I watched and was astonished by how close a real time gaming engine was coming to generating photo-real renders. I had fiddled around with Unreal Engine from time to time and had a little familiarity with it. So I decided it was time to do a deep dive and find out what this was all about. I needed to know if it was hype or something real that could help my production pipeline.
From time to time, discussions in production can get deep, heavy, punchy and downright ridiculous. It’s the ridiculous to which we draw our attention today. A team room can be a pretty funny place, often filled with sharp wits and keen observers. Once in a while, someone says something that’s stupid enough or profound enough that it belongs on a t-shirt. This has happened enough times that I’ve decided to create this special blog just for such things. I will add new t-shirt slogans as they come up.
Be cost effective. This is, or should be, the core philosophy driving any employee in any company. When employees are cost-effective, in other words when they do something of value as cheaply or quickly as possible, the company’s profit margins rise.
As digital media artists and technicians, we deal with many different software applications daily. They vary in quality, from barely usable, unstable, unreliable, obsolete nonsense to generally reliable, mostly stable, modern and user friendly.
A few years ago I wrote a blog article called Visual Effects Artists are Not High Tech Professionals. I did this specifically to deal with situations like what happened in Sausage party. Shortly after that I wrote another blog called The Trouble With Overtime. It went viral, garnering thousands of views per day for a while.
I am very pleased to announce that CG Masters is adopting Katana into its production workflow beginning May 2019.
CGM students get to do a lot of cool things. We tour production studios, learn to shoot, discover all the interesting disciplines of 2D and 3D production, but none quite as awesome as this. 5 CGM students were invited to the set of Deadpool 2.
I can’t help smiling (on the outside) when I discuss this topic with certain visual effects production people, especially the managers who haven’t had to do 12 – 18 hours straight busting their brain at a computer work station for five months of 6-day weeks. You know…the ones who work 40 hour weeks, including 1.5 hour lunches each day.
As the solar eclipse of August 21st 2017 approached, I was thinking about the effect it might have on shadows. After all, the size and shape of a light source has a significant effect on shadow quality, and the size and shape of the sun was going to change (apparently) from the occlusion of the moon.
Always dreamed of working with NASA? Us too. Earlier in 2017, students at CG Masters were given the opportunity to 3D model, 3D print and build a scale model of a NASA Mars Rover concept vehicle. It was the chance of a lifetime!