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Ranting about stuff

June 28th, 2011

**A friend of mine reminded me what the true issue was regarding one of these points, so I have adjusted the article accordingly. Thanks Mac ;D**

Well it’s pretty self explanatory, I just feel the urge to rant about some things I have on my mind. The main thing that’s pissed me off today is the state of the game industry in Australia currently. Now as a disclaimer, I am just a 3D enthusiast when it comes to game design… I haven’t had a job in any game design studios nor have I been heavily involved in the game community such as IGDA and the Aussie communities, but some things are so in your face it’s a joke.

I follow an online digital community of digital professionals called DLF – digital laborers federation. Recently there has been a bit of talk about the issue of credits in games, namely LA Noire. From what I understand, the game was developed jointly between Rockstar Games and Team Bondi – the Australian game studio. The discussion is about the fact that Team Bondi didn’t include the full credit list of the staff who worked tirelessly on the development of this game. While this may not seem like a big deal to most people, for those people who have put blood sweat and tears into making this a game a reality, it’s a real spit in the face. And to me, it’s a big spit in the face of the Australian game development community as a whole, which has got me really pissed off…

This isn’t the first time that local companies, as well as external companies, mainly American, have dared to blatantly spit in our faces. One time that rings loud in my ears is with a game studio called Pandemic. They produced a game I used to play every day called Dark Reign. Although it wasn’t as successful as RTS’ such as Starcraft, it held a dear spot in many people’s hearts and had a strong following. EA Games purchased Pandemic and then proceeded to lay off nearly all employees and shut down the Australian office. EA Games has a long history of purchasing studios and then shutting them down, clearly flexing their control over the gaming industry.

Another company that is bitter to a lot of Perth based game developers is Interzone, which is now known as Big Collision Games. They entered Australia giving hope to lots of budding game developers in Perth, they accepted government support and financial aid. They employed a lot of talented people who invested a lot of time, energy, and intellectual property into the development of their game concept. In return, Interzone decided not to pay the employees, nor their super. They also didn’t pay taxes, and as a result went into liquidation destroying the gaming communities spirit in the process. They then had the nerve to relocate and reform, with zero intention of settling the outstanding issues in Australia. Now how does that look in the eyes of this who supported them? I’m pretty damn sure the government will be very hesitant in supporting any future business willing to set up studios here…

There are other studios who have experienced problems such as Krome, but I won’t go into these details because, well, I’m not too sure of the details. All I know is there were bulk job losses which cripples the industry – even if it is due to not winning contracts vs competition. I’ve had enough watching international companies deciding it’s ok to spit in our faces and treat us like shit, and what’s even worse is nothing has changed over the past years of abuse. I think it’s about time that Australian game developers give the big middle finger to the major studios and get on with developing high quality games that we can be proud of. You can definitely run a highly profitable business without treating your employees like shit, and why don’t we set a precedence?? There’s no doubting the talent that we have in Australia and frankly I’m sick of seeing all the talent being forced over seas… It’s about time Australia stands up and says ‘fuck you, respect me’.

This is just the random thoughts of myself, would love to get a discussion going regarding the issue, and also a plan in place to make the industry as strong as we can…

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It’s been a while…

June 21st, 2011

Well it’s been a while since I’ve done a blog post, the last I wrote I was trying to keep a daily blog up and failed on the second day. I must say, blogging doesn’t come natural to me, but when I have lots of ideas to think about I need a repository to store these ideas, so it’s definitely something I need to get into…

I had the urge to write a post a few weeks ago regarding folio preparation, but didn’t get around to doing it. It’s definitely something I want to write about soon as I think it’s an important topic. A little update about what’s going on with myself… I’m working as a 3D and Multimedia tutor at Curtin University in Perth, Western Australia. Have been doing that for a couple of years and I’m settling in pretty well and enjoying the education aspect. Other than that, my freelance is just heating up. I have some decent size jobs going on and some sizzling clients and contacts that will definitely propel my business in the right direction. Enough about that!

The experiment

When working on a lot of work related things, it’s good to procrastinate sometimes to relax, and what better thing to procrastinate with than playing around with some 3D dynamics. Not particle, or cloth or anything like that. I’ve always wanted to play around with audio driven 3d animation, so I gave it a go on the weekend. This is my result:

As you can see, the line bounces to the audio track. It’s not perfect, but its a start, and a decent result for one days messing around. It’s actually a cool starting point and I can imagine what cool stuff I can animate to a wav file. Currently that’s just an extrude based on the value output from the audio file, mapped over time, but imagine using the output values for colour changes, other animation changes, particle emission changes etc.

How it’s done

It’s driven off the plugin downloadable off area.autodesk.com called ‘audiowave.mll’. Here’s the basic set-up…

  • Install the plug-in, import the audio file. Time to link everything up via MEL.
  • Create an audio node & attach the wav file to the node – note the file HAS to be a wav file not an mp3. Use the following code.

    • createNode audioWave;
    - This creates a node called audioWave1. It’s what you hook the wav file into. I just executed each MEL script after each line to make sure it was done correctly.
    connectAttr soundNode.filename audioWave1.audio;
    - Where ‘soundNode’ is the file name of the audio clip. You can find this out if you aren’t sure by right clicking on the timeline where the audio is placed, and hovering over the sound option. It should tell you the audio file reference name.
    connectAttr time1.outTime audioWave1.input;
    - This hooks the audio wave up to the timeline, so the value changes over time.

    From here you’ve hooked up the audio to the audioWave node, and also hooked it up to the timeline. What this will do is it will output various values ranging from 0-1 for the wave sign position in the timeline. You can now use this value to animate different elements of a model or texture. It’s the driver for the animation. For the animation you see above, I have animated the subcurve extrusion attribute. This is how it was hooked up:
    connectAttr audioWave1.output object.attribute;
    - Use whatever attribute you want to animate. If you are unsure of the attribute name specifically, you can right click on the attribute and go to create an expression, and nab the attribute name in that window. The only reason I did it this way is because I am pretty much clueless about MEL.

    The most noteworthy thing is, once you are happy with the animation produced from linking the attributes up, I noticed that you had to bake the keys for it to render in batch render. Not sure if this is supposed to be part of the process, but I found that this allowed it to be rendered. I noticed the bake only worked if the object baked was the one directly affecting the animation, so in this case the subcurve value.

    All that aside, you have now linked up the audio to a wave control node, and now hooked the wave results into an animated attribute. Another quick note is you can use nodes to amplify the results. For example, I hooked an audio clip up to the luminance value which isn’t easily seen, but the luminance value isn’t effective in casting light/shadows at low values which are output by the wave node (eg. 0.75 etc), so by putting a multiplier node and multiplying the value by 10 or 15, you get more of an effect.

    What’s the use of it?

    So as you can see, now you’re getting a result from the audio peaks/troughs, what’s animatable is only left to your imagination. My next thought was splitting audio waves into highs, mids and lows and animating different elements, such as colour, size, even particles. Set driven keys, anything you can think of. Could be useful for audio decoding and even initial mouth/character animation based off voice.

    The animation has LOTS to be refined on, such as motion blur etc, but the concept is there…

    I intend to tweak this and play with this a lot more in the near future with different animated elements, so hopefully I’ll keep this blog updated with progress.

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    2/1/10

    January 3rd, 2010

    Well I pretty much missed this day already, hows that 2 days into the posting and I’ve already failed. Well technically I haven’t, as its 10 minutes till midnight….

    So today has been quite a lazy day, caught up with some friends I haven’t seen in a long time, had lunch and a few beers. Was quite fun hearing tales of adventures, goals, stories and reminiscing over old times. I really need to do that more this year.

    After the short catch up, a few of us went to see Avatar in 3D. The graphics were incredible, its amazing how you can build such a realistic world in complete CG, and not be able to spot flaws everywhere constantly like the previous films. Just incredible. It somewhat inspires me to do what I can to go further in the 3D animation world… Just what I need, some fresh inspiration!

    Other than that, I’ve still got to finish editing that film due on Monday. Its such a bitch getting into things you haven’t done for a while. Unfortunately I’ve got a music festival tomorrow so my time to edit will be extremely limited. I will have to knuckle down either tonight or tomorrow morning and night to get it finished in time. I think the KISS (keep it simple stupid) motto will have to ring true, something I’m not that good at following… Wish me luck!

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    1/1/10

    January 1st, 2010

    Lets see how long I can maintain posting on this blog this year. Didn’t drink that much last night so luckily i’m not too hung over to be unproductive. My task today is to cut together a video + audio voiceover recorded for one of my clients, Curtin University. Its only a quick cut together but its being sent with a staff member to the UK for a conference.

    I’ll try to keep myself on track and on task for work, and play by doing a real quick daily blog. I will be listing specs of the render farm and more specifics in the coming days. I have a music festival coming up this Sunday which should be good, but I will still try and get a post out. Got 50% of the video edit cut and edited today.

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    End of 2009

    December 28th, 2009

    Hi everyone. Well it’s the end of the year and I guess it would be smart to provide an update on what’s happening and what’s planned in the near future…

    The year has been an interesting one with the operation of my own business running at full capacity all year providing a high stress environment to thrive in. A change from operating under my name to an official business name ‘Gear Interactive’ gives me a more professional image, although in saying that I have a long way to make that transition from freelance to official. The website isn’t together yet which was going to be my project over this festive season but is still on standby, although the .com and .com.au are both registered and waiting to be implemented.

    In terms of jobs this past year, the majority of them have been the same WoundsWest education project, involving 3D viz, interactive design of these elements and the occasional graphic design task. One project that I finished recently was a children’s book accompanied by an interactive CD. Working with the WoundsWest team and the book author, a prac student from UWA, we worked together to produce the book and ideas for the interactive CD. It was a job that I totally underestimated on the sheer size of the project and the short deadline to produce the final product.

    My jobs in this project included vectorizing every illustration and Photoshop editing every page to clean up the original illustrations created by children in a remote primary school. Adding to this, the interactive CD involved every vector page created for the book, which was 18 pages, to be animated for a ‘story mode’ requiring no book to facilitate the story. Due to time restrictions, these animations were very limited but suitable for the target audience. The interactive CD also contained 3 mini games to enhance the learning objectives for the children which required extensive coding. thankfully my kind brother Tim Gittos provided me extensive assistance on this part. The project was completed early December and piloted mid December in Broome Western Australia.

    Other contracts include training 3D animations for a trucking company safety procedures, which are still in development. These type of jobs are always welcome to me and there is capacity to take on more of this type of work, especially now but I will tell you about why that is soon.

    Finally, the biggest news this year is that I have become a sessional tutor at the university I graduated from, Curtin University. This is most likely the biggest challenge for me this year passed as I was chucked in the deep end by getting 3 year groups 1st years, 2nd and 3rds. Having no prior teaching experience or training, I found it a little hard at first to gain respect from the students but also maintain discipline. I feel I learnt rapidly and managed to do relatively well for the time I was there. Definitely looking forward to the start semester of 2010.

    I mentioned earlier in the year that I was looking into building a render farm for the expansion of my work. Well back then I didnt know much about how rendering worked, and hardware/software that I would need to get this done. Also, I wasn’t totally ready or committed to building the farm up, but after being in some sticky situations of rendering and deadlines during the year, I got 2 render nodes, and have recently decided to expand the 8 cores to 20 cores introducing 3 more computers to the farm. Back when the discussion was started, I wasn’t sure if more ghz/core was better or more cores (hence the discussion about cheap dual cores), but after some research I decided on sticking with some quad cores instead of dual. Unfortunately I am still waiting on 2 motherboards to finish the build (which will be able to be picked up early January) so I have not finished the final setup, but its all on the go.

    I’m still not entirely sure of how I will set up the render farm software/server wise, but my first thought was to give Linux and drqueue a whirl. Unfortunately i want my render farm to accommodate After FX as well as Maya to complete my pipeline, and AfterFX doesn’t have a Linux compatible render engine unfortunately… I will be looking into Royal Render (http://www.royalrender.de/cms/royal-render/) to see how it can help me and update everyone once I have it sorted.

    So I’ll keep it to that at the moment as I am still on the back foot – I can write for ages about whats planned and what I want to work on but I’ve got a fair bit of stuff to do. Looking forward to what 2010 brings and how I can improve on 2009…

    Take it easy,

    Jarrad

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    Spam, tabs and updates.

    July 20th, 2009

    Hey all, haven’t done a blog in a long time so heres a little update. Firstly, i’d like to thank all those russian spammers for constantly reminding me that I actually do have a blog, and sorry no I’m not interested in your sex toys, money making spams, although I do appreciate your fake flattery on the quality of my blog! Anyway, lets get into those tabs, finally get to clear them up…

    I have collected a bunch of animations, some old, some new, but they are all pretty cool and have a great level of detail, skill and creativity involved. I’ve had them open in my firefox tabs for weeks now because I’ve watched them so many times, so time to get them cemented in my blog!


    Kajimba
    Kajimba is a 26 episode x 5 min CGI series in production at ProMotion Studios in Sydney, Australia. Conceived by James Neale, it is aimed at an older market owing to the flavour of the language and themes

    Kajimba Annecy 2009 – trailer from Kajimba on Vimeo.



    Alarm

    ‘ALARM’ done completely by ‘Moo-hyun Jang’, a director of the independant animation team MESAI It’s pretty self explainatory so just sit back, watch and enjoy!



    This Side Up

    “A naive music-lover’s patience is tested on his quest to download music online, as his perspective on technology completely changes.” – Animated by Liron Topaz and you can visit the official site of the movie at http://www.this-side-up.com/



    Blip
    “Two aliens try to take over the same planet.”
    A short 3d animated film, produced by Ben Harper and Sean Mullen in our 3rd year at the Irish School of Animation.

    COPYRIGHT Ben Harper Sean Mullen © 2008
    seanmullenartwork.blogspot.com
    benmation.blogspot.com

    Blip from Sean Mullen on Vimeo.



    Planet 51
    Movie trailer for a new animated film set to be released in Australia on 10th December 2009. Planet 51.
    The inhabitants of Planet 51 live in fear of alien invasion. Their paranoia is realized when an astronaut arrives from Earth. Befriended by a young resident, he has to avoid capture and recover his spaceship.



    Cloudy with a chance of Meat Balls
    Movie trailer for a new animated film set to be released in Australia on 26th November 2009, Cloudy with a chance of Meat Balls.
    Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs will be the most delicious event since macaroni met cheese! Inspired by Judi and Ron Barrett’s children’s book, the film focuses on a town where food falls from the sky like rain.



    Sigg Jones
    An oldie but a goodie: “When the heavy weight champion wrestler Sigg Jones drinks a strange Powerdrink he loses control of himself unleashing all the good he had. His Agent will have to set him straight…” http://www.siggjones.com/

    Sigg Jones from Asterokid on Vimeo.



    Galactic Mail
    From the same makers of Sigg Jones, here’s another high quality animation sure to impress! A fast paced race to deliver the mail on time to its destination, which mail carrier will come out on top??

    Galactic Mail from Asterokid on Vimeo.



    Wrap Up
    I’ll leave it at that, will have to update you with more projects that are in development, update you on the renderfarm research, and share some ideas and concepts I hope to be working on in the near future. For now, i’ll leave that for the next post (this was longer than I expected, thought I had less tabs open than that!)

    Feel free to leave feedback on what you believe makes a good animation, what works well and what doesn’t. Really keen on hearing opinions on these animations as I hope in the near future i’ll have an animation in the works!

    - Jarrad Gittos

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    Showreel uploaded on Vimeo!

    June 23rd, 2009

    Just uploaded my last showreel to vimeo for easier viewability. Its not my most up to date work having been updated mid to late 2008, so I should really update it with my latest works.

    Either way, check it out!

    Showreel of Jarrad Gittos – Perth 3D Animator from Jarrad Gittos on Vimeo.

    Cheers,
    Jarrad Gittos

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    Quick Update

    June 16th, 2009

    Hey all, just thought I’d drop a quick update.

    I have been snowed under with work, so haven’t had a chance to post a blog in a long time. I have a few posts to do, on inspiration links and works (open firefox tabs for weeks), an update on the renderfarm project, and further research and tests on rendering and lighting.

    Hopefully I’ll have a post up relatively soon…

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    Mental Ray Memory Management

    April 18th, 2009

    Memory management is often forgotten in today’s high speed multi core & high RAM systems, but it still plays a crucial role in the optimization of rendering 3D animations. It is a very important factor in the process of animation, especially with more complex lighting, material solutions and high poly scenes (inc. bump/displacement maps). Its something that isn’t easily approached by the casual 3d modeler/animator, but luckily, the Gnomon Maya Mental Ray Fundamentals educational DVD shed some light on some memory management methods and techniques, and now I’ll record them here for my own memory (and potentially your education! :D ).

    What is BSP and how do I find out how it affects my scene?

    The controls for Mental Ray’s memory management fall under something called BSP – Binary Space Partition. Basic explanation of BSP is the breaking up of the models polygons to be managed more efficiently by Maya’s render engine to optimize the RAM usage, therefore increasing efficiency on rendering and therefore SPEED. This alone is worth the effort to learn how to use the BSP settings to your advantage… Before you start tweaking with the BSP settings, you need to see how efficient your scene file is in the first place.

    To do a diagnosis, jump into the mental ray settings in the render settings window, expand “Diagnostics” and change the dropdown box “Diagnose Bsp” from Off to Depth. Open up the Mental Ray Globals tab (type ‘select mentalrayGlobals;openAEWindow‘ in script editor and run the script), and change “Render Verbosity” dropdown to Progress Messages. This just ensures you get the correct feedback in the Output Window. Keep in mind that all of your output information will be displayed in the Output Window – for some reason I thought everything was displayed in the script editor, so be aware of this. You need to look for what is displayed below in the Output Window…

    RCI 0.3 info : main bsp tree statistics:
    RCI 0.3 info : max depth : 35
    RCI 0.3 info : max leaf size : 7583
    RCI 0.3 info : average depth : 21
    RCI 0.3 info : average leaf size : 111
    RCI 0.3 info : leafnodes : 3284
    RCI 0.3 info : bsp size (Kb) : 865

    This information will be what you will be basing your decisions and tweaks on. So now you know how to access your BSP statistics to tweak the settings, we can start tweaking and optimizing the memory usage for the scene. Just before we move on, the parts of the statistics shown that we will be focusing on with our tweaking is the average depth and average leaf size, this will be explained more in the next coming paragraphs.

    Tweaking BSP Settings to decrease render times

    You may ask: ‘how do I know if I need to tweak the BSP settings?’. My response is, it doesn’t harm to have a look at the settings already. The settings of the BSP can be found in the mental ray tab of the render settings under > Raytracing > Acceleration. To answer the question anyway, generally if the ‘average leaf size’ in the render output (as shown above) is much higher than the leaf size specified in the Acceleration (BSP settings) section, then tweaking will most likely be needed.

    Generally, the lower the value of the BSP Size (leaf size), the faster the render will go. Although, this will mean that there is more memory usage, and it works vice versa (higher BSP size, slower render but less RAM use). If the average leaf size in the output window is relatively large, this is an indicator that the BSP depth in the render settings is too low. If the BSP depth value is too low, it will SLOW the render down. Be aware of this – try and increase the BSP depth and lower the BSP size (leaf size), for example if you were on 15 & 30, try 10 & 40 in the boxes and run the render again.

    Be aware you will not notice any big differences on simple scenes!!

    Keep playing with these settings and keep an eye on the render time displayed. There will come a point where there is no major change in render time taken, or that you are actually INCREASING render time. This is your indicator that you have reached the correct values, so revert back to the lowest render time values if the time does increase after new settings. Rough rule is: For small scenes, use BSP Depth of 30, medium scenes use BSP Depth of 40, and for large scenes use BSP Depth of 50-60. Example outputs which look better than previous outputs:

    RCI 0.3 info : main bsp tree statistics:
    RCI 0.3 info : max depth : 45
    RCI 0.3 info : max leaf size : 3376
    RCI 0.3 info : average depth : 40
    RCI 0.3 info : average leaf size : 28
    RCI 0.3 info : leafnodes : 29807
    RCI 0.3 info : bsp size (Kb) : 311

    The average leaf size is much smaller than before, therefore render speed is increased as the memory management is more efficient. This post may sound a little confusing but have a play with the settings, and watch the changes. Don’t forget once you have optimised the render times to turn off Diagnose BSP in Diagnostics in MR render settings. PLEASE MAKE SURE YOU CHECK THE RENDER TIMES OF THE ACTUAL FRAME. You may notice your BSP tweaks aren’t reflecting the render time of the actual image, so make sure you check all of the render times.

    Last note – in the “Acceleration Method” in the Acceleration section of MR render settings, Regular BSP is used mostly for normal scenes, if you have intense scenes use Large BSP, it creates a larger BSP tree but will allow you to render extremely complex scenes.

    Last tip is to make sure your Mental Ray is taking advantage of the most memory you can – Open mental ray globals (script editor code as before), expand Memory and Performance, and Memory Limits. Have a look at the physical memory in the box, and make sure it is taking advantage of the memory you have installed on your system. If you change the value to a higher value, make sure you leave at least 1 gig of RAM for the operating system. I have 8gb in my system, and the Physical Memory value written is 5821 – I’ll leave it as this as I do like to use other programs while rendering…

    I will revisit this post with an extra couple of tips for memory management including the use of .map texture files. For now I’ll leave it here!!!

    Good luck!

    - Jarrad

    Resources to enhance – explains graphically the job of BSP
    http://toi.bk.tudelft.nl/toi-pedia/index.php?title=MR_Using_BSP_Diagnostics
    http://www.animationxpress.com/anex/y2k8/headlines/anex3941.htm

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    Posted in Fundamentals, Maya Mental Ray | 4 Comments »

    Links, Inspiration and Ideas Part 2

    April 12th, 2009

    More links that I have open on my firefox. Both inspiring and amazing in their own rights…

    Videos

    Whats in the Box?

    The first video is a video by a student in a ‘half-life’ style theme. It is said the film test was done 100% from him, using a combination of 3d Studio Max, After FX, a Camera and a budget of 150 €. Time will tell if this is just a form of viral advertising for an upcomming game or something along these lines, but either way its a really impressive and inspiring piece of film work. The name of it is “Whats in the box?” and revolves around a box, and a world that appears to be affected by some extra terrestrial activity. Anyway, check it out good montage of awesome camera work, special effects, good storyline and good composition.



    Steel Life

    This is another student project – this time a Masters student study on visual effects mainly. Its very subjective about the meaning of the film, so I will not preach to you what it is about… It has some impressive effects, and montage to create an interesting array of visuals…


    Steel Life from Mathieu Gérard on Vimeo.



    No Fat Clips!!!

    This final link is an aggregation of a lot of movies, short films and visual entertainment. Have yet to look at many movies on this website but it will sure be a good source of reference and inspiration.The no fat clips website can be found at: http://dekku.blogspot.com/

    I’ll leave it there, as there is so much more to post (useless or helpful, its all to jog my memory later when I get too senile to remember anyway…).

    Ciao!!

    - Jarrad

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