Oct 06

Running GUI licenses and Render licenses on a farm

Posted in: Programming & Development
Hey all,

I’m trying to streamline a farm a bit more and was wondering if anyone has any experience with getting Nuke and Rush to use both render only licenses of Nuke and the interactive (GUI) licenses to render multiple frames.

The ideas is that if we have say 3 licenses which lets us background render on 3 machines but can also run 3 GUI licenses, then it would be great to send frames to machines using only GUI licenses and keep the render only licenses cycling through different machines. This is probably more of a python/Rush thing but it may also be Nuke’s limitations.

The Nuke manual says:

"Use an interactive (nuke_i) FLEXlm license key. This flag is used in conjunction with background rendering scripts using -x. By default – x will use a nuke_r license key, but -ix will background render using a nuke_i license key."

I’ve tried incorporating and changing my submit-nuke script for Rush with different combinations of -i and -x and I could get it to use the interactive license but it seems to only send 1 frame to each machine and then leaves the GUI open not allowing other machines to open Nuke because all the licenses are in use. I have a feeling this is going to be quite a bit more difficult than I hoped but if anyone has any ideas it would be great.

Thanks in advance!

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Aug 08

Formula Deformer for Maya

Posted in: Programming & Development
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6gRnlYi5ABU

Plugin developed in C++, still in beta testing.
It allows to express directly the three mathematic formulas that drive the new position of each point of the geometry: x’ = Fx(), y’=Fy(), z’=Fz().

Parameters that you can express for each formula:

x,y,z=the previous position of each point
index=the point index
t=additional external parameter (useful to let the deformer be animatable).

Supported functions:

sin, cos, tan, abs, ceil, sqrt, pow, exp, log and so on.

Critiques and comments are welcome.

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Jun 27

Hello everybody!

Posted in: Programming & Development
Hi everyone!

As soon as I discovered vfxTalk I came directly to this Forum!

I’ve been reading some of your posts and I think I found the right place to ask for some guidance.

Let me tell you a little about myself, I’ll be as brief as I can.

When I was a little kid I became rapidly attracted by programming: the idea of having to solve a problem through logic, the science in it. I decided I wanted to solve problems for a living and therefore, asked my parents to take me to a Computer Science-oriented high school. So I went and felt at home, really happy.

Despite that, through the years I realized that most of my classmates were really bad when it came to social skills or even talking about other things. I realized then that if I kept following the same path directly to Computer Engineering, I’d keep meeting the same people. So I decided to take a break and applied for the National Film Making School while watching lots of movies, reading lots of books and listening to lots of music. A radical change.

I graduated finally, with a Film Editing degree, and through those years I met lots of different kinds of people, and learned about art too. But during the last third, I found myself more and more intrigued by the technical aspects of filmmaking and postproduction than by the artistic process.

So I decided to start studying Computer Engineering at last, something I still do.

I love programming, but I need to get out of the mainstream bussiness it is applied to. I want to be surrounded by people like me and I usually find that in people interested in art. I want to solve problems related to physics, maths, colors and shapes, and not currency, stocks and invoices.

That’s exactly why programming for the film, 3d and visual effects industry is what I want to do.

But I can’t.

I live in Buenos Aires, Argentina, where I’ve only managed to contact only one studio willing to pay for my work, but they don’t a significant work volume for me to live out of it. I keep searching, I keep hitting walls.

And that’s why I’m writing to you.

I’m looking for any kind of advice on finding people willing to hire or guide me in order to start working form Argentina (I need to finish my studies here!) designing and coding ANYTHING related with VFX, CGI or workflow design.

Is it possible work from here? I don’t mind doing small/dirty/boring jobs at first, I just want to do what I love.

Thank you a lot for your time and attention!!

Ariel Janover

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May 29

Convert a movie to a 16 bit image sequence

Posted in: Programming & Development
I’ve been tinkering with some pipeline tools for a short shot on a DSLR that outputs "MTS" AVCHD files, which have proven to be a pain to deal with.

For doing the effects, I naturally wanted to convert to an image sequence. Normally, I would just use ffmpeg, or mplayer to make an 8 bit PNG sequence. But, I decided to be sort of insanely paranoid about losing color information in the process. Since the MPEG-4-ish AVCHD is basically a YUV format, there is theoretically a little bit of possible loss of color when going to RGB. So, I have been cooking up a transcode workflow that should preserve whatever color has survived the compression to AVCHD.

I am sharing a utility that turns a movie file into 16 bit TIFF’s. It’s a small test program that I made while working on a small part of a larger internal workflow utility for the project shot on DSLR. It sort of grew out of an R+D side project to see if it was possible. You have to run it from the command line. It takes exactly one command line parameter – the name of the video file to turn into a TIFF sequence. If you drag and drop a movie file onto the executable, it’ll sort of work, but it won’t know what directory it should be working in, so it just dumps the frames into "c:\Documents and Settings\USERNAME" (or the equivalent on your version of windows.)

So far, I have tested this utility on exactly two types of files: M2T files captured from my Canon HV20 with HDV video, and the MTS AVCHD files from a Panasonic Lumix GH-1. Running this utility with anything else may cause an explosion. OTOH, it uses the ffmpeg libraries to handle all of the decoding, so it may well coincidentally work with almost any common video you throw at it.

Like I said, this is something that grew out of a proof of concept on a larger project. i don’t currently have any plans to improve this utility, or to distribute the larger project. I just figured there might be somebody out there who would find this useful, and it wouldn’t hurt to share it.

FFMPEG handles the conversion to 16 bit RGB itself, so if there is ever a "superwhite" that clips in the conversion to RGB, AFAICT, it’ll still be clipped in the conversion to 16 bits. This uses an int format, not float, so I don’t think it’ll preserve values greater than 1.0. It should just give slightly better precision in the conversion to RGB. (Unless I’m horribly misunderstanding the ffmpeg documentation, which is entirely possible, because there basically is none.)

http://www.forkforge.org/files/tools/movie_to_tiff.zip

I think I’ve bundled all of the dll’s that this depends on. I don’t have a second Windows machine to test deploying it on a clean install. It’s like a 40KB utility that depends on 20MB of third-party dll’s, so I can’t claim credit for most of the work in this. 🙂

Anyhow, if anybody does find this sort of thing useful, let me know.

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Apr 30

Hair System.

Posted in: Programming & Development
Hey Guys,

I am doing a standalone hair system, which has tools for creating, combing cutting hair.

Firstly the maya scene is exported out to a custom cache scene format, which read by the hair application.

There are controls for density, sizing, segments of the hair follicles.

The one thing which is really cool / hot is the interactive shader previewer. This allows the user to see their shading results on the viewport itself, without having to wait to go through the rendering process.

Also it calculates self shadowing, based on a fast approximation of the Deep Shadow techniques.

Current state of the output can be seen in the images attached, one with no self shadowing and the other one with self shadows calculated.

Current development: physics / dynamic tools using bullet and the hair editing tools.

Later, would be exporting the viewport shaders to the most popular production rendering engines.

Would be more than happy to receive any help / guidelines / suggestions.

Thank you,
Nihal Kenkre.

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Apr 17

Averaging linear and cubic interpolated values = ?

Posted in: Programming & Development
Hello all,

I’ve been playing about with interpolating visual data – so far I can see how linear works mathematically but don’t have the knowledge to grasp cubic interpolation yet. Looking at the output data I can see each method has its own tendencies and characteristic failures (certainly once you chuck in worst case images like points, blocks and checkerboard high contrast data) …

I thought upon looking at the output, why not just use the mean value of a linear and cubic interpolation outputs ?

Kind of a hedge your bets methodology…

Perhaps this just a redundant and wasteful operation which could be achieved within one cubic interpolation itself ? (some sort of internal fiddle or what not of the algorithm).

Not that I can see it yet but maybe I’m creating a contradictory system with even worse artefacts ?

:veryfunny

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Jun 05

stock footage help

Posted in: Programming & Development
you might want to visit http://www.clipcanvas.com for some awesome stock footage.
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Mar 26

installed Python 2.5.4 didnt got IDLE or little window

Posted in: Programming & Development
Hi I was watching DT python tutorial i am confused and tired too i am not getting the IDLE window neither the small window like the instructor show in tutorial…

plz help…

Attached Thumbnails
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Feb 28

adding surfaces to singleshadingswitch using MEL

Posted in: Programming & Development
hi
i am trying to add selected objects to the single shading switch,

well i first run the project i get this error

procedure AEswitchAddButtonCB not found, but later if i once manually open single shading switch i click on Add Surfaces i have this procedure in memory,

my ultimate objective is to load the items in shape column of singleshadingSwitch using this method

Code:

AEswitchAddButtonCB ($sssName) input inShape inSingle;

but i also tried using this method

Code:

listConnections -source true -destination false "vdfvsss.input[1]";
listConnections -source true -destination false "vdfvsss.input[1].inShape";

doesnt work…

can anyone help how cani add items to single shading swithc using mel…

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Feb 28

what am i doing wrong here

Posted in: Programming & Development
Code:

int $k = 0;
//Start from 0 to total obj in list
while( $k < size($objSel) ) {
//Set inSingle of inShape based on counter
setAttr ($sssName+".i[$k].it `rand 1`");
print "\n";
print $objSel[$k];
print "\n";
//`rand 1` above generates a random number on the fly
$k++;
//Better increment the counter or you'll be stuck in a loop
}

is giving error // Error: Invalid attribute index: gfnsss.i[$k].it `rand 1` // why ?

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