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If you still preview your sequences in an absolutely obsolete and impossible RAM Player in Max, or terribly outdated and rigid FlipBook, do yourself a favour and buy a license today!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

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.

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.

Anyways, the render node’s config is a Core i7 860 (Lynnfield) CPU, 8GB of DDR3 RAM (I couldn’t get 16GB, 4×4GB, sticks unfortunately, but the mainboard supports them), Corsair I believe, a Gigabyte mainboard (H55M-UD2H), Western Digital hard drives, one 10krpm 74GB VelociRaptor and the other is the same as I have in the PowerVault MD1000 DAS, a 500GB RE3 HDD. The case is a Chieftec 1U chassis. That’s about it. No graphics card, no nothing.

I’m still waiting for the 1U coolers, which will be Dynatron K199, hopefully enough to cool down the CPU in such a tiny space. And a few more misc bits, like a rack shelves or flexible PCI-e riser cards that’ll allow me to temporarily place a backup graphics card in the case for installation, which’ll be removed from the system after that.

The OS of choice is, none other, than Windows 7 Professional x64. I have several reasons for this is:

1. Win 7 is pretty fast
2. It’s modern and flexible, meaning I can further enhance the performance by disabling tons of stuff and it’s gonna support the latest HW
3. Win 7 will communicate better with the Windows 2008 Server I have running my entire pipeline tools
4. And NO! I can’t run Linux on any of my machines!

I’m planning on experimenting with AMD CPUs as well, to see which ones perform best in the rack installation. The plan is to buy a new render node each bi-month, so by the end of the year, I should have at least 6 of these installed and online in the rack. For now, however, I’ll have to wait for the last parts to arrive from the US and then perform some benchmarking. I’ll keep you updated, of course!

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!

I understand rendering is the hottest shit. It provides results both for the clients as well as for the developers and their PR. It’s cool, sexy, in, fresh, new, first and what not, but I’d really much rather see some other GPU utilisation than just viewport acceleration and some rendering attempts or, even worse, real-time rendering previews, such as the VRay RT etc…

The thing is, when you render, it’s still a semi-product, it’s not what the client will/should ultimately see. The rendering has to go through at least a basic post-process (color correction, perhaps simple A over B composition or similar). The thing is, the client most likely won’t be sitting at your workstation watching over your shoulder whatever you’re rendering. No! But they will art-direct your sims for example! They’ll tell you “ok, add more in here, but make it blow from upper-right and give it a bit of a punch on this frame”. They will want you to make the clothing more flappy, less flappy, more rigid, less sticky etc… But rendering? Nope. You’ll send your batch on the farm and have it rendered, stored on a framestore (or wherever) and have it delivered to the compositor, who’ll then take those frames and add unicorn tears and fairy dust to the comp so that the director/supervisor can see what the hell you’ve been spending your weekends on.

That being said, I’d too love to see some GPU accelerated rendering, at least partially (if it is even possible), but quite honestly, much more useful and helpful would be to see other areas utilizing the amazing power of modern GPUs, especially when Fermi is coming soon.

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!)

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?

A lot has been written and said about this gorgeous gadget in the past months. So, I won’t bother you with yet another review, rather I’ll give you a subjective point of view of, perhaps, the most demanding user there is, me! No really, I’m very demanding and almost bitchy about what software, hardware or gadgets I use. I want them to do EXACTLY what I want/need them doing. If it’s not done my way, I am, simply put, unsatisfied, if you know what I mean. That’s also been one of the reasons I’ve exchanged about 5 – 6 smart phones (PPCs) in the past 2 years.

Anyways, for those of you highly demanding as I am, when you pull the beauty out of its box it’s great, gorgeous, fast, massive and generally uber-cool. However, as it always seems to be the case, once you really start using any device, it’ll show its strengths as well as weaknesses. Paradoxically, one of the weaknesses as well as strengths is the gorgeous 4.3 inch screen. It’s purely capacitive, which means you can forget about a stylus, or, sometimes a tablet pen, if you need to type quickly something. Also, it’s overly sensitive. Really, it’s so sensitive you spend more time deleting what you’ve misstyped than actually typing. Even though HTC claims they’ve “fixed” this in the latest ROM version, it’s still overly sensitive. Another little hiccup were the three huge buttons on the home screen. Why only three? If only there were, say, five, these would be much more handy. The whole matrix could contain more smaller buttons. The Start menu “honeycomb” could too utilize a bit more columns. And then there are the functionality quirks and minor annoyances here and there. Such as the WiFi going out when the phone goes to sleep. Or a missing quick Bluetooth toggle button. I also missed the good old HTC task manager in the upper right corner and the option to close a running process by tapping the “X” button. The list could go on and on.

Thankfully, and this is one of the strong reasons I like sticking around, admittably aging, Windows Mobile OS. There is always a solution to any problem you might ever have. Be it in a form of unintuitive and user unfriendly Registry tweaking or in a form of a freely or even commercially available piece of software. Once again, I’ll only highlight stuff I’ve personally installed and am actually using, so, hopefully you might take advantage of the same modifications and tweaks as I have. Also, to save you some precious time, at the end of this article I’ve put a link to a package of all the plugins, tweaks, patches and programs I’m mentioning here, so you can go through them and choose whichever you like to use yourself.

• Obviously, I’m using the latest ROM with all the official patches. (Except for the large ROM, the files are included in the archive)
• Another, obvious one, was the start menu item quantity as well as the number of home buttons extender tweak I applied. (20shcut.cab)
• A 3G toggle button. (add_3g_commmanager.cab)
• A Bluetooth toggle button. (bluetooth_toggle.cab)
• BsB Tweaks app. is a great way to quickly and conveniently tweak very common registry entries to enhance functionality and fix some annoyances. (BsB Tweaks 1.5.cab)
• Bear in mind that the BsB Tweaks app. requires the latest .NET Compact Framework from Microsoft. (NETCFSetupv35.msi)
• The latest (beta!) Total Commander for PPCs. (cecmd.arm_b2.cab)
• The 3D graphics enhancer toggle. (chainfire-hd2-3d-driver-patch_1.1.2-test.cab)
• A tweak for minimizing accidental link clicks when rolling menus. (disable_accidental_link_clicks.cab)
• The beloved HTC task manager. (duttys.task.manager.for.leo.v2.1.free.cab)
• A fix for displaying Flash in Opera. (fixOperaFlash.exe)
• A tweak for disabling the always present home clock flip effect. This doesn’t disable it completely, only when you’re switching back to the home screen the clock won’t flip. (homescreen_flip_clock_off.cab)
• A tweak that allows for quick locking of the device by holding the send key for a few seconds. (longpress_sendkey_lockdevice.cab)
• A tweak to add “Mark All Read” to the menu in the mail app. (markallreadinbox.cab)
• An enhancement to the audio driver. (srs_wowhd_v1.5.1.0_sector.cab)
• A tweak that removes the WiFi disabling feature when the device goes to sleep. (starbase64_wlan_suspend.cab)
• This is a fun one. This tweak allows to use the LED flash as a torch light. (TorchButton_v2.3.cab)
• This little helper shows the amount of battery in percent on the upper bar. (Touch_X_1_percent_battery_LEO.cab)
• A tweak to show four rows in the Start menu instead of the default three. (Touch_X_Hexagon_4_row.cab)
• Should you need to add a quick link for a soft reset of the device and a WiFi toggle, this is it. (Touch_X_reset_and_wifi.cab)
• An obvious one, Skype. (SkypeMobile.cab)
• And an alternative soft keyboard called FingerKeyboard, which I got used to using. (FingerKeyb-2.1-WVGA_2_.cab)

That’s it. These are the 3rd party apps and tweaks I used to modify my HTC HD2. I’m very satisfied with the way my phone looks, behaves and works right now, which means something! Considering… So, if you’re like me and love to tweak the hell out of your gadgets and happen to own this fantastic device, go for these. You can, of course, install only those that you personally find interesting or handy, but I though I’d give you those in one, convenient, package.

I should add a disclaimer here as well. In no way am I responsible for any damage should it occur to your device! Even though I’ve installed all of these packages and have absolutely no problems what so ever with them. Also remember to BACKUP all your data, your contacts, calendar entries, mails, messages and what not, should you need to flash the phone from scratch! Don’t install any of those if you don’t feel comfortable modifying or possibly flashing your phone! And a credit: most of those tweaks come from a great, Czech, site WindowsMobile Mania, so, if you understand Czech, pay them a visit.

And as promised, here’s the full package (57.28 MB) containing all the above mentioned installers. Enjoy your HD2!

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.