Alexander Kucera

Hello everyone, I have to make a completely selfish plug for a movie I worked on lately. It is called Solo and is about Jon, the first winner of the Danish Popstars show. I don’t speak a word of Danish — well, at least not enough to fully understand the movie — but the critics seem to love it and it is a big success for us so far. Me and my team worked on several things, some which made it into the final movie and some which ended up on the cutting floor.

A lot of times I hear people complaining how slow this or that program is. “shake is so slow”, “motion is total crap” or “why is this taking so long?” Well, guess what, there is actually a solution to it. And the magic word is workflow. We are working on pretty heavy projects most of the time. HD material (even if the output will be PAL in the end), 2K material for film or lots of layers or 3D layers.

I don’t know if you already know this service called [Twitter] 1. It can be described as a IM independent status message, so you can notify people of your current doings if you like. [Coda Hale] 2 created a [Quicksilver action to post conveniently to Twitter] 3. [Ted Leung] 4 thought it would be nice to have [Growl notifications] 5 in the mix and [Matt Matteson] 6 thought it needed a bit more sparkle by [adding iChat support] 7.

Last time I talked about the basic ingredients of a working naming convention, which got inspired by a topic covered on [Lifehacker] 1 and [43 Folders] 2. What to avoid — like never using the word “final” in any circumstances — and what to include — for example version numbers. This time I will show you how to use this new gained knowledge and plug its elements together into a working template for a professional naming convention.

Remember Emilia? She did this song called “Big Big World” about 7 years ago: Big Big World Guess what? She is back, with her new song “Var Minut”, which means “Every Minute” and is the usual thing about love I guess. I can’t really tell though, because she is singing in Swedish and I don’t understand a single word of it. ;-) Anyway, I was VFX Supervisor on set and also the main guy to do the VFX in post.

special-test_final_3a_preview_5b Do you know filenames like this? Or even worse, do you still use them? I did too. But I learned how to avoid these ugly names that no one can decipher 5 minutes later. And in this two parts series — that got inspired by a topic covered on [Lifehacker] 1 and [43 Folders] 2 — I will show you how you can get a clean working naming convention, too.

We met our new interns today and they all seemed very nice. One of them made a little bad impression though. Not only was he new in the company, but he also made bold statements about his future work. And he had never touched that area before, so what he said was either over the top or just wrong. Both things made him look like an arrogant guy or someone who has no clue at all (I am not sure which one fits better).

It seems like a niche market that had to be filled sooner or later. After Apples decision to quit the development — and with it the support and maintenance — of shake with version 4.1, there is a big hole in the support area of shake. Of course, there are the normal forums like [fxshare] 1 (formerly highend2d) or [cgTalk] 2, but for deep down support it is always nice to have the developers at hand, because only they know, what really goes on inside the code.

Here you go guys. A screencapture for all of you who want to see the actual speed of this baby. I captured at 800×600, but had it also running at 1680×1050 with no noticable difference in speed. At first the scene (generously offered by [Wiliam Eggington] 1 - it is a WIP, so don’t look at the animation itself, ok?) runs in MetaNurbsed geometry. Later I have it un-MetaNurbsed, and that run basically realtime.

Yes, you understood it correctly. [Messiah] 1 is able to run on the [new Intel Macs] 2. And I am not talking about [BootCamp] 3 here fellows. I am talking about not having to restart your Mac to run Messiah. Being able to check mail or work in your favourite Mac application and simultaneously running the 3D character animation software Messiah. Don’t believe me? Here is the proof: What you see on the above image is Messiah running on [an emulated Windows environment called Parallels Workstation] 4.