it boasts a full CPython support, tight Shotgun integration, draft, the ability to run multiple instances on one render node and much more. For more details, read the official announcement.
Here’s a video demonstrating the power and practical usage of Shotgun (data) brought over to 3ds Max natively via our Python plugin, duberPython.
I’ve been looking for the perfect phone since my good old Nokia 7650 I had in high school. It was a great phone, back then. Had a very comfy portrait keypad and a large screen. Since then I had a few more Nokias until finally switching to HTC phones. My first HTC was TyTN II, what a beast! Then, after the iPhone introduction, some more touch only or touch + type HTC phones. My last one was HD2. I loved and hated the phone equally.
I’m, along with Gavin Greenwalt from Straightface, featured in Thinkbox’s study that took a look into the Deadline Power Management feature and how it can help save your studio money in the end.
Every TD knows that command line tools are among the most powerful in their arsenal of tricks and secrets.
I want to mention RVIO, as today it saved me quite a lot of time (again), which is absolutely key when a deadline is coming.
My client requested a minor tweak of animation (a lip sync, to be concrete) on an almost finished shot. So, the general approach would be to do the change, have the animation data go through the pipeline and at the end have the finished frames ready to be loaded in an existing edit, which then gets rendered out and the final result gets showed to the client.
All fine, until you realize your render farm is completely full with other shots, so you have to skip the “beauty” pass rendering and only present the client with a, somehow, polished preview directly from your 3D package, which isn’t the safest way, trust me. But this client is great and understands that what he sees is actually only a preview of the animation.
So, the last piece of puzzle to solve is to get the preview assembled with additional layers of information (such as frame number, shot name etc…), basically a slightly customized overlay. All this sounds nice and simple, you just open up (in my case) Premiere Pro, swap the layers, render out the portion you need and be done with it.
But this certainly isn’t the TD way.
Just a quick shout about the compatibility of duberPython and the latest and greatest IronPython 2.7.1 release (released a couple of days ago). All working smoothly and quickly, as expected.
Should you need more info on duberPython or what we’re doing with it and Shotgun or Tactic, just drop me a line and I’ll be more than happy to show you how cool duberPython is.
I have nothing but huge respect for Steve Jobs and what he has done with the world of technology as we know it today. So the news of him passing away saddened me very much. We lost one of the greatest visionaries of our time.
Rest In Peace, Steve.
I’d test driven RV a few months ago to see what all the fuss was about. I was kind of satisfied with RV at that time, but didn’t really have a strong reason to switch from my beloved FrameCycler. Now, however, I needed a strong platform for conforming, ingesting and generally managing my review and delivery pipeline. My two immediate options were MetaRender and RVIO.
First of all, I am not a big fan of acquisitions. I admit it’s sometimes to the better for all of the parties involved, but sometimes, for the worse. I personally don’t see Adobe investing too much (at least not in the begining) to FrameCycler and MetaRender. They admitted they were more interested in the color grading suites. Secondly, RVIO provides a bit more robust framework for transcoding etc… and seems overall more powerful.
So, that’s the reason right there, I’m slowly switching to RV mainly thanks to RVIO. I wish FrameCycler all the very best, I certainly don’t want to see it go and it most likely won’t go anywhere, but, I think there are more interesting things happening on the RV side. 