I’m doing the night shift here at Energia on Iron Sky. My goal for the evening is to get 3 shots into render. I have been here since midnight after leaving to get some sleep around 5PM earlier today, or yesterday or whatever it was or is. So far though out of 3 shots I have one in and its just about 4AM, and I have two more to go and I will be a happy kat I guess. I’m a little concerned with some technical stuff once things go into compositing. Over the past week or so we have encountered an odd problem with both fusion and nuke not being able to read certain exr files from our main storage unit. I have hit this problem before but I don’t recall how I resolved it. I believe that its related to network overload or delay on the write device itself when a node saves the image from a rendering engine like LightWave’s LWSN or even mental ray’s node rendering for maya. My theory is that the device is falsely believing it has written that data per frame to the unit when in reality there is more data coming, being delayed by network traffic, processes on the device itself or whatever that may be causing this problem. In August I was told that we would be getting another storage unit for the back half of the show, but nothing so far has materialized and we are starting to push the 90% full level on some of these drives. One of them is apparently easily expandable, the other is not. Thankfully its all backed up and it hasn’t been a major issue so far, but it is a bit disconcerting. I miss my set up at home. As an artist, even a lowly CGI guy like me, I miss having my own personal render cluster of systems with multiple multi-terabyte storage options at my finger tips. Even though my workstations and nodes are a bit older now and only have 8GB ram in them for the most part, I had them all tuned, perfectly and I could throw stuff on them knowing exactly what I get out the other end and not have to pause a machine so someone else could do work here and there on them during the day. That’s part of the reason why I have started to come in at night. I’m much more productive this way and its shown in the last few days that I have done this. One of the other reasons why I miss my set up at home was that I could walk out the door and get chow at any time of day. There is NOTHING open at this hour that is anywhere close here in Tampere that I would want to eat. Not only that its more expensive here than in downtown Vancouver. So why am I here again? Oh, right, the money.