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Working at Various VFX Companies

I’ve recently been working on a full-cg piece for Porsche’s 918 Spyder hybrid car (don’t think about bying one though, because all 918 models have already been sold out).

Comp lead was Julian Schädler and I’d like to link to his blog here because he has written about his work experience for a bunch of VFX companies:

MPC London
Mackevision (Stuttgart)
Pixomondo (Stuttgart)

With the last one, there’s a lot of shit hitting the fan right now regarding their payment practices. Freelancers who are still owed money are venting their anger on Facebook.

update:

Found out about the site thevfxwatchers.org, which aims to be a way for freelancers to anonymously rate employers in the vfx industry. They are apparently eager to make this a constructive site instead of an arena for ranting and libel. So far the response seems to be a bit limited. For example, Scott Squires pointed to the site numerous times on twitter after bad business and payment practices have been made public, yet few ratings have seemed to trickle in at thevfxwatchers.

I hope that this site picks up some steam, and that it becomes a site that recommends places with good working conditions, sound production planning and staff that knows how to treat workers well and sail the rough waters of vfx business relations. After all, gratification is more effective than punishment when training dogs. Maybe it works for businesses as well 🙂

Wire Frame

Here’s one for everybody who’s doing CGI car commercials: a real-life wire frame Lamborghini 🙂

Story

reminds me of Automan…

Elysium: Expected Too Much

Saw Elysium yesterday. What stayed in mind were two things: great production design and the most annoying accent ever in a movie villain.

Elysium trailer screenshots (C) TriStar PIctures

Just like in District 9, director Neill Blomkamp has a thing for gritty sci-fi technology. There are cool firearms and space shuttle designs that seem to have evolved naturally from today’s technology. The computer displays and interfaces on the other hand are a bit backwards for the year 2100-something. Some look more like 90s era LCD wristwatches.

Elysium trailer screenshots (C) TriStar PIctures

Apart from the obvious things (space station etc.) it’s hard to make out exactly which shots are CG. Probably most aerial shots and all the police robots. The VFX and composites really are fantastic.

In the end, however, the movie didn’t quite satisfy me. It got boring even though you were supposed to care for the hero’s mission. (This is why I enjoyed Pacific Rim so much as an action movie: It didn’t include a cheesy “hero needs to save his love interest’s sick child from dying” subplot!)

The movie’s villains suffered from severe cases of overacting: I haven’t seen Jodie Foster in a while but she sure likes to make it obvious with every syllable that she’s playing an evil person. The movie’s other prominent villain has what I guess is a genuine South African accent but it made him laughable like those fan-made Youtube clips where people are dubbing movies with silly voices.

7/10 (the “better than average” level)

Comp-Fu Answers Part 3

More recurring search terms that have led people to my blog!

optical flares for fusion

No.

what the user wanted
what the client wanted
what the customer wanted

I think you’re all after the same thing 🙂

what-the-customer-wanted

source: unknown

vfx naming convention

Now, this is actually quite an interesting topic. I’ve worked at a dozen small to medium companies as a freelancer and one thing’s for sure: everybody does it differently. Some places even opt for a content/asset management system that allows artists to name things the way they want. Only when checking something into the database, files will get tagged and renamed.

For the rest of us, it’s probably enough to have a naming convention that works on the file system as it is. This is usually done by combining so-called “tokens” via underscores (“XMEN_04-100_comp_v012.0001.exr”). Depending on the departments you have and whether your project’s shot are split up into sequences, things differ wildly. However, here are some best practices. Interestingly, all of them are just workarounds for the fact that file systems and the file managers that come with each OS are really, really bad for VFX work. So the database-driven CMS isn’t such a bad idea after all 🙂

Rule no. 1:

Write scripts that take care of file names. Every time an artist has to enter a file name or – heaven forbid – create a directory manually, chances are he’ll fuck it up. Scripting is easy for compositing or 3D apps, but a nightmare for AfterEffects, Photoshop or e-Mail attachments.

Rule no. 2:

Don’t over-engineer things by stuffing everything into a file name. That’s what metadata is for. But do make sure you can figure out where a file came from just by looking at its name: call it the same as the scene/comp/script that created it and then some but think twice about adding a department code, artist name, image size token or color space info to every frickin’ file name.

Rule no. 3:

Adjust to your file manager’s capabilities. They suck on every OS but even with an asset management system in place you’ll want to browse directories sooner or later. This means files should be easy to find and sorted logically:

  • General strings first, then get more specific as you add tokens to the file name. It’s better to do shot_task_version than artistname_shot_version.
  • Dates should be written as YYYYMMDD so they sort correctly.
  • Version and frame numbers should have a fixed amount of digits, padded with zeros (e.g. v003)
  • One file sequence per directory, named the same as the directory it’s in. Exceptions for multi-pass renderings (put em all in one folder) or multiple output resolutions of the same shot (split into subfolders like “jpg1080p” or “hd_exr” so the files themselves don’t have to contain this token).
  • A new version of a file (rendering/comp/animation) should only differ in one predictable place: its version number (which may occur multiple times if you consider the whole path name as well). That makes scripting easy and allows versioning up in Nuke. If you put a comment token or artist name somewhere in the path name (\SHOT100\Spaceship\renderings\v005-newShading\…), you’ll need to write smarter pipeline scripts for no good reason.
  • What happens if somebody accidentally moves a whole directory somewhere else? If you have a directory named “Shots” in every project folder, you can even wipe out a whole project on MacOS (drag “Shots” from one project into another and blindly click OK). Windows and Linux are not prone to such a major disaster but if you merge two shot folders have fun untangling them. Better use a short, project-specific prefix for the 2nd or even 3rd level directories inside a project folder.

Pacific Rim Fan-Art

Artsy pop culture site “blurppy” has a great collection of Pacific Rim movie posters made by various designers. Check out their two-part series by clicking on either thumbnail!

Pacific Rim Poster by Richard Davies   Pacific Rim Poster by Doaly

left one by Richard Davies, right one by Doaly
(found via Mech Love Not War)

Funny how many posters in the 2nd gallery take inspiration from Japanese iconography. The movie itself stars a Japanese actress but the plot takes place in Hong-Kong.

I wonder how that movie is received in China or if it is even shown there? From what I learned during my stay in Shanghai, only a couple of western blockbusters are admitted to Chinese theaters each year. Which is probably part of the reason why many big Hollywood productions are cozying up to that market (Emmerich’s 2012 making a statement about Tibet that made the audience cheer, Bruce Willis being married to Qing Xu in Looper).

Maybe there’s a special edit for that market with more shots of the Chinese mecha pilots? Because a Japanese girl defending Hong-Kong might feel to some people like Germans defending Moscow…

And here’s one more treat I found on blurppy: A fan-made trailer for Pacific Rim in the style of those good old Godzilla movies. I love it and vintage grading they put on top of that clip makes the CGI even more life-like in my opinion.

By the way, all of this creativity could be killed off by the ongoing trend of always tougher copyright enforcement and lawmaking. Update: a link on that would be nice, so here’s an article on techdirt that touches on that subject of fair use.

The Pixel Painter

Here’s a great short film about a 97 year old man who uses MS Paint to great effect. Touching!

Add Tool improvement for Fusion

Here’s an update for Fusion’s Add Tool script that makes it remember your favorite tools. This way you will never again get confused by similarly named tools that you never use. These favorites get written to disk into your profile directory so they persist whenever you restart Fusion.

The popup also lists macros and scripts and it makes 3rd party tools or Fuses easier to spot by printing their vendor ID as well (e.g. “Fuse” or “KD” for Krokodove plugins).

AddToolX

Tool favorites are preselected and marked with a number of stars based on their popularity. Press ctrl-U to reset the counters.

The changes I’ve made are based on the work of Andreas Opferkuch (who made an improved version of Add Tool called Add Anything) and the new substring matching that lets you skip letters is based on the Nuke script “tabtabtab” by Ben Dickson.

Download the script here and place it into your comp scripts folder:
Add Tool X.eyeonscript

Installation.

To launch this script instead of Add Tool you need to modify your Fusion.hotkeys file. The default Add Tool script is bound to Ctrl-Space. If you use Nuke as well you might prefer the Tab key instead. Put this block into Fusion.hotkeys (use the Flow section instead of Frame because the Tab key is already used in the viewers or the control panel…)

Flow = {
   TAB = "@Scripts:Comp/Add Tool X.eyeonscript",
}

How to use it:

After launching the popup using your preferred hotkey, start typing. As with the original Add Tool script, the list of tools will be restricted to those that contain the string you’ve entered. However, some tools have very similar names and the wrong tool might be selected until you type the complete name of a tool. For example, ‘tra’ will match the Tracker before the Transform tool. This isn’t exactly speeding up your workflow!

Add Tool X will keep track of all the tools you spawn so once you have manually chosen Transform over Tracker, it will prefer Transform from now on. Unless you have spawned other tools starting with T, Add Tool X will even offer you Transform as soon as you enter the letter T! Your favorite tools are also sorted to the top of the list which means that the second most popular tool is always just a cursor key away.

Non-Consecutive matching.

Inspired by “tabtabtab“, Add Tool X sports a smart letter matching system that allows you to skip letters as long as the first character matches your desired tool’s name. For example, m3 will match “Merge 3D” or trk matches the “Tracker”. You’ll quickly figure out your own unique shortcuts to your favorite tools that don’t clash with other tool names. Note that you can still rely on the standard substring matching which doesn’t allow you to skip letters but on the other hand doesn’t require you to start with the first letter. This is why, in the screenshot above, m3 also matches “Transform 3D” (spaces are always ignored). You can start typing a tool name with a capital letter to turn off the non-consecutive matching altogether.

Advanced options.

The script also has a bunch of flags that you can adjust using a text editor:

-- show the helpful label at the bottom of the popup?
SHOW_LABEL = true
-- pop up where the mouse is
CURSOR_POPUP = true
-- disable to hide macros
SHOW_MACROS = true
-- disable to hide scripts
SHOW_SCRIPTS = true
-- put favorites to the top of the list
SORT_BY_POPULARITY = true
-- cache macros and scripts (off by default)
CACHE_MACROS_AND_SCRIPTS = false