Patrick's VFX Blog

Happy new year folks! I wish one and all a very blessed new year ahead.  I pray all of you get to move towards your goals and do the things you've always wanted to do.  Thank you all for the 1340 visits since February this year. It has been an amazing journey so far, I hope it will only get better. God bless you all! 

BB has been asking me about Maya, hierarchy and constraints. He will soon be enrolling into Animation Mentor . BB's working with Softimage XSI over the past year and more. However, Animation Mentor requires students to work in Maya. Thus, for those who are not familiar they may require additional modules to learn the basics and be familiar with Maya. We were talking about having a time where we can meet up so she can ask me things related to Maya.  Finally we found a day we could both be available, and it was today. I was on leave and she could meet up after her day's work.  She came with Z and had dinner with Christina and myself at Saizeriya, City Square Mall . We had dinner and came back to my place. There I sat them down and showed them Maya basics with Maya 2012. I demonstrated the following:

Talking about round-robin, I am reminded of the elevators at the block of flats where I live. I've been frustrated at the elevators before. Sometimes when I call for the elevator, I can tell that 2 of the lifts are in transit (going somewhere, with or without passangers). Sometimes only 1 out of 3 is in transit. When I call the lifts, I expect one of the lifts that are parked to be mobilised. Instead, the logic that drives the lifts assignment lets that lift go in the opposite direction, then come to a rest, (either to drop off some passenger or park itself), then wakes itself again, to come to my level. 

This post has a bit to do with the music virtual instrument plug-in I am now using, but the term Round-Robin has a direct software coding application, so I decided to post it up, just like I did on the rest of my blogs In the course of reading the manuals of EastWest virtual instruments plug-ins, I keep coming across the term "round-robin". What Round-Robin Means At first it seemed to be a recording technique, or some kind of microphone set-up. I searched  google.com  for "round-robin mic techniques", and found nothing. Closest results relevant to audio processing was a a "round-robin" setting in protools configuration that allows Protools to be configured to read/write audio data from an array of hard-disks to ensure stability of glitch-less recording.  After I watched the videos from Youtube (from the previous blog entry), they used the term to describe the way samples are triggered. Here's what I found on  Answers.com : http://www.answe...

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: