Patrick's VFX Blog

I bought this today! Should be a good read! Saw an ad banner on one of the vfx sites, and I decided to buy this for USD12.95. It's an ebook that talks about a career in Visual Effects, how to find a job, get your big break as a fresh-graduate or from being jobless.  It also talks about how to move up once you get into the industry. So it should be a good read for artists at every stage in the industry (except for those people who are already up there being a cg or  vfx supervisor. heh) This is the first e-book I have every bought online. Yey! Open the flood-gates! (I've just done a quick browse through of the pages looking for photos/pictures, and I found none! To be expected actually.) Anybody else bought and reading this book? Share your thoughts please!

I finally got to watch Godaizer, the short film that my friend Hillary Yeo created. For about 2 months just before Double Negative set up in Singapore, I was helping out with this project while doing research and leg-work for the setting-up of the dneg facility in Singapore. So in a way Hillary was also my former boss. :) Hillary has entered this short film into quite a few film festivals.  I was helping out on this film as a generalist TD. I did a bit of animation, previz, asset creation, layout, lighting, props rigging and rendering. I also helped out a little bit on helping out with workflow improvements and researching techniques to help solve production issues. These included projection mapping, transferring of UV textures. I wrote a few scripts to help with projection, uv-transfers, and cloth simulation for static models.  All in all I am excited and proud that the film is completed! Well done, Hillary! Please watch it and "like" it if you enjoy it! Leave some

Here's the final and cleanest method. Skeel showed me the solution the next day at work by pointing me to a new MEL-only command that has been made available since Maya 2009. Somehow this method did not turn up in any of my searches on the subject. I must therefore conclude that it has been overlooked. All you need to do to reset the initial state now, is enter the MEL command: clearParticleStartState <particleObjectName> This immediately removes the particle cached initial state, and resets your particleIDs. This method completely removes the initial state.  Here's the video to show it: