
Why a Frozen Head Slows My Films Right Down - thenomad
http://www.strangecompany.org/why-a-frozen-head-slows-my-films-right-down/
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programminggeek
Pretty much everything the author is talking about applies to the switching
cost of picking up a new language, tool, or framework. The time spent to find
all the little gotchas and so on is always bigger than you estimate. This is
why a lot of people learn a tech stack like Java, PHP, Rails, C#, Django, etc.
and stick with it for so long. Even if the new thing offers awesome benefits,
it comes with a lot of those hidden things you have to re-learn and re-invent
over and over again.

~~~
ykl
This is why retooling a pipeline at an animation or VFX studio is so mind-
bogglingly complex and difficult. The analogy I've heard before is imagine not
only rebuilding an airplane while its flying and trying to make sure the
passengers don't notice, but sometimes also making the tools that you're
rebuilding the airplane with from scratch as well.

~~~
thenomad
I've only worked with smaller indie studios directly, but yes, that's an
excellent analogy!

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bryanlarsen
Attacking this problem is one of the primary goals here at Exocortex.

In the short term, you can use our Alembic Crate tool to assist with
transferring your assets between tools.

In the long term, we're working on clara.io, a web-based replacement for
SoftImage/Maya/3DSMax. Think how much easier would it be for tooling if all
your assets were web-accessible with nice web APIs.

~~~
thenomad
Crate is something I'm going to be using much more in the near future - great
piece of software. I didn't use it on a recent facial animation project ( the
one I talk about in the article, actually ) and I subsequently regretted that
decision.

I must admit, though, I'm not entirely sold on Clara yet - I don't quite see
how it's going to benefit my workflow more than having systems sitting on my
local network.

When you say "web-accessible with nice APIs", do you mean I can query them at
a code level and get out streams of geometry data or similar?

~~~
bryanlarsen
If all of your team is in a single location, the primary benefits of Clara
(IMO) are:

\- simultaneous editing

\- player links: makes it much easier to show off work in progress to co-
workers/bosses/clients

\- VRay in the cloud: don't pay & maintain a render farm that sits idle most
of the time

\- no licensing hassles

Of course, it's once your team is distributed in more than one location that
Clara really starts to shine.

~~~
thenomad
Thanks for the reply! Very interesting.

I am very excited by the future of rendering in the cloud: that has the
potential to change our industry massively.

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twic
Okay, so did anyone else see the title and assume the "frozen head" was Walt
Disney?

[http://www.museumofhoaxes.com/hoax/Hoaxipedia/Walt_Disney_Fr...](http://www.museumofhoaxes.com/hoax/Hoaxipedia/Walt_Disney_Frozen)

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Grue3
And what kind of animation doesn't take so damn long? Be happy you don't have
to draw each individual frame like in the old times.

~~~
Keyframe
Having done both in my parallel life of animation, I can attest that hand
drawn animation takes less time. :)

Having said that, there is a huge opportunity to make a good
storyboard/animatic tool out there, because current solutions are, to be
polite about it, shit.

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bsenftner
Worth noting that the guys at www.3D-Avatar-Store.com are former VFX pipeline
developers offering auto-creation of photo-real 3D heads, just supply one
facial photo and you get a fully rigged head ready to stick on any body.

~~~
delinka
What do I need to do to get pricing from the 3D Avatar Store people?

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bsenftner
If it's for commercial use, use the contact form.

Otherwise, its 3 free for noncommercial web site use upon joining and low
pricing, like $2.50 a pop, thereafter. WebAPI use is considered commercial,
has many more features, and a boatload more for release soon. So use the
contact form for for WebAPI.

Disclosure: I'm the founder.

Here's an example of what we're hustling to make public:
[https://www.dropbox.com/s/0vewo3j3k6326fn/Obama%20Auto-
lip-s...](https://www.dropbox.com/s/0vewo3j3k6326fn/Obama%20Auto-lip-sync.mov)

~~~
thenomad
I don't mean to be rude here, but

"If it's for commercial use, use the contact form."

kind of says to me "if you have to ask, you can't afford it".

Is that an accurate hypothesis on my part? I make indie animation, but it's
not all non-commercial.

~~~
bsenftner
We're a small company, and want to provide a quality service. Any commercial
use will undoubtedly require some level of support, and we want to assess
those getting commercial access to insure we can support them successfully.
We're not expensive by any means. We just don't want to be flooded and then
have to tell users we're overwhelmed. Plain and simple.

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csense
He's talking about using Maya toward the top, then 3D Studio Max later on.
Using two different packages is asking for trouble! Why didn't he just pick
one technology and stick with it?

Also, why not Blender? I'm guessing you'd probably have more luck with file
formats and stuff with Blender because you can read the code for everything.

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eonil
Does this mean you have constructed your own pipeline with your own
implementation? Just like Pixar or ILM?

~~~
thenomad
It's not complete yet, but yes, that's the direction I'm going in.

Most CG workflow stuff is either directed at games (completely different
requirements) or 30min+ a frame rendered CG. The kind of indie performance
capture I'm interested in is very much a new frontier - some people do it, but
not many.

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snorkel
Composing a 3D scene is a lot like composing software. The objects in the
scene are like individual functions that were authored separately for a
specific purposes. Some 3D objects can be reused in other scenes, and
sometimes it's only specific to that scene. Over time you build up a catalog
of objects, textures, and characters, just as a software developer builds up a
catalog of code objects. The action in the scene is the execution of the
program, and the camera's view is where the output of the program is being
directed to. And just as software has bugs and hacks, so too 3D scenes have
glitches, shortcuts, hacks, and areas that are under construction.

~~~
thenomad
And each software tool you use is a (really, really complex) library - and
just like libraries in coding, some of them require quirky inputs, or have
wierd restrictions, or randomly crash on a Tuesday.

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niels_olson
> One of the biggest speed-ups for any 3D process is, simply, having done it
> before.

Really, any process. Doing my first real research project, holy crap. So many
things to figure out before you're allowed to start...

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ttflee
As long as you do not care about the originality and quality, CG animation is
cheap and fast.

In China, some cartoon production companies have made money out of fast paced
3D animations. They copied the story board from Japanese ancestor anime frame
by frame, got the scenes constructed and complete the animation and voices.
Finally they got government subsidies counted by not the gross cost but
minutes of production!

BTW, 3D animations have been proved to be cheaper than 2D ones in this
scenario, as many models get reused times and times again.

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malkia
Netflix has plenty of these animations, and it's hard to keep my son off them.
Some of them are real bad, like this one - Legend Of Kung Fu Rabbit -
[http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1876517/](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1876517/)

~~~
ttflee
I'm afraid this is not the type of anime I was discussing.

The Legend Of Kung Fu Rabbit seems to have certain originality. What I
mentioned was those copy-cat animated TV series potentially violating IP of
the original creators. The average quality was much rougher than this one.

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liminal
I'd love to see a chart showing work hours spent per minute of animation
produced over time. Over the last 30 years I'm sure things have become MUCH
more efficient, but it would be interesting to see the shape of the curve.

Is that sort of data publicly available anywhere?

~~~
thenomad
Not to the best of my knowledge. However, I might start keeping such things
myself - check back in a couple of years when I've had time to build up a data
backlog :)

