A Great Blog

La Vieja Escuela

2011-05-25T06:40:00.000-07:00

Como primer post de lo que quiere ser una serie de artículos sobre la creación de efectos especiales y el día a día en este trabajo me gustaría hablar un poco de algo que siempre he admirado de esta profesión:
La vieja escuela.

Y algunos se dirán, bueno y eso de La Vieja Escuela qué es. Ahora tenemos en nuestro arsenal de herramientas simuladores de todo tipo, podemos renderizar millones de partículas o simular océanos enteros, pero que pasaba en los tiempo de Parque Jurásico, Twister o Titanic.

Bueno, estas herramientas no eran tan comúnes y los artistas de efectos tenían que ingeniárselas para conseguir resultados que dejasen con la boca abierta a la audiencia.

El recuerdo de estos pioneros de los efectos me ha asaltado en numerosas ocasiones. sobre todo cuando ves compañeros o hablas con colegas y te comentan el millón de partículas que están simulando o los teras de caches de simulaciones de fluidos que están usando de los servidores de ficheros.

Una de las razones porque me ha interesado mucho este tema es por mi cercania a Houdini. Yo aprendí casi todo lo que sé sobre efectos usando esta herramienta, y esta fue una de las herramientas más usadas por esos pioneros de los efectos que antes comentaba.

Gente como Judith Crow, Theo Vandernoot o David Prescot, sin olvidar a esos genios de las series B rescatados unos años antes por George Lucas para la saga Star Wars.

Hace no mucho, cuando los sistemas de partículas eran jóvenes casi todo se simulaba a base de deformaciones de geometría, lo que en jerga profesional se llama modelado procedural, y texturas procedurales. Desde crear un tornado con un simple cilindro deformado y unas simples particulas en su base a simular lava haciendo un Creep con un cilindro

Row Your Boat

We Got Cows

Obviamente en los tiempos que corren todos esos efectos pueden realizarse con avanzados sistema de simulación pero día a día experimento lo útil que es conocer esa Vieja Escuela, en el 90% de los casos el resultado de un simulador necesita ser postprocesado y conocer algunos trucos de los viejos tiempos ayuda muchísimo.

Resulta que es relativamente fácil poner a trabajar un simulador y que cree una simulación creible, pero conseguir que ese efecto sea dirigible y adaptable a las necesidades del plano es otra historia y esa es la razón principal por la cual muchos de los efectos requieren de un pequeño masaje en la gemetría inicial o final. Por ejemplo, en lugar de crear complejos sistema de partículas con multitud de fuerzas y varias líneas de scripting, en muchas ocasiones preparar y jugar con la geometría que usaremos para emitir es mucho mas rápido y controlable.

A veces, una seria de ruidos bien ajustados y animados pueden sustituir a un simulador de tela o de fluidos.

Y no sería la primera vez superponiendo varias capas de geometría y un shading acertado, que las renderice con distintos niveles de transparencia, consigue resultados espectaculares.

Y lo mejor de todo cuando usamos deformaciones para crear efectos es que son totalmente dirigibles y no dependen de simulaciones.

No es el objetivo de este post comentar diversas técnicas sino simplemente recordar y poner hincapié en que crear efectos no es sólo simular fluidos y renderizar millones de partículas, al final en el día a día siempre hay que ir ajustando simulaciones o creando efectos rápidos y efectivos, y ahí es donde la Vieja Escuela se impone.

Por supuesto no podía despedirme de este post sin recomendar un blog y un libro que hablan precisamente de este tema:

El blog del venerable Jeff Wagner.

El libro de David Santiago: Creating 3D Effects

How to make Fuzzy Finder and Mac Vim 7.3

2011-03-28T18:06:00.000-07:00

Hi all.

I am pretty sure that if you area fan of Fuzzy Finder for Vim and an user of Mac Vim you have to be very annoyed because of the errors from Fuzzy Finder when using the latest Mac Vim updated to the recent Vim 7.3.

This is the typical error you get when activating any Fuzzy finder mode:

E806: using Float as a String

Among others errors.

Well this problems comes because when starting Mac Vim from the Dock or Spotlight for some reason it doesn't pick up the correct locales.

HDK in the Mac. Using hcustom with Leopard

2010-10-12T17:52:00.000-07:00

Well, I have recently tried to compile some custom SOPs in my Mac.
No luck at the beggining so I begin to as in the Houdini Mailing list, Odforce, but no luck.
In my first try I got these errors:

Making SOP_Flatten.o and
/Users/pablo/Library/Preferences/houdini/11.0/dso/SOP_Flatten.dylib
from SOP_Flatten.C
cc1plus: warning: command line option "-fobjc-gc-only" is valid for
ObjC/ObjC++ but not for C++
/Library/Frameworks/Houdini.framework/Resources/toolkit/include/SYS/SYS_AtomicImpl.h:
In function ‘int32 SYS_AtomicImpl::test_and_add(int32*, int)’:
/Library/Frameworks/Houdini.framework/Resources/toolkit/include/SYS/SYS_AtomicImpl.h:345:
error: ‘__sync_fetch_and_add’ was not declared in this scope
/Library/Frameworks/Houdini.framework/Resources/toolkit/include/SYS/SYS_AtomicImpl.h:
In function ‘int32 SYS_AtomicImpl::compare_and_swap(int32*, int32,
int32)’:
/Library/Frameworks/Houdini.framework/Resources/toolkit/include/SYS/SYS_AtomicImpl.h:351:
error: ‘__sync_val_compare_and_swap’ was not declared in this scope
/Library/Frameworks/Houdini.framework/Resources/toolkit/include/SYS/SYS_AtomicImpl.h:
In function ‘int64 SYS_AtomicImpl::test_and_set64(int64*, int64)’:
/Library/Frameworks/Houdini.framework/Resources/toolkit/include/SYS/SYS_AtomicImpl.h:358:
error: ‘__sync_lock_test_and_set’ was not declared in this scope
/Library/Frameworks/Houdini.framework/Resources/toolkit/include/SYS/SYS_AtomicImpl.h:
In function ‘int64 SYS_AtomicImpl::test_and_add64(int64*, int64)’:
/Library/Frameworks/Houdini.framework/Resources/toolkit/include/SYS/SYS_AtomicImpl.h:365:
error: ‘__sync_fetch_and_add’ was not declared in this scope
/Library/Frameworks/Houdini.framework/Resources/toolkit/include/SYS/SYS_AtomicImpl.h:
In function ‘int64 SYS_AtomicImpl::compare_and_swap64(int64*, int64,
int64)’:
/Library/Frameworks/Houdini.framework/Resources/toolkit/include/SYS/SYS_AtomicImpl.h:372:
error: ‘__sync_val_compare_and_swap’ was not declared in this scope
/Library/Frameworks/Houdini.framework/Resources/toolkit/include/SYS/SYS_AtomicImpl.h:
In function ‘void SYS_AtomicImpl::store(int32*, int32,
SYS_MemoryOrder)’:
/Library/Frameworks/Houdini.framework/Resources/toolkit/include/SYS/SYS_AtomicImpl.h:389:
error: ‘__sync_synchronize’ was not declared in this scope
/Library/Frameworks/Houdini.framework/Resources/toolkit/include/SYS/SYS_AtomicImpl.h:399:
error: ‘__sync_lock_release’ was not declared in this scope
/Library/Frameworks/Houdini.framework/Resources/toolkit/include/SYS/SYS_AtomicImpl.h:405:
error: ‘__sync_lock_test_and_set’ was not declared in this scope
/Library/Frameworks/Houdini.framework/Resources/toolkit/include/SYS/SYS_AtomicImpl.h:
In function ‘int32 SYS_AtomicImpl::load(const int32*,
SYS_MemoryOrder)’:
/Library/Frameworks/Houdini.framework/Resources/toolkit/include/SYS/SYS_AtomicImpl.h:428:
error: ‘__sync_synchronize’ was not declared in this scope
/Library/Frameworks/Houdini.framework/Resources/toolkit/include/SYS/SYS_AtomicImpl.h:435:
error: ‘__sync_val_compare_and_swap’ was not declared in this scope
Compile failed

I am using Mac OS X 10.5.X, Leopard. So asking to SESI seems I have some problems with the gcc version.
I have been using Xcode 3.0 which uses gcc 4.0.1, whereas Houdini is compiled against gcc 4.2.
So I installed Xode 3.1.3, which is the latest version for Leopard and includes gcc-4.2.
You can grab it from here:
http://connect.apple.com/cgi-bin/WebObjects/MemberSite.wo/wa/getSoftware?bundleID=20414
Now, how to use it, you can go to the dirty solution, removing cd gcc links in /usr/bin and make new ones pointing to gcc-4.2:

cd /usr/bin
rm cc gcc c++ g++
ln -s gcc-4.2 cc
ln -s gcc-4.2 gcc
ln -s c++-4.2 c++
ln -s g++-4.2 g++

Or the clean solution, don't touch the system just add some environment variables:

# Use GCC 4.2 rather tha GCC 4.0
export CC="/usr/bin/gcc-4.2"
export CPP="/usr/bin/cpp-4.2"
export CXX="/usr/bin/g++-4.2"
# Use GCC 4.2 for HDK
export HOUDINI_CC=$CXX

I put the text above in my ~/.bashrc
The first thre variables are for the usual GNU tools.
The last one is used by hcompile, the script called by hcustom to compile your DSO.
Now you can try hcustom and see your DSOs happily compiled.
Happy hacking!

I´m dad!!!

2010-04-05T19:32:00.000-07:00

Hi all.

Last 28th of March my daughter, Ines was born!

Both, Ines and mum are doing well.

A new life begins .......

Iron Man 2 - second trailer is out!

2010-03-14T18:16:00.000-07:00

Hi there.
At least after long hours the movie is almost done and the secon trailer was showed in the last Oscars night.
So here it is I hope you like, and specially if you are a fan of the saga

http://trailers.apple.com/trailers/paramount/ironman/

At Dneg we have been working in the sequence between Whiplash and Ironman.
I was mainly doing tesla and sparks fx.
Before this project I supposed this kind of effects should be easy, actually I think doing electricity fx phenomena to look real and credible is really hard.
Cheers!

Prince Of Persia official trailer is out!

2009-11-04T16:01:00.000-08:00

At least here it is the official trailer for Prince Of Persia.
At DNeg we did the daggertime effect and the final battle.
I worked on the daggertime effect which is inspired on the bullet time effect from The Matrix with a little (ok not so little) touch of sand :)
Enjoy

Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time at IGN.com

TDVim 0.1 Alpha Released!

2009-08-02T19:15:00.000-07:00

At least!
After some hard work with the keymaps and testing them for Linux, MacOSX, windoiws and Cygwin the first release of TDVim for development use is ready.
This is alpha software, is only ready fo rdevelopers or people who feel curious about what TDVim can do and get an idea of the project.
I am using it in my daily work so at least will have some functionality.
the documentation also has got a dramatic improvement.
Go to the download section to get it.
Give it a try and tell me your opinion, much appreciated.

TDVim Wiki Ready!

2009-06-07T19:42:00.000-07:00

The new brand TDVim wiki is ready!
Ok is a first version and just a brief skel for the whole wiki but the foundations are there.
This wiki will be an extra source of help for many users of TDVim.
Is specially oriented to new users, they will find the web format much more easier than the usual VIM documentation.
Also the other reason to have a wiki appart from the docs integrated in vim is to have a repository for tricks and tutorials for all the VIM/TDVim users.
Enjoy!

Speeder Tools basic help infraestructure is done!

2009-06-02T16:06:00.000-07:00

Now I can begin to actually collect all the tools, pack them into OTL libraries and add the help.
I hope that with this first compilation the project will begin to get shape.
I think there is a lot of potential in this project cos there is a demand for a set of tools that makes Houdini easier out of the box, specially for mid/small studios.
More about Speeder Tools here.

My first TD College Houdini course!

2009-06-02T15:55:00.001-07:00

Hi guys!
The past Sunday I begun to taugh my first Houdini course at TD College.
It was a great experience and I have two nice students, one from Demark and another living in Toronto.
I hope they will find the course interestin and useful and to learn from this new e-learning experience.

Me entrevistan en Dimension 2.5

2009-05-26T16:07:00.000-07:00

Miguel de Dimension 2.5 ha tenido la gentileza de entrevistarme para su blog.La entrevista se centra principalmente sobre el camino recorrido desde mis comienzos en el 3D.Podéis echarle un vistazo aquí, espero os guste.

TDVim close to the first developer release

2009-05-20T16:38:00.000-07:00

TDVim is close to it´s first developer release 0.0.1.
This will be the first release of the project and it will put the foundations for the whole project.
First an usable and portable config file will have the most important keymaps ready for different platforms.
The internal docs infrastructure will be done.
And finally the initiation sequence and user install ready.
I hope to have the first internal release, 0.1 very soon.

Links and Projects sections added

2009-03-21T17:48:00.000-07:00

I find some time to add a couple of more sections to the site. A new links page with interesting links to places, companies, books fvourite webs, etc ....
Also a Projects sections, a place to put all the projects aI have done or I am doing in my spare time for learning, fun or to create small tools.
Links
Projects

Creating my personal site

2009-03-04T20:42:00.000-08:00

Hi everybody, today I have begun the developing of my personal site which will get it´s name from my most used nick in the net: lisux.
I am a technical director working in the film and commercials industries, at the time of writing this I am living in London with my girlfriend Nuria.
I am going to begin a new excitement stage in my career the next week at Double Negative as a FX TD.