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.

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!

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:

• It is 64bit.
• It supports very flexible 3D LUT files.
• It sports very robust review and edit features.
• It does Stereo pretty damn good and fast.
• It is rock solid and reliable.
• It is extremely fast.
• It supports command line input.
• It plays nice with other production tools.
• It has amazing support.
• It is really cheap.

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 was kinda curious how this baby would perform once installed in the rack and how it’ll compare to my workstation, which is also a Core i7, 12GB of RAM, tons of HDD space (about 4TB), GeForce GTX285, some BD and DVD drives and other stuff all crammed on a standard ATX main board.

Here’s a quick video of the setup and of the first benchmark, for which I used the latest 64bit FryBench renderer. Quite surprisingly, the render node performed a bit faster than my workstation (might be due to the fresh install, though). It rendered the glass scene in 00h:07m:12s.

Music © Frank Klepacki

My workstation finished the scene in 00h:07m:29s.

I’m quite pleased with not only the speed of the render node, but also how cool it is. The temperature never went above 70°C, which is very, very good! Especially in a crammed rack setup. But obviously, the more nodes in the rack, the more heat they’ll produce and I’ll certainly have to deal with that later, especially during summer.

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

A few years later, when I started a high school, one of the computer classes started with a comprehensive DOS course. We learnt all the tricky bits and hidden gems of the OS. We learnt to use batch files effectively, escape sequences, pipes, even a bit of BASIC programming. This was in 2003.

Obviously I don’t have to tell you how much time I spent in DOS trying to configure or repair my Windows 95 or Windows 98 installations.

Then Windows 2000 came along, the first NT OS for the masses, in my opinion, which desperately tried to get rid of DOS for the users. There were several reasons for it. One of them was the NTFS file system. You simply weren’t able to access those NTFS partitions from DOS. Another was security. This is also tied to the NTFS, but security was a big concern. Another reason was the fact that Microsoft, ever since it introduced MS-DOS, tried to get rid of it. They wanted people to use Windows exclusively and not the cheap OS alternative. But even so Microsoft added an RConsole (I believe the name was? I might be mistaking it for the RAdmin in NetWare?).

Funny thing is, even nowdays there are software companies that still write software for DOS. Mainly database systems for large enterprises, like Post Offices, Banks, Account Management companies etc… This really surprises me on one hand, on the other, it makes some sense. You can run DOS on your wristwatch, it doesn’t multitask (well, there are programs that allowed a limited amount of multitasking) which means it can’t run viruses effectively without the user noticing, it’s pretty bulletproof (because it’s extremely simple) etc…

Now, it is 2010 and I still use DOS from time to time. Obviously not that often, but recently with the addition of a dedicated server and a network storage to my studio, I’ve spent a lot of time in DOS configuring the storage controllers, BIOSes and running other little utilities. It’s interesting how important this OS still is. And in my opinion we won’t get rid of it any time soon. It’s so simple, yet powerful, that people still need it for some lower level system configuration. One of the proofs of DOS’s power is the Shell. Sure it existed long before DOS in nix systems, which makes the point even more valid, it’s the simplest way of communicating with the system for the user. I wouldn’t be surprised if I was still using DOS to configure my uber-servers in my, by then, huge VFX facility.

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.

Here are a few shots of the setup when I was working on it (I have a habbit of documenting a lot of stuff, when I come to think about it. ).

Anyways, we’re on a 1Gbps line all across the studio now and when I tested to copy a 14GB file from one PC to another the average data transfer speed was about 35MB/s, which took about 7 minutes or so. Not too bad. Obviously transferring tons of tiny files will always be an issue, but it should help with the larger ones, such as the scenes, source textures, renders, point caches etc…

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?!