duber's blog

I’m, along with Gavin Greenwalt from Straightface, featured in Thinkbox’s study that took a look into the Deadline Power Management feature and how it can help save your studio money in the end.

Go ahead, it’s an interesting read.

Every TD knows that command line tools are among the most powerful in their arsenal of tricks and secrets.

I want to mention RVIO, as today it saved me quite a lot of time (again), which is absolutely key when a deadline is coming.

My client requested a minor tweak of animation (a lip sync, to be concrete) on an almost finished shot. So, the general approach would be to do the change, have the animation data go through the pipeline and at the end have the finished frames ready to be loaded in an existing edit, which then gets rendered out and the final result gets showed to the client.

All fine, until you realize your render farm is completely full with other shots, so you have to skip the “beauty” pass rendering and only present the client with a, somehow, polished preview directly from your 3D package, which isn’t the safest way, trust me. But this client is great and understands that what he sees is actually only a preview of the animation.

So, the last piece of puzzle to solve is to get the preview assembled with additional layers of information (such as frame number, shot name etc…), basically a slightly customized overlay. All this sounds nice and simple, you just open up (in my case) Premiere Pro, swap the layers, render out the portion you need and be done with it.

But this certainly isn’t the TD way.

(more…)

Just a quick shout about the compatibility of duberPython and the latest and greatest IronPython 2.7.1 release (released a couple of days ago). All working smoothly and quickly, as expected.

Should you need more info on duberPython or what we’re doing with it and Shotgun or Tactic, just drop me a line and I’ll be more than happy to show you how cool duberPython is.

I have nothing but huge respect for Steve Jobs and what he has done with the world of technology as we know it today. So the news of him passing away saddened me very much. We lost one of the greatest visionaries of our time.

Rest In Peace, Steve.

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.

If you’re used to scripting your GUIs in Max with the standard rollouts via “createDialog …”, you might be a little confused and lost when you first try to use a 100% .NET Form object instead.

Whatever your reason might be for using .NET Forms instead of standard dialogs, you’ll still want to:

• Create the main form and define its properties
• Define other UI controls, such as buttons, checkboxes etc…
• Define event handlers for specific control objects
• Initialize and display the entire Form with all the controls and functionality tied in

All this is done a little differently in the .NET realm than what you’re used to in MAXScript. But before you start, check out Paul Neale’s great .NET tutorials on his site. Paul provides some great info for anyone trying to use .NET controls in their scripts.

Now, there is one thing I bumped into, you can actually use .NET objects in MAXScript rollouts, however, you cannot use regular max controls in .NET Forms! So, trying to assign a standard button to a .NET Form will result in an error.

You might think that this creates a burden on the TD to actually skin and customize the .NET controls to look like native 3ds Max GUI elements. You can do this, of course, but it’d really be a lot of additional work to hassle around with color classes, HWNDs etc… you actually don’t need to worry about this as there is an Assembly available in standard Max installations. It’s a little .dll, found in the root of Max, called MaxCustomControls.dll. This Assembly contains some of the more exotic controls, such as SceneExplorer, but it also contains a complete Form control that has already been modified so it reflects your 3ds Max environment, including all the colors, themes and even an initialization method for showing the control as a part of the max process/window.

(more…)

That’s right, folks! I am thrilled to announce, that Pixomondo, the company behind some of the most challenging VFX shows, such as Sucker Punch, Iron Man 2 or 2012, has purchased and implemented our duberPython plugin for 3ds Max, allowing them to tightly integrate software, such as Shotgun, into their complex pipeline.

We’ve also helped with scripting Shotgun wrappers and optimizing the duberPython engine to suite Pixomondo’s needs. This resulted in a more refined, streamlined and faster IronPython connection for 3ds Max TDs, scripters, developers or even regular users.

A few key points of duberPython:

• It allows for direct calling of Python code from within MAXScript
• Also allows for Python script files to be called with unlimited number of arguments
• duberPython supports behind-the-scenes data type conversions between Python and MAXScript
• duberPython is a dotNET assembly, which means it’s a 3ds Max version and release agnostic (can run on Max 9 to 2012, both x64 and x86)
• duberPython is built on IronPython and thus supports the latest dotNET version and 3ds Max releases
• duberPython was created for the sole purpose of enabling 3ds Max users to use tools like Tactic or Shotgun
• duberPython is available for licensing! Get in touch for more info.

I’d love to show you more, so, you can either wait for me to make a nice presentation and put it up here, or, you can get in touch and I’ll give you a private presentation and provide you with a fully functional, time-limited, version of duberPython.

07th of August, 2003 at 23:26:00, I registered the domain name duber.cz, the home of duber studio.

So, happy birth day, duber.cz!

People have asked me how to actually write a plugin for Deadline that will automatically submit a Nuke scene (or any other, for that matter), so I put together a quick tutorial showing you just that.

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.

(more…)