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__"
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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’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. 
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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Let me get this straight. Photoshop is not a compositing tool. Period.
I certainly am not a compositing artist, however, I have a, rather, deep technical knowledge of compositing principles and compositing software packages (such as Nuke) and thus I get asked from time to time by fellow CG artists about some compositing issues they have etc. The worst thing is when I find out they’re comping their still image in Photoshop saved as a PNG file! Blasphemy!
There are so many attributes that make a good compositing program that you cannot even start considering Photoshop for the duty. Even After Effects fall flat facing some more serious compositing tasks (mainly true 32bit float comps, or 3D space comps etc…). Why, you may ask. Let’s start with the essentials. One of them is color management. It truly startles me that Photoshop, the mecca of digital image manipulation tools, doesn’t have this feature! I mean, of course you have color management in Photoshop, but that’s more to have with calibration to printing standards, CMYK color space etc… but you don’t have a chance loading up a custom LUT, or, hell, even something as essential as an sRGB LUT. So, working with true linear renders is a huge pain in Photoshop.
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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.
So far I haven’t had much luck transforming my render farm to a fully virtualized environment for easier management of the render nodes’ software config.
I’ve tried Microsoft’s Hyper-V technology at first as it seemed like the easiest path, but I couldn’t have achieved what I’ve wanted from the setup:
- Startup of the render nodes
- Have all the render nodes boot up to a centralized virtual OS
- Render tasks
- Shutdown
I’ve even tried the SCVMM, but it was way too complex and complicated so I didn’t actually spend too much time fiddling with it.
I’m currently looking at my #2 option (mainly due to added cost and software layers), VMWare. Especially the VMWare View and vSphere products.
So, no virtualization tips from me right now, all is still one big work in progress, but I’ll be posting updates as soon as I have them.
After having a very interesting discussion with a friend and collegue of mine, Michal Mocňák, on the topic of IT infrastructure virtualization, I realized that this is something I’ve needed even for my small, but growing “data center”!
The “data center” is still currently offline (except for the license server), so, I’ve been thinking of how to improve upon my previous setup with the future in mind. With a semi-constant grow of my render farm, the management, upgrades, installations and maintenance of the individual machines from the software point of view is becoming more and more problematic. I’ve written a few tools to help me automate the process, but still, managing the actual OS, the actual installed applications, the updates, hotfixes and service packs etc… is a hassle. I currently only have nine nodes in my farm, but being able to abstract from any number of physical machines and be able to easily manage my nodes from a one-person point of view (yeah, I am the only TD/IT guy here 
) would be a bless!
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In case you’ve never played the original Portal mini-game from Valve (included with the Orange Box combo), you should definitely go and check it out.
The original Portal game was a mini-game bundled with the Orange Box games released back in late 2007. After finishing Half-Life I started the game and was immediately hooked in. The story was rather simple, but still interesting to keep playing. You were a test subject trapped in a synthetic testing environment controlled by a psychotic AI mainframe. Spoiler alert! You escape the testing chambers and kill the psychotic robot in the end. Now, the game was a first-person 3D action puzzle game. A very strange and rare combination, but extremely fun and addictive. You solve puzzles primarily using a device called Portal Gun which creates one entry and one exit portal anywhere you attach these to appropriate surfaces (you can’t do that on all types of surfaces, though).
Fast forward to 2011 and we have here a sequel to the very popular mini-game. This time in an AAA title of its own. To say that this game rocks is a huge understatement. So, basically, to not spoil anything and to keep this short and simple, if you liked the first Portal, you’re gonna love the second one! If you didn’t play the first Portal game, go grab it on Steam and then get to solving Portal 2.
Also worth mentioning is the (nowdays hugely overlooked) co-op mode, which is almost another campaign on its own! Get a friend and play the co-op together. It’s tons of brain twisting fun!
Portal 2 is one of the very rare games I had to finish in one go. I sat down to the game at about 9pm, fell asleep at about 4am and continued playing the next day when I woke up until I finished it! Same for co-op. We played the game for good solid 4-5 hours straight with my brother. It was absolutely amazing and very refreshing from all the FPS titles available nowdays.
Simply put: go buy this game NOW!
