Tuesday, November 25, 2014

Digital Pyrotechnics at Industrial Light & Magic with Plume

I always think about how big studios deal with pyrotechnic (explosion, fire and smoke, usually). Do they use Maya fluid or FumeFx, Phoenix FDHoudini Pyro FX, or Flowline, or something else (Blender)? And the answer is something else. Of course they probably use a lot of off-the-shelf stuff as it needed but since 2010 ILM has a proprietary solution called Plume. So there is an awesome presentation on youtube.


Thursday, November 20, 2014

Autodesk acquired Shotgun

Okay, it is not recenty news but for me it is because I do an extensive research on asset and project managment topic.
I found this a couple of month ago: Redcurrant. It is in connection with the Goosbery Project as I wrote before. As the open source community push forward the industry (not just CGI and VFX) it could be a viable idea to create an open source asset and project management solution. But as we know it is a tough-tough topic.
So what I expect from that acquisition? Is it all about the big fish eats the small one? Maybe. Because Autodesk provides lots of tools for VFX an CGI (but certainly not all of them) I think there is a need to establish a clear terminology for the industry. There is a global need of generalization I think. Example for that is OpenExr and Alembic.
What do I mean generalization?
There are lot of things which are the same for eg. in Maya, Houdini, etc. and whole the industry use these  concepts. Polygon, shader, render, etc. for example.
But lot of concepts are conceived at different vfx companies, universities and software developers, etc. which I think should be the same. Asset is a typical example for that. Is it a file? Or is it a set of file versions? Or it is a lot of small components which build a 3d character?
Another example is a status of a task. Task is a complex thing itself. About it statuses: there are ready to start, WIP, hold, pending, approved, completed, on feedback, daily, commented, reviewed, has revision, omitted, etc. In this list reviewed, has revision, commented basically the same. Certainly should be an exact definition for for statuses and certainly should be a clear picture how many status necessary for the project management.

There should be a standard definition for a lot of concept in connection with VFX-CGI.
I think a major player on the asset and project management field or an open source movement can affect the generalization of the industry. It might be Shotgun.

About Shotgun you can read here.
About the acquisition you can read here and here.




Thursday, November 6, 2014

Open Source

I wrote about open source a bit during the past few month but that was the first time when I looked up in wikipedia. There is that nice little stop motion movie I like to share here. I think it is great :)