Writing from the glands of scientific theory

His griefs grieve on no universal bones, leaving no scars. He writes not of the heart but of the glands. -W. Faulkner

Recently, I’ve been quite busy working on a script narrative for a computer game that I’ve been working on for nearly 2 years now. It’s not the same game that I started out with. Indeed, I have had several major changes in direction, each turn became a personal revelation why the other idea just didn’t work for me.

One could look and say that I was fickle. Ultimately, I couldn’t concern myself with it whether it was true or not. For what is ‘fickle’ if only an external point of view used to categorise, and thus predict future behaviour? Why should I, of all people, predict my future behaviour?

One thing that I’ve learned is that the creative process is a process of thinking and feeling. Thinking and feeling bounce off each other and influence each other in kind. From thinking and feeling, we come upon that collection of intuitions that we may call instinct.

In writing, of which I know little about, I have been informed that there are types of writers who are plotters, and those that are pantsers. I’ve discovered that I’m a little of both.

In animation, of which I know much about, there are two animation methods called pose-to-pose, and straight-ahead. As an animator, I don’t work exclusively with one method over another. These methods are not techniques per se, but the only two ways of thinking about technique. Hence, as an animator, you are use both principles in order to find multifarious methods suited for the works that you want to do.

Whether you take concepts such as these strictly or loosely, the most important thing for the artist is knowing how and why these concepts are applied. I call this the Grey Area, because there is no right or wrong, only why something is working or not.

The Grey Area is like the Grey Matter — our brain — where any external concept floating out there in the world can plop down and relax. It is our little private room where we can do anything we want with these concepts, and no one has to know about them. Privacy is key, because privacy is what makes it special to oneself and potentially to the rest of your external world. As far as philosophy and analysis is concerned, I confine myself to these coarse principles of creativity. I’m happy to let ambiguous concepts mutate and evolve in the Grey Area.

Unfortunately, because of that loose creative disposition, I become irritated by over-analytical people. Out there abounds articles of a scientific bent which seek to ‘optimise audience-user engagement’ and ‘define and measure suspense (anxiety) in terms of durability’. Presumptuous titles adorn most of these presumptuous articles, and sometimes follow a template such as: “How Science is Helping Art…”, ‘Art’ being things brought on by the creative process, I would assume.

The life that gives breath to these articles is a superciliousness of these business-minded scribblers who use the authority of science to convince us of what they think the bottom line art is supposed to be. Go scrounge a few measurements, researches, testimonies, call it science if you will; but what was it that caused them to think that art was made to catalyze ‘unconscious involuntary responses‘, or ‘meet audience expectation’? If art had to exercise techniques in manipulation, and to some degree it has to, why does this seem like the overriding function of art? Why does a biological and psychological research into, say, the ‘fear-anxiety process’ infer that such stimulus must be pandered to at all?

The idea that science is serving the purposes of art is one of willful ignorance: even if scientific researches don’t objectively presume to understand or even define art, but only to observe its effects, why are the results of its conclusions always encourage ‘scientifically minded’ people to presume that artists need to act on these effects? Let’s be honest and perceive that science does not conduct its business to serve art. Instead, its very insistence seeks to bring itself above art by defining it, by saying, “I know you better than you know yourself. This is what you really need.”

And that’s the point when I say, no, I don’t. You can tell me what makes me cry in a movie, but you can’t tell me if I should be crying at all. You can push all my buttons to make me keep from pressing the stop button on this crappy movie for a few seconds longer, but you can’t tell me that it’s truly worthwhile watching. And if we, as artists, keep conversing in the thoughtless language of statistics and obsessive yet irrelevant analysis, pretty soon that’s all ‘Art’ is going to become

(If it isn’t already.)

 

 

Tokyo Ghoul – 5 Years After

I had started out as a freelance in my previous company, and then a year later, I became a permanent staff as a CG supervisor. A CG supervisor’s responsibilities may encompass many things. Or, inversely, may encompass only a narrow field. This depends on the company’s expectations from the role and the person. As such, some write certain things on paper, but are not carried out in reality, and vice-versa.

As a technical person in a supervisory role, I naturally supervised everything I had competent skills in. This meant everything in CG post-production, whether it would be as high-level as a pipeline development, or low-level as switching out a heat sinks from defective computers. This is just my nature. I like fixing, and designing things as well. There were some things that I initially didn’t always look forward to, like production shoots, but it was my job. And in the end, I learned to like it as much as a computer geek possibly can.

Through the intervening 5 years, the role remained as broad as I was. There was no need to do less work. In Sporty Drive, I had taken more responsibilities than before, but no more than a CG supervisor of my expectations would have. This would be the only project in 5 years that I can confidently assert that gave me a sufficient level of satisfaction after its completion. But from then on, as if on the downward phase of a sine wave, it became a challenge of enduring the tedium of the advertising world.

Tokyo Ghoul was the last major project I worked on in that studio. And I mention this because it serves as an end reference point for my role as CG supervisor just before I left. We hired a new great TD, originally from Weta, and both worked — in tandem with the main studio in Japan — on some shots for Ghoul. Our major task was rigging, though we also did some animation, too. Although I had been usually the one to work on rigging in the past, the studio execs and producer wanted to leverage our new TD’s expertise and occupational history to impress our Japanese counterparts, so all of the rigging work was assigned to him.

I was left to become a visual effects producer of sorts. I helped write the final visual effects breakdown; since our work was technical in nature, I wrote documentation and emails explaining the technical concepts to a non-technical Japanese translator: what problems we were having, the details of what we need, what the rigs are meant to do, etc. I created video tutorials for workflow suggestions (that sometimes had nothing to do with rigging, but simply a knowledge exchange between CG artists), and for explaining the rigs we were delivering. It echoed my Lifeway CG teaching days.

(I also did some animation: when we couldn’t afford to get animators in, I took over and animated a few shots in the end.)

You can say that my role was largely educational and social. It was challenging and it was important as well. I’m aware of that, and I’m fine with it. But this isn’t the sort of thing that I’d been wishing for. In fact, this was certainly a step in the wrong way, and a step that I had been forced to make gradually over the years.

The execs do not have any sense (tactically or strategically) for technicalities of CG production, so they habitually nod their heads in feigned consonance whenever I relate anything related to technology or software. Thus it becomes a difficult proposition to build anything of substance in an environment where pipeline is only just a word bandied about creative directors who want to sound cool among production people. It’s not real enough for execs; it’s not as real as clients’ whims, it’s not as real as the debates of the philosophy of creativity that I used to hear in our open-space office, it’s not even as real as promised money.

I am not exaggerating when I say that though I had been coding the studio’s pipeline for 5 years, the execs have assumed that I don’t actually code, and perhaps they think I just download plugins and scripts. Anyone who truly knows my development work will probably laugh at that bit of irony. And I’m laughing a bit, too. (Of course, never mind the 10 odd years prior of doing code; to some that’s ancient history.)

Perhaps they lacked confidence in my professional pedigree, or they didn’t know enough to understand any other aspiration apart from theirs. Perhaps, perhaps. Either way, I saw the trajectory of where I’d end up, and if I wouldn’t be out of a job due to redundancy, I would have been out of my mind in boredom.

So, in the end, when an opportunity presented itself to do a bit of original coding related to Iray, Janus, and LightWave, I took on a contract, despite its short term.

I think there’s a point when many factors for quitting converge. But some seem so charged with emphatic resonance that you’d think that was the primary reason for changing your job (or your life). People might say they hated working with so-and-so, or got paid peanuts, or felt no respect from others, or the workplace was stressful. But all of them helped to make it worse, until at one point, not any one of those factors is going to be enough to make it better. When the bad stuff accumulates, it hardens after a time. Then, even if they worked on getting new tables, lamps, decors, heaters, hardware, software, or whatever to make it seem that they’re addressing issues, everything wrong has accumulated to the point none of it matters. Because none of them, by themselves, matter anyway. As one the execs — an example of irony if I ever saw one — used to pontificate: the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. And so truly, it is: when the parts are faulty, the whole is more faulty than the parts.

Never forget.

 

Openbox hotkeys

Hotkey stuff for Ubuntu via Openbox, which seems an interesting tool that I hope to look into more closely in the future.

It was quite useful to know how to map LXTask (task manager) to the same combination as Windows. Of course, if I knew that Lubuntu already had a hotkey assigned to it (CTRL+ALT+DEL), I wouldn’t have bothered. Ignorance, after all, can lead to more knowledge than being knowledgeable already. At least sometimes it does.

Some obvious links:

Lubuntu/Keyboard – Community Help Wiki

obkey – Openbox Key Editor – Google Project Hosting

 

Lubuntu

I had crossed paths with Linux before. It had appealed to me on several levels. One of them was simplicity. The other was the potential of understanding deeply the tools that I would be using. At one point I dabbled with OpenSUSE, Ubuntu, and a few other distros that had been personally recommended to me. But for years I had put off learning it because I had many good reasons to: work, personal projects, so many other applications or tools to learn.

Some years ago I retired my old MSI GX620 laptop running Windows XP. It was a great performer — still think it is — being a gaming laptop and the fact it was running the venerable XP. When I recently needed to install Linux (Ubuntu) to view an OpenFOAM source, I felt the keen desire to dive back into it again.

I tentatively chose to run with Lubuntu simply because of the LXDE; I wanted to make most of my older hardware. With nothing concrete to do in Linux, I went on a installation journey to find all the possible apps that may be of some use to me: GIMP, Blender, FocusWriter, XnViewMP. Installing packages seemed easier with these package managers. I had been clueless the last time I used Linux and was never really aware of them. It almost felt like I was being cheated from a true Linux experience. I did experience a missing library error installing XnView, which prompted me to read about how to properly fish for them. FocusWriter used a PPA that I had to learn how to install as well.

So far it’s been fun learning simple stuff. But I still don’t know what to do with it. I want it to play a bigger part on what I do and if I don’t find something worthwhile, I may never learn it deep enough.

Movie short: Damien

Dick. That’s what I did for this short. Yes, I did a dick; a paper dick, a CG paper dick, to be precise. It comes to life after the protagonist draws on a piece of paper; it runs along a man’s shoulder, then up a woman’s skirt, makes a dash for the exit, gets doused with water. That’s about the extent of it. Fun little project for a cool director.

User functions FTW

Here I am, few days later talking about user functions in Janus again. Why not? It’s been giving me results and it’s fun to play with — as a TD, I mean.

Back at work I wanted to output an RGB matte for multiple instanced object. LW doesn’t have a way to do a scene-based surface override on an object (perhaps shaderMeister?– though I don’t know if it the Spot Instance node will work with it). Basically, I wanted an easy way of assigning RGB colours to items in a particular group.

Before, Janus’s item processing was strictly group-oriented, where group settings were simply propagated to the items. There was no way to individually and programmatically affect certain items within the group. So in the latest rev, I changed that. But the important bit was that I tied it (again) to user functions, and I embedded a new context — the group item context — through populating two constant variables relating to the group item’s index and name. In this way, the user function can be created that references the group item’s index, and based on that value, the command parameters can be changed on that particular item as it is being processed. It’s basically a ‘last minute’ change in the render pass settings just before the group item is applied its parent group settings.

Since user functions are basically string replacements from within the cmd line, there’s a lot of flexibility (but can also end up a heaping mess if the Janus user doesn’t watch it), so that I can dynamically various bits of settings; I’m not limited to adding one parameter, for example, because I can just concatenate the new subcommands in the return string; so as along as the final resulting cmd line is syntactically valid, Janus will grok it.

Mardonier Poses

Rigged and posed Mardonier. Some screencaps of two poses that I was testing. Pose B, the pose where the pistol is held high, seems, to me, a commonly-seen  pose – path of least resistance and all.

So, I’d probably go with Pose A, which seems more low-key.

Or I might do something totally different.

EDIT: based my wife’s critique, I’ve modified Pose A and made it slightly more aggressive or confrontational. Pose C shows Mardonier in mid-step with the pistol held slightly higher and the body tending forward, almost trying to get itself ahead of the weapon.