Animation workflow, pipeline, asset management & production control.

Pablo just wrote about this interesting website about workflows and digital cinema equipment  http://www.wolfcrow.com .  In Pablo´s own words: "there are plenty of articles written with huge reasonableness, and away from the "spec whore" mentality found in the majority of webs". Readers of this blog might like to have a look at "VFX and CGI Workflows" ( http://wolfcrow.com/blog/vfx-and-cgi-workflows ). Have a look at the "About" section too, where you will find that the author, Sareesh Sudhakaran, lives in Mumbai, India, and that " Wolfcrow (or wolfkrow) is workflow spelled backwards. Yikes! "

Jeffrey Dates posted this recently in a newsgroups and h e kindly allowed me to repost it in this blog, you can check more stuff at his personal site  www.kungfukoi.com " So a short time ago, I was asked to give a 'boot camp' for some freshmen  and sophomore producers on what exactly happens during CG production.  Just  a basic, basic oversimplification of CG production with visuals. It went over really well, and sort of went viral around our studio. I just wanted to share with you guys. I hope you get a kick out of it also. http://kungfukoi.com/files/onset/CG_101.pdf Cheers, Jeff."

I just received a promotional email from Shotgun offering a 10% discount in this course , please let us know how the course went, if you attend. We've teamed up with the folks over at fxphd to offer a special course called  "Building a Modern Pipeline with Shotgun" . The class will cover topics like: Getting Shotgun setup at your studio Building a project, then scheduling tasks and tracking their progress Setting up a solid review pipeline Getting Toolkit setup and building your own apps Special talks featuring tips & tricks from real studios using Shotgun  Those taking the class will receive a special extended Shotgun trial for use during the class. Sign up today  using promo code "shotgun" and fxphd will graciously offer 10% off your fxphd membership. TM and copyright © 2013 Shotgun Software Inc.

One of the most relevant features in this version is that it now connects to your Google Drive to, for instance, create the folder structure for you, and it even offers a script for this called Buckshot v3.3 builder, which will be available for public use to assist you in building new projects for one week (until Mon14th of October 12pm PST) and after that you will have to wait for two months After almost 1 year of hard work to reach v3.3, Marcus is not going to make any more updates. It´s your turn: " Now go make something cool! " What does all this mean? Well, you better hurry up and get your own Buckshot v3.3 project now: http://links.vfx2.com/Buckshot-Build-v3 As Marcus says: " Make your life easier, and learn to use Google apps to manage your projects just like the big boys do. Here's my step-by-step guide on how you can set up your own professional project in just 12 mins. ". For more information, I´d suggest you to see this video  http://youtu.be/...

A few months ago I offered you the exclusive about  Buckshot free CG Project Manager , and  now, Marcus LeVere has just contacted me again with an even more amazing  project,  STUDIO.COOP , which  is (from their web) " a cooperative that enables creatives to develop, distribute and license their own intellectual property by crowdsourcing and profit sharing " treating " all of the collaborators fairly with a profit share ". Wow! You can have a look at the introductory 1 minute video to get a quick idea: And the I suggest you read the  Studio.coop Manifesto v0.1  and the about us   The official announce will be tomorrow, but remember you saw it in  3dresearch.blogspot.com  first! :-D Thanks again Marcus, best luck with this incredible project, and Keep Up The Good Work!

Transporter is a gigabit network disk that can "communicate and share files in a peer-to-peer fashion with computers and other Transporter devices located anywhere in the world. This ability eliminates privacy concerns, recurring fees, and all complexity associated with syncing files over the Internet". In other words: It is like having a (cloudless) 2 Tb Dropbox account without the monthly fee. Your data is not in the cloud, but replicates automatically among the selected devices. It is a tad expensive for me, I am just waiting for a small drop price to get my hands on a few of those. Has anyone had a first hand experience with it? http://www.filetransporter.com

Shotgun 4.3 has been tagged as "the New Shotgun: a unified toolset to help you track, schedule, review, collaborate, and manage your digital assets". Release 4.3 includes: New pricing. Screening Room (formerly Revolver) and API in the standard version. Integration with Tweak Software´s RV into Screening Room. http://www.shotgunsoftware.com

I just received a newsletter from Southpaw: " TACTIC for Mac is here! Now you can download an open source version of TACTIC TEAM and use it on your Mac! This is not a feature-limited port - this is a full-featured version of TACTIC TEAM, with the same powerful asset management, project management and workflow features as TACTIC TEAM for Windows® " See more details here

I found a post by Cesar Saez ( Character Technical Director in Kandor Graphics ) in Linkedin, h e wanted to "share his take on this problem". His take is basically to "create a layer to solve the names using the conventions and work with those names on your code, this way you have a centralized place where set the new naming requirements and all your tools becomes name independent." You can see a 7 minute long video where he ellaborates about this subject and shows the solution he has developed: http://csaez.blogspot.com.es/2013/01/naming-convention.html

This post is maybe not 100% related to the blog, but who knows if you will be in my situation one of these days... I recently prepared my first DCP using OpenDCP and following the instructions in  http://dcinemaforum.com , it takes several steps, including changing the color space from RGB to XYZ among other things, but when we went for a technical test projection on a real theater, we found out that the result was... well... pink all over :-(  Although the projector ingested the DCP correctly, the colours were all wrong, obviously I made some mistake along the process. My main problem was that there is no easy way to check if the XYZ color output is even remotely correct other than using an XYZ projector or monitor, so I looked for a color bar image: http://www.teklogic.com/files/SMPTE_Color_Bars_16x9.bmp And asked a friend to "properly" convert it from wide gamut RGB into XYZ,so I could use it to home-test the result of the conversion process ...