Hasta La Motion!

A Senior Rigger’s primary responsibility is to create highly versatile character rigging systems and animation interfaces. The rigs will be used for feature film in the animation of 3D characters and props.

We are looking for a talented rigger who can:

– implement animation control rigging systems for complex characters and props using Maya
– set up rigs for low and high-res characters
– set up and rig character models
– work with animators to design, create, and maintain animation rigs for characters that are clean, efficient, and animation friendly
– design user interfaces and controls for characters and facial animation systems (bone and blend shape driven)
– maintain and improve current animation pipeline
– knowledge of animation sharing, and motion capture transfer between character rigs
– maintain a consistent level of productivity while meeting deadlines and producing high quality work
– troubleshoot and wrangle character-rigging issues for artists
–
Requirements:

– minimum three years industry experience in 3D CG for digital animation or visual effects
– excellent communication skills a must
– experience in setting up cloth simulation rigs highly desirable
– experience with Maya and/or other high-end animation software required
– experience with mel, csh, python, TCL, perl or other scripting languages a must
– skilled knowledge of anatomy for animal/quadraped and human/biped
– ability to work well under pressure

This is a full-time position and employment is to commence as soon as possible.

To apply for this position, please submit a cover letter and resume with a link to your online website/portfolio demonstrating your ability in rigging, scripting and tools or plug-in design.

toronto-resume@spinpro.com

If you are submitting by mail, please send info and DVD to:

Spin VFX Toronto
620 King Street West
Toronto, Ontario Canada
M5V 1M6

www.spinpro.com

Preference will be given to Canadian residents.

Due to the number of anticipated responses, only qualified applicants will be contacted.

No phone calls or drop-ins please.

Here’s the issue:

Currently the sup sets up the various writeout settings for the show and the artist imports that script into theirs and just attaches it to the end. The problem is if there are any changes to that writeout portion, the artists are responsible for updating any scripts that need to be rerendered with the new writeout nodes. If they go back a couple versions chances are that eariler version doesn’t have the latest writeout nodes and they often forget to update it, ets.

I’d like to have a centrally located writeout script that is called at the time of rendering (assuming they render using a custom render command rather than interactive). If the sup updates it then all work, even past scripts, would automatically get the changes, no extra effort on the part of the artists.

It seems like the way to go is to treat the artists scripts like a precomp with an output node at the bottom (below a precomp write node) and to then have a precomp node at the top of the writeout script tree. The custom render command would actually fire off the Writeout script and environment variables and runtime arguments would tell it what shot and script to reference. The issue is that the precomp node doesn’t appear to like environment variables or commandline passed arguments. It only works with a hard code line.

My question is, is there either a) anyway around this to be able to feed the File field of the precomp node variables at run time, or b) a better way to acomplish what I want to do, i.e., have a centrally called Writeout script?

Thanks for any help you guys might be able to give me,

Dan

Please email LeahB@swaystudio.com if you’re available!

Sorry, I can’t put up my script so I’ll describe it as best as I can.

My basic set up is –

2d rendering of ground and also one of the jet,
Bring in camera and proxy geo from 3DSMax (Oh, a huge kudos to whoever wrote that Nuke’Em script, what a lifesaver!)
use stock footage of dust to put onto cards and line up in 3d space.

Is there any limit to the amount of cards to use?

I have 5 sequences of dust and I’ve done some retiming on them (to slow them down) and a few other things (grade, blur etc) and then rerendered them and then I’ve plugged them straight into a large amount of cards. I have about 50 cards and some of them I have edited using bicubics to loose a bit of the flat feel. Should I project instead of just pluggin them in? That would be a hell of a lot of cameras and I would think that would slow the script down even more.

My script was starting to get a bis messy so I started to group the cards to keep track of them and then plug several scene nodes into one main scene before the scanline render node. Is this bad? Should I just use one scene node? Or use a copy (or a clone) of the camera for each smaller scene?

Also, I have used Retime nodes to offset the starting of each of the dust sequences for each card, should I use a timeoffset node instead?

I have to try and optimise this scene as it keeps bloody crashing on me and I really, REALLY, want to finish this shot tomorrow as it’s driving me mad! 😡 (And no finished shot will mean no beer for me tomorrow night, and by god after this week I could do with a few!)

Phew!

Any advice would be much appreciated.