That’s right! Althought I missed the 100 days anniversary, I am still very happy to see that my server has gone through over 115 days of labor without a single hiccup, error or restart. 
So, hopefully, at the very least another 115 days will come by without any issues what so ever.
It’s been almost two months since I haven’t updated this place! Man!
But it has been pretty busy here. I’ve done countless budget estimates for various projects. Mainly TV commercials. So, hopefully at least some will come to a fruition. 
Also, been pretty busy getting my material for the EUE 2010 master class. I think it’ll be pretty interesting for those new to this topic of Pipeline, Workflow and Data Management.
In case you haven’t seen the TV commercial we finished in the begining of May, Dr.Max (a local chain of pharmacies here in the Czech Rep.), please, check it out, it’s pretty cool I think and all the artists involved worked very hard, very long hours, to bring this, way above average (locally speaking), TV spot to life.
Also, on the technical field, I’ve invested quite some time and cash 
to learning new technologies like WPF along with IronPython and a new IDE, Visual Studio 2010, which seems pretty damn promising (not there yet, but getting close with each release)! So, hopefully, I’ll finally find some time to properly design some nice UIs for our Tactic connections from within 3ds Max. Oh, and I managed to get the very latest build of Tactic from the ever-so-awesome guys at Southpaw, so, I’ll be playing with the new toys pretty soon.
Anywyas, I’ll start posting some interesting stuff as soon as I get back from Utrecht next week, so, please, stay tuned!
It’s confirmed! I’ll have a speech in Utrecht, in June 3-4, at the End User Event 2010. The topic: Pipeline and Workflow issues and solutions for freelancers and studios alike.
I’ll be delighted to see you there for a chat and a few drinks…
I’ve had a chance to cooperate with James Hindley from FPA Architects on a pretty comprehensive article on Linear Workflow in 3D. Go check it out!
If you still haven’t bought the book yet, DO IT NOW!
Or at least, do it after you’ve read this thorough review of the book.
I can’t resist to quote what the reviewer is saying about my chapter, of which I’m quite proud, obviously.
The advanced unwrapping chapter I found very useful as unwrapping is not my strongest skill in Max. By the way, none of the authors are shy about suggesting outside plugins and stand alone utilities if they think they will do the job better or at least faster than Max. In this Chapter 4 Lukas Dubeda suggested a small separate program for UV layouts that I downloaded to try myself. It does seem to be quite capable at getting the job done. The following sums up this section pretty well:
…
That “…just scratching the surface” seems to be the sentiment of many of the experts in this book. Believe me that they are all making some pretty deep scratches, providing us with an in-depth look at their chapter’s topic.
Anyways, here’s the full review for those still undecided.
Here are my top 10 reasons why FrameCycler is the single best sequence player on the market:
If you still preview your sequences in an absolutely obsolete and impossible RAM Player in Max, or terribly outdated and rigid FlipBook, do yourself a favour and buy a license today!
I’ve finally received all the parts for my first render slave and immediately got into assembling and installing it. The rig is quite simple, very mainstream and very affordable. A standard ATX board placed in a 1U rack chassis, a Core i7 CPU, 8GB of RAM, two drives, one primary for the system and software and the other for buffering stuff, no DVD drive, no GPU, 350W power supply and that’s it. All running 64bit Windows 7 Professional.
I’m still amazed how useful DOS can be, even in 2010! And the main reason I thin it’s the most revolutionary OS of all times is that it actually brought the entire PC industry to regular folks’ hands.
Now, by DOS, I’m actually referring to the simplest form of OS environment, IO.sys, MSDOS.sys and COMMAND.com. That’s all you need in order to communicate with your system. That’s all you need to actually get some work done! Isn’t it amazing?
Obviously, Windows and MacOS heavily extended the OS functionality and brought something else in the game. But that’s just evolution. However, DOS on the other hand was truly revolutionary. I may be skipping some other important OS attempts, but DOS was the first OS I ever used as a little kid. I remember when I was about 8 or 9 years old, my grandpa had a, at the time, high-end 286 computer, 512KB of RAM, some 30MB HDD, it was a beast! and it was running DOS. I learnt a few basic commands, such as CD, MD, CLS, COPY etc… just to be able to run Prince of Persia or Wolf3D
The entire studio ethernet ran on a standard 100Mbps line, 100BASE-T Fast Ethernet, which used to be enough. However, with the addition of a render farm and a fast centralized storage, I needed an upgrade. Thankfully, nowdays, a Gigabit Ethernet is becoming pretty mainstream as well, so I didn’t really have to put too much money into the whole network. All the standard, mainstream, main boards come with a 10/100/1000Mbps network cards integrated, the 1000BASE-T switches and routers are also pretty cheap, so all I really needed was a new switch, a bunch of CAT6 cables (however, CAT5e would have been enough as well) and a bit of re-wiring. The new network topology can be seen at the top.
Hell yeah! After a few months of putting the gear together, getting all the paperwork done, installing the electrical and network cabling, we finally run our own data management platform with an added bonus of a private render farm. How cool is that?!