duber’s blog

I’ll elaborate on this topic some more later, but I thought I’d let you know that I’ve successfully deployed, configured and tested Prime Focus’ Deadline®, the render manager of choice for duber studio.

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If you still preview your sequences in an absolutely obsolete and impossible RAM Player in Max, or terribly outdated and rigid FlipBook, do yourself a favour and buy a license today!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’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

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I finally started building the render slaves for my studio. The first dedicated render node I built is based on basic mainstream parts, nothing fancy, but with enough power so that the render node does make sense to be placed in a rack installation.

The basic idea, obviously, was to build as powerful a machine, as possible for the lowest price tag, as possible. Since I’ve been an Intel user since, well forever, I based the machine on a Core i7 860 (Lynnfield) CPU, DDR3 memory and the rest is pretty much optional. But for my purposes, I wan every machine in the studio, to basically follow this idea of having a dedicated hard-drive, preferrably pretty fast, for the OS and a dedicated one for all the offline data. So, each machine, including the render nodes, will host a C: drive with all the software and programs on and a D: drive that’ll be setup to support all the files that we’ll work with. The workstation will have some other HDDs optionally, but these two drives are neccesary in order to rule out variables in the pipeline I’ve been building for a few months now.

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It seems that GPU accelerated rendering has been the hottest topic recently. But why should only the rendering get accelerated on the powerful GPUs?

There are tons of other applications that desperately need acceleration. Simulation for example. Cloth, hair, particles, rigid bodies etc… all need some heavy calculations and are actually quite simple, in comparison to rendering that is. Wouldn’t you prefer your cloth sims to be faster than real-time? Wouldn’t you love to be able to have physically accurate dynamics in your particle simulations? Or better yet, wouldn’t you love to be able to mix all this together in one mighty-powerful framework, all running on our GPUs? I would!

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I bought an aging file server, HP ProLiant ML350 G-5, and I want to transform it into a modern workstation that’ll be used for compositing tasks (Nuke, Photoshop and maybe After Effects). However, I’ve ran into some issues. Mainly, the server doesn’t have a dedicated PCI-Express 16x slot used for modern graphics cards, it only sports 3 PCI-e 4x slots, which sucks (how much it suck I’ll know after some benchmarks). The server also has only one CPU, a quite old and slow one. And, only 2GB of DDR2 RAM. The RAM is the least of an issue, the CPUs are quite expensive to upgrade, so I’ll keep the one already in there for the time being. But the GPU is the bummer! I’ve documented an approx. 15 minutes long video of “hacking” a regular graphics card in the PCI-e 4x (actually of the 8x size) slot, for those curious ones out there (I sure was!)

Get the Flash Player to see this player.

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This film has to be seen at least two times! I’ve seen it three times already and I’ll be going to see it at least once more again. The experience is mind-blowing! This is, simply put, the best movie I’ve ever seen.

The first two times I went to see the standard, “2D”, version of the film, which was in the original audio. And it was massive. But today, I’ve seen this masterpiece in IMAX in 3D, which seems it has always been meant to be seen like that. And I must say, the visual orgies are overwhelming! I was sitting there (in the very center of the movie theater), mouth and eyes wide open with goosebumps all over my body. Pandora completely grabbed me and didn’t let go until the final credits showed up. It was this massive!

The only drawback was the Czech dubbing. It wasn’t bad, but I’d rather see the film with the original sound. Unfortunately the dubbed version is the only one available for IMAX in this country. But still, since I’d already seen it in English twice, it wasn’t such a big deal after all.

Anyways, if you haven’t seen this movie in IMAX yet, BOOK YOUR TICKETS NOW!

After spending the whole day with the most awesome phone on the market (all right, a bit biased here, but I’m really loving it! ), tweaking the shit out of it, installing gazillion apps and customizing it exactly to my liking, what has the experience been like?

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Ahhh! Finally, the courier has arrived and after 14days of waiting, I’ve got my new phone in my hands!

Yes, none other than the icon of pure awesomeness, HTC HD2 (Leo). So far (only a few minutes) the experience has been beyond fantastic. The phone is very snappy, huge and uber-powerful. I’m simply loving it! Besides, I wouldn’t settle for anything below high-end, so, this phone was a clear winner.

One little hiccup, though. The Mini (perhaps micro?) USB port on this device is slightly different to all the previous HTCs I’ve had, so I have to change the cable leading to my PC. But I’ll do it tomorrow and besides, it’s really nothing.