Alexander Kucera

Today I am a proud to announce that my wife’s first children’s book illustration is available on Amazon. Tapp Malu was written by Angelika Tscherepanow and it is a really cute story. Monika put a lot of effort into it and it came out great and with a unique style you won’t find in any other children’s book.  Go get it and help make this little endeavor a success for her.

David Sparks has a great selection of iBooks for a wide range of topics. If you help back because they didn’t work on an iPhone then the wait is over. The new iBooks release means that all of David’s books now work on the smaller iOS devices as well. Link: macsparky.com/blog/2015…

Ich habe einen Kollegen, der ist auch ein Bayer. Gut, er kommt aus Serbien… Via: A Friend

Agreed on all accounts. Link: brooksreview.net/2015/06/p…

A great read that has me thinking about how to behave myself in the future. As it was in Anna Karenina, Madame Bovary, and Othello, so it is in life. Most forms of private vice and public evil are kindled and sustained by lies. Acts of adultery and other personal betrayals, financial fraud, government corruption - even murder and genocide - generally require an additional moral defect: a willingness to lie.

Calendars are a record of interruptions. And quite often they’re a battlefield over who owns whose time. […] In my experience, most people don’t schedule their work. They schedule the interruptions that prevent their work from happening. […] Let’s start with the premise that you have a 40 hour week. (If you just started crying you need a new job.) […] People rarely schedule working time. And when they do it’s viewed as second-tier time.

I never thought of it that way, but it makes perfect sense. I’m definitely on a maker’s schedule. Link: www.paulgraham.com/makerssch… Via: Shawn Blanc

This post also appeared as part of a longer article on fxguide. Christophe took us on a journey through the history of Renderman. From the basics of RSL (Renderman Shading Language) with its empirical shading to RSL 2.0 and the first steps in physically plausible shading to the new RIS path tracing engine that allows physically accurate image creation. We started with RSL 1.2, which basically was state of the art in big budget productions up to 2005.

Brent Burley talked us through the development of Disney’s new Path Tracer Hyperion in this session. Path Tracing is the third cornerstone in Disney’s new rendering strategy with the former two being PTex and the new “principled” BRDF (Disney made available a nice tool to explore different measured BRDFs called BRDF Explorer). Hyperion was used as the main renderer for Big Hero 6, Disney’s newest animated feature film. This was a big challenge as the development of Hyperion started only about three or four months before movie production.

I’m on my way to Stuttgart as I write this to report from this years FMX. As always I’m writing for Professional Production Magazine. My goal is to update this blog with short articles about the various sessions. I’m also likely writing one or more things for fxguide. If you want to read about a specific session check out the schedule and let me know. I’ll see what I can do.