Tag: lw

Kerry Logistics’ Video Wall

faulknermano1 Comment

This project is not classified as a commercial. It was meant to be privately displayed inside the company’s (Kerry Logistics) reception area. It’s a couple of metres high, six times across. Pretty big, if you ask me, though I’m sure there’s always some guy who can pee higher. There always is.

Anyway, that’s the reason that I can’t show, at least in its final form, what it was. But I do have pictures — pretty pictures — of the stuff that I got to contribute.

Mocap data, to geo in Maya, then LW for point rendering.
LW nodal displacements with the help of Denis Pontonnier’s tools.

Particles made easy by LW’s nodal displacement fancy-footwork.
Additive particle morphing in LW using nodal displacements.
RealFlow HYBRIDO sim. LW for instance rendering.

Mass transformations using Denis Pontonnier’s toolkit and LW instancing.
Nixed scene. LW displacements, scene and render.
Motion graphic shenanigans in LW using 2-point polygons and instancing.

The keyword in this project was ‘repetition’. Now, a guy in the studio kept using the word ‘iterative process’. But no: this wasn’t iteration. Iteration means:

…repetition of a mathematical or computational procedure applied to the result of a previous application, typically as a means of obtaining successively closer approximations to the solution of a problem.

The operative phrase is ‘successively closer approximations to the solution of a problem’. If it were actually the case that in the so-called creative industry that iteration existed, of which my experiential opinion says is more of anomaly than a rule, it would follow that some end goal could be discerned at the beginning. This was not the case here. It began with an idea, then killed, to reincarnate into a new form, killed again, rose from the ashes, ad nauseum. Indeed, nausea is actually a good word for it. Isn’t just better just say repetition to be truthful? Instead, we are encouraged to think it’s iterative, so as to regard each ‘iteration’ not the pointless exercise it actually was.

Here, I also encountered the novel concept of ‘not second-guessing’ the client. What this actually meant was that ‘the client doesn’t know what they want, but we do.’ Basically, a Jedi mind trick. The hilarity of it all is that we’re not Jedi. No indeedy. Hence, the bulk of the setbacks were clients totally rejecting the concept and, despite the studio’s assumptive airs, we took it by the balls — what choice did we really have? They were the ones with the money — and re-did it again and again and again. Joke’s on us. Actually, joke’s on me, because I was at the bottom of that food chain. As I say, things like money/wealth may be too dense to trickle down. But work, overtime, and frustration, those things don’t sit at the top for too long.

At the of the day the repetition stopped. Where we got to is for Kerry Logisitics employees and guests to see. Where we had came from is, as they say, history.

 

Retirement and Retrospect: Janus EOL

faulknermano5 Comments

After some thought last year, weighing in what I want to do for the future, I  decided that I should ‘clean my closet’ first. And one of the things that stood out in that closet was Janus development. There have been no new sales for Janus for quite a long time now, unsurprisingly, because I never really made any respectable effort in its marketing. Besides a few clients, its userbase has equally been quiet. And so I’ve decided to retire Janus from commercial development, and the main reason is that I can’t see myself guaranteeing the same kind of support that Janus users have enjoyed through the years for free.

It feels like a nominal thing to say that Janus is no longer being developed because Janus dev hasn’t been as active, and I’m pretty sure only a very few are concerned with its development anyway. If anything, announcing the fact will simply get me off that spectral hook of ‘developer obligation’ for EOL products. At least that’s what I hope.

I’ve always said in the past that Janus was never meant to be a mainstream tool. But over the course of the years, I learned one major reason why: many LWers didn’t try it. Part of me comprehends the rationale that the Janus video tutorials described a workflow that they didn’t like, or was confusing. But this is what I couldn’t understand: despite the complaints of the lack of a render layer system in LW, why people wouldn’t even attempt a free try in the hopes that they make something out of it.

Then there was the price point of 200 bucks (later 100 bucks) which might have made it totally incompatible with their idea of a layering system, no matter how well (or badly) designed. I kept hearing their demands to NT to put a layering system in there as part of their LW upgrade path, avoiding the need to invest in a 100-200 dollar plugin. Apparently, they’ve been waiting for a long time: at least 7 years.

What strikes me ironically, in retrospect, is that if they had invested in Janus from the beginning, it would have been a free Janus upgrade path from then on. Of course, I can’t say that I would have guaranteed it, though it seems likely since it was the case despite the minimal community support behind it. It would have been a very small price to pay to have such a tool that early on in LW9.5 — LW 2015 still does not have a functional equivalent of Janus or a render layer system. I say that in retrospect; a few Janus users have been saying it for years.

Most LWers have lived without a proper layering system, because the need is not truly pressing for most of them; I think despite their complaints, they can wait 7 more years if they have to.

Whether or not I would have stopped development regardless of its popularity is something I will never know myself. To me, Janus, as a commercial product, has run its course. I think it does a lot more than what was advertised, which is a good thing for me as a developer; I’m proud of what I’ve accomplished, but more grateful for the things I’ve learned developing this tool. Janus is still available to be bought, but no support will be given (unless I can actually afford to), and I will try my darnedest to ignore bug fix requests: it’s easy to get obsessed with them, and they eat up lots of my time.

This is not to say that I’m through with Janus: I use it daily, and I will continue to code it to solve problems that I encounter myself. I may yet support Janus in the context of a company as a technical consultant, which is a better use of my time, and I can be actually recompensed for my work. I may fork it, or create a derivative for other progs like Maya — who knows, really? The future unknown, and I’d rather not try to plan or predict. I’ve focused on tools for the most part of my vfx career, and left creative pursuits largely untravelled. And that’s where I’m headed next.