duber's blog

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’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.

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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.

Go ahead, it’s an interesting read.

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.

That’s right, folks! I am thrilled to announce, that Pixomondo, the company behind some of the most challenging VFX shows, such as Sucker Punch, Iron Man 2 or 2012, has purchased and implemented our duberPython plugin for 3ds Max, allowing them to tightly integrate software, such as Shotgun, into their complex pipeline.

We’ve also helped with scripting Shotgun wrappers and optimizing the duberPython engine to suite Pixomondo’s needs. This resulted in a more refined, streamlined and faster IronPython connection for 3ds Max TDs, scripters, developers or even regular users.

A few key points of duberPython:

• It allows for direct calling of Python code from within MAXScript
• Also allows for Python script files to be called with unlimited number of arguments
• duberPython supports behind-the-scenes data type conversions between Python and MAXScript
• duberPython is a dotNET assembly, which means it’s a 3ds Max version and release agnostic (can run on Max 9 to 2012, both x64 and x86)
• duberPython is built on IronPython and thus supports the latest dotNET version and 3ds Max releases
• duberPython was created for the sole purpose of enabling 3ds Max users to use tools like Tactic or Shotgun
• duberPython is available for licensing! Get in touch for more info.

I’d love to show you more, so, you can either wait for me to make a nice presentation and put it up here, or, you can get in touch and I’ll give you a private presentation and provide you with a fully functional, time-limited, version of duberPython.

07th of August, 2003 at 23:26:00, I registered the domain name duber.cz, the home of duber studio.

So, happy birth day, duber.cz!

I’ve been really lucky to have been able to use Shotgun as a developer for some time now (getting to know the API, integrating it into 3ds Max pipelines, etc…).

Now, for the first time, I’ve actually tried to use it on a production we’re working on here at duber studio. The reason is the sheer amount of shots needed to be done, even though they are not very complicated.

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I think I jizzed in my pants…

Go see this VFX miracle. It’s the holy grail for VFX enthusiasts and artists.

I’m actually scared by the fact that even 24GB of RAM isn’t enough for a high-end workstation these days. And I’m talking about projects up to a maximum of full HD resolution! I don’t even consider 2K or, hell, 4K projects at the moment as I primarily work on TV commercials etc…

This is very interesting as I remember every time I upgraded the amount of RAM of my workstation, I was very pleased with the performance and the amounts of available memory every time I worked on something. But then, not long after, I started to reach the limits of the system’s resources.

The thing is, when you reach the cap of your CPU, or GPU for that matter, your renders just take a bit longer to finish. But as soon as you reach the RAM limit, your apps start crashing and the entire system becomes unstable! So, it is a bit of a problem.

I started reaching the limits not long ago when I had tons of apps open at the same time. Especially Nuke, Max, VMWare Workstation and Photoshop. But on recent projects I started reaching the cap with Nuke and Photoshop alone! It’s terrifying as it suggests that no matter how much RAM I put in the system, it will never be enough!

So, it seems that my next workstation upgrade will, indeed, be a RAM boost. Not sure I’ll be able to buy the full 96GB of ECC RAM at once, but, I’m certain I’ll get there very soon.

A very informative post on the Autodesk forums about making 3ds Max deployments.

I planned to do a similar how-to here, on this blog, in the future. Possibly a videotutorial, so, stay tuned…