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