Iron Sky – Day 84
Yeah. I’m still having issues with Ozone, turns out that one of the bug fixes I was sent wasn’t part of the installer used to put ozone on one of the other machines to do render tests. That in turn confused ozones “core” (why is it that everyone wanted to call their apps core for a while? its a stupid name/idea as we have seen – its not sexy, I don’t care what marketing says. HardCore (porn), C4D CORE (rotten to the core?) all come to mind when I hear it) installation on the local system and thus fails as it does some kind of version check before rendering. What a bad way to do a plug-in – like really… do you need all that extra gack? A render node certainly doesn’t. All of this garbage is so they can protect the software, rather than make it faster, work better or hell, be cheaper or easier to install. E-On totally fails in my book on that count. Oh but there is more. On the one box that I can get it to run on which is my workstation here at Iron Sky, a 1280×960 resolution frame with no AA of a Spectral sky at night with some poofy clouds wants almost an hour to render per frame. 640×480? Oh, only about 10 minutes. Per frame – and no AA whatsoever, no motion blur, nothing. DIRT SLOW.
And this box is no slacker. It’s 12 threads, i7 980 or something with 24GB of DDR3 doomsday ram. I think Ozone4 and even 3 rendered faster 3 years ago on the AMD phenom 9750 boxes I had at Front Street working on LTOTGC and Fireball. It’s just stupid how slow Ozone’s rendering is. I can’t even imagine how silly slow Vue is with a full eco-system. Brutal.
Anyway, enough complaining for a moment. Let’s talk siggraph!
NewTek obviously didn’t have a booth but Kiko did manage to chat with Rob Powers about why the lack of a foot print presence. It basically comes down to “is it really worth it”. I was under the impression NT wasn’t going to be there at all, but apparently several people from NT are there and doing the rounds quietly with studios, and users – building up to something much larger than what siggraph in vancouver could contain I think. I haven’t a clue what that really is, but I can guess. I won’t do that here though because too many people on the NT forums are speculating wildly – some even suggesting NT is going to sell LW (never happen, trust me) to Autodesk or some other company. Like come on…. no. Even if they wanted to I think that boat sailed a while back.
My main concern right now for LightWave’s future is getting more good solid reliable people up to speed on the software in production environments so that I can crew up for shows like Iron Sky quickly and know we have a good roster of talent to choose from. Things are only going to get busier for LightWave artists who really know the application and have the knowledge of how it works in production work flows because it’s become clearer to people now that used to scoff at LightWave that it really is a very very solid tool and not only that, a cost savings one from both actual purchasing to the fact that you can do more with less people or way more faster with the same amount of people if they are using LightWAve and your going to get predictable results.
It’s that simple. And thats where things are today for me. Back later. I have clouds to fight with. Among other volumetric stuff (which I am not fighting with and getting amazing results out of LightWave natively).
Cheers.
PS the wild boar wasn’t all that great and certainly not for 12 euros or whatever it cost me. Brutal. « Iron Sky – Day 83 (Previous News)
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That sounds similar to the rendernode config file that was MIA for 9.5. The fix came almost immediately, but since the file was never installed on rendernodes, and the only difference for rendernode installations is that file, the updater couldn’t place it on the nodes because it couldn’t identify whether or not a rendernode installation was desired.
A little awkward, sadly.
As for render performance from Ozone/Vue, I have no complaints. It takes time, but given what it is doing, I’m impressed it is as fast as it is. There are controls to dial down the quality, or change the calculation model, as needed. Perhaps the volumetric mode would be more suitable, if you can’t accept the overhead of the full simulation in spectral mode?
I just got back from Siggraph. It was pretty disappointing that Newtek didn’t have a booth. The only Lightwave-related things I saw on the exhibition floor was the screen-cap video that Rob had in his talk about virtual art departments at nVidia’s booth and the Inside Lightwave 10 book at one of the book venders. The guy I was with said that the exhibition was tiny compared to previous Siggys.
Newtek wasn’t the only no-show. Luxology didn’t have a booth there either. I saw a Houdini booth, but it may have been someone offering Houdini train. It was the smallest booth size possible. With some vfx companies there, I would’ve expected more VFX software things, but Eyeon (Fusion), Foundation (Nuke), the company that makes PF Track (or any of their competition), and e-on (Vue) weren’t there either.
‘The Foundry’ makes Nuke 🙂
‘The Pixel Farm’ makes PFTrack.
Luxology were doing the same as NT, using other vendors booths as springboards. That kind of cost-sharing, given the expense of a booth in addition to the costs of shipping, travel, accommodation, makes perfect sense. NT’s inability, for whatever reason, to show off footage on the scale of AD’s presentation also limits impact.
The conference schedule may also not be working for the product schedules of many vendors now, as things are sliding towards 12-18 month release cycles. Both Lux and NT shipped their major releases back in December and, 10.1 aside, have nothing lined up to announce.
Given all of this, it seems that the webcasting events and/or focused meetings work better for vendors, giving the vendor more freedom. As a customer, if that keeps the pricing down and the value of upgrades higher (by using marketing bucks for engineering), I’m content with that. Ignoring the damp squib at the end of the effort, remember the level of interest in the period before the Core announcement. If there had been something behind the hype, the result would have provided much more value for money than a conference presence.
Mind you, I’ve never attended SIGGRAPH.
Yeah, the guy I went up with was telling me that the internet has reduced the need/impact of Siggraph.
Now we can see cool cg streaming online. We can find just about any trade books we need online instead of whatever they happen to have at the local book store. News and product reviews are instant.
The exhibition is still great for hands-on demos, but for a lot of the other things, its not quite as important as it used to be.
It was definitely the smallest Siggraph I have ever been to.
I don’t think there were any major announcements or product launches. There was no new tools or technologies that I have not seen before.
It was worth it for me, but I could see how it would not have been worth it for others if they were going for the first time and didn’t know people who were there.
The exhibition was really mostly a jobs fair or a education fair. Seriously, the number of places offering courses in Video Game design and VFX? For the number of jobs out there?
The standard swag was sub par as well. I got Disney pencils and Lucasfilm markers, but I missed out on the pixar teapot. In fact I don’t think there was any swag worth getting at all outside of the teapot.
Chatted to some cute girls though. Nothing wrong with that.
Next two Siggraphs are in Los Angeles, so I’m hopeful they are going to be more substantial.
Keeks