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.

I’m trhilled to be able to finally showcase, at least, some of our very own Python implementation into 3ds Max!

First off, our primary reason for writing our own, proprietary, Python connection to 3ds Max is Tactic by Southpaw Technology. An awesome asset management system entirely written in Python that I decided to invest in and integrate our tools and software packages into. Another reason for this connection, later came up, was the need for writing much more complex scripts with complex GUIs, since, as you probably know, a few functional lines of code are hardly enough in a modern, efficient, VFX production of today.

The heart of our Python integration is dotNET from Microsoft. I can’t express myself enough how much I appretiate this framework! The brain of our Python integration is IronPython. Also a product from Microsoft, completely open source and free, which are two very important aspects for any pipeline tool in any production facility of any size. Not the price as much as the availability of the software. And with IronPython and Microsoft, I am certain that this piece of software will be around for years!

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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If you still preview your sequences in an absolutely obsolete and impossible RAM Player in Max, or terribly outdated and rigid FlipBook, do yourself a favour and buy a license today!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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That’s right! I needed to convert a fairly complex, proprietary, LUT for preview purposes to one of the IRIDAS’ formats. I chose .ilut, since it’s a really simple, yet, extremely powerful format!

Let’s take a look at the syntax first. On the online documentation IRIDAS site, you’ll see all the different LUT formats FrameCycler supports, as well as the syntax for those files. The .ilut format is pretty flexible. It supports either an XML (ASCII) syntax, or an inrerpretable script format. For my complex LUT I used the XML format. The LUT wouldn’t be of much use to you as it’s used on a specific machine with a specific graphics card, specifically calibrated display and generally a different color workflow than the rest of the machines at the studio. But, to demonstrate the usefulness of this LUT file format, I’ll show you my sRGB LUT I created a while ago using the interpretable script syntax for previewing linear images (OpenEXR for example).

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I am very excited to present a very early development results for our own Python implementation in 3ds Max.

First a bit of an intro. At duber, I’ve setup everything around Python, the most versatile and powerful language I’ve ever seen. I felt in love with Python so much that it even influenced my decision to leave Fusion (my favourite compositing app) and dive into Nuke (my, now, most favourite compositing app). I even invested in a commercial data and asset management system, Tactic, that is entirely written in Python. I run tons of custom Python scripts to tie together programs such as Tactic, Nuke, FrameCycler, Photoshop etc… etc… But the last missing piece to the entire pipeline puzzle was 3ds Max.

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I finally received the Windows Server 2008 Standard (not R2) package via the terrible czech post service, so I can finally start to fully concentrate on the server side software development for my studio.

I’ll write about it some more later, when I actually have something worthy showing off

Even though Google’s Chrome wasn’t a bad browser, the only reason I tried it was the horrible UI in Firefox under Windows 7’s Aero.

After a good two hours of looking around for the perfect Firefox theme, I bumped into two plugins that saved the day, Glasser and Stylish.

Glasser will conveniently turn most of the browser’s upper area transparent. Or rather, take advantage of Aero Glass’ theme.

But Stylish is really cool. It allows you to easily modify everything in Firefox, from the button colors, text highlights, to the menu width etc… and all using a simple CSS syntax. Really nice.

So, if you’re like me and hate the blueish shitstorm present everywhere in Aero Glass, or at least in Firefox, go get these two addons, they’re really cool!

That’s true. I’m so pissed and desperate that Microsoft broke the old classic themes in Windows 7 that I’m willing to give Aero one last try.

I’m already having hard times getting used to the over-brightened workspace (dual monitor setup certainly doesn’t help), especially since I’m used to working late at nights. I adjusted most of my professional applications to make it a little more easy on me. I’ve brightened 3ds Max a little:

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As you might know, I’ve upgraded to Windows 7 recently, however, I’m slowly starting to regret it.

I’m a bit choleric about certain things, especially when somebody enforces me to do, think or work the way they want. And I’m extra sensitive to bad UI designs.

I generally think that Aero and especially its Aero Glass theme is a very badly designed theme with terrible user experience, globally. Windows 7, however, bring this nonsense to a whole new level by almost strictly enforcing you to use Aero, because without it, it simply doesn’t work!

Here are things I absolutely hate about Windows 7. They are mostly tiny details, mainly UI related, but all the more they piss me off! Especially since they not only influence my overall Windows 7 experience, but, by their nature, they influence it all the times.

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