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Installing pyShake on the laptop today.

It's every bit as painful as it was when I installed it on my old desktop machine.  Maybe a liiiiiittle bit better since at there's a configure for it now, but installing prebuilt binaries really spoils you.

If you've never installed a traditional unix/linux/macosx application,  you're in for a treat. It's one thing if it's your own application, as well, since you'll know what's going on: but when it's someone else's...

Well, you never *really* know what any application installer is doing.  Data gets socked away hither and thither, but mostly you don't know about it.

Doing a configure/make/make install sequence usually displays TONS of data.  There will be a thousand lines of successful completions, another thousand of warnings of varying severity (with usually alarming-sounding messages that may or may not be important - and very frequently aren't), and maybe even a few outright failures that *also* may or may not be important.

A truly great build will usually ease your mind a little.  Several of the warnings you get for things like boost::python will reassure you that the error you're seeing happens to nearly everyone and shouldn't alarm you.

Somehow, that doesn't make me feel entirely at ease. It's like your girlfriend telling you, "It's ok, honey. It could happen to anyone."

Then there are errors like this:
Please ensure that LDFLAGS is configured properly, or specify --with-boost-root

Thanks.  I'll do that.

I just read that Ubisoft bought Hybride Technologies - a large video game company buying a medium-size visual effects house.  The article had a lot of talk about the future of video games and movies and seemed to miss the point when it quoted recent reviews of "Beowulf" that said it was like a "long video game scene".

The point was that wasn't a positive statement...

But it got me thinking: there's been so much talk about how video games will become as good as movies - and it's a pet peeve of mine that writers can be so ignorant.

What??? You say?

Sure.  Video games will eventually look as good as what you see when you go to see Hellboy this weekend.

But when that happens, movies won't look like that any more.

Now eventually, and we're not talking in the next year or two, we're talking a decade down the road perhaps, video games will start to look a lot like what you see when you walk outside (except of course that there will be zombies or terminators in the video game and may or may not be killer cyborgs and diseased undead prowling your real-life neighborhood).  By then, feature films may well be predominantly 3d - but your video games probably won't be.  Another five or ten years and then maybe the playing field will be levelled.  Except that the movie theaters will have vibrating chairs, a better sound system than you're likely to have at home, misters and blowers and scent generators, actuators to lift and tilt the chairs.  Oh - and even better 3d and higher res displays than consumer televisions can deliver (what, you thought HD was the best it got?  Please.  Not even today.  But don't count on a 4k home television standard any time soon.)

Oh, and their screens will always be bigger than yours.

The constant talk about video games 'replacing' movies on some level just sounds like people talking 100 years ago about radio replacing books.  The internet hasn't even replaced books - though it has put printed encyclopedias out of business, but then how many people ever kept a consistently updated set of encyclopedias in their homes?  If you ever even owned a set, chances are you owned one that still talked about the USSR and the apartheid government of South Africa.  If the internet replaced *that* bookshelf dominating monstrosity, I'd say that's not even surprising.  Public libraries had been replacing private encyclopedias for decades already.

Ubisoft's purchase of Hybride is motivated by the same thing that's making companies like Digital Domain say they want to get into video game production: fear. The fear that they won't be prepared if things go that way.  The fear they're going to be missing out on something.  They see something like the release of the new GTA and it looks like video games are the road to making billions.  It's just not true, any more than a small multimedia house in New Orleans should look to Wall•E as the future of their company.  Ubisoft doesn't need Hybride to understand how to make better CG. And the guys at Hybride probably can't help much with getting their ideas into the game engine: because that's an entirely different discipline.

My point is, video games will change.  But I don't think they'll "converge" with feature films any more than television "converged" with feature films.  Television is still a poor substitute for going to the movies and as much as we make the decision to sometimes catch something when it comes out on television/pay-per-view/dvd/bluray/what-have-you, as a society the rise of television has done nothing to diminish movie attendance.  Now we just expect more entertainment, and predominantly entertainment that we can enjoy just by sitting on our ass with a bucket of popcorn in our lap or a plate of nachos on the coffee table and no video game controller anywhere in site.  A theater full of people aren't going to be strumming their Guitar Hero guitars or thrashing around with their Wii controllers, and next year's Batman installment isn't going to require you to learn to drive the batmobile.

Unless of course you want to.

photo credit: Capture Queen ™I have a side project for iPhone that I'm working on. There's a patent filing in process, incorporation paperwork to do, all that good stuff - so I won't be doing a lot of specifics about the project until it's ready to go. It's basically a location-based-services thing but when we've looked over what everyone seems to be doing with LBS and social networking and the like, it all seems to be thinking very inside the box. Just like a few years ago there was a rash of "... on the internet!" patents where things we'd done forever in the wetworld were being done online and called "visionary", now there's a rash of similar "... on a mobile phone!" patents and websites that are no more groundbreaking than when we did them online or on our feet. It's like patenting driving in nails with the side of a hammer. It works, but it's not especially groundbreaking nor is it even ideal.

We really feel that this project is going to move mountains though, and change the way people view the real world around them, not just when they're in front of a computer.

The tendency towards developing for the iPhone is that the iPhone has arguably the best SDK there is: and a substantial and rapidly growing marketshare. Still, though, that limits our deployment: it's the largest selling smartphone-style device, but it doesn't represent the majority of the market. No-one does.

Today I've been evaluating Mojax, a cross-platform mobile development environment. It looks promising. It promises cross-platform compatibility, including access to a number of necessary core services like GPS, and currently runs on all phones supporting J2ME (Java on Mobile), all color Blackberry phones, and shortly Windows Mobile devices from WinMo 2003 onward, any mobile running Brew V2 or later, and Helio devices. Just the J2ME support gets me onto most smartphones - so this effectively would get the product onto every mobile device there is with gps capability.

This excites me because I like the prospect of running the application on every feature-capable mobile phone without having to separately develop for Blackberry, HTC, Samsung, and Nokia. Getting the product out simultaneously for iPhone, Windows Mobile, PalmOS and Blackberry would be fantastic. There are some annoyances with using J2ME midlets, but I'll take the slight user experience tradeoff for being able to deliver an application at all without breaking the bank

So I'm working on a side project that's mainly just for me, but it's so damn handy I might just make it publicly available when it's done (probably for a small monthly fee). It's basically a super quick way to run certain types of scan for stocks during the day, picking out data that's usually hard to get until the end of the day. I'm tying it into the OptionsXpress API so that when I identify a good entry or exit point on a stock, I can change my position with the click of a button.

I've been designing the site to automatically rescale for my mobile phone, but I need a way to determine if I'm looking at it on the phone or on a desktop - and since my mobile browser is generally configured to identify as a desktop browser (so that I don't get sent to the "mobile version" of the sites I visit) it's harder to do. My browser does a great job of rendering full-screen pages and scaling them - if you've seen the iPhone browser, both Opera Mini and Pixsel do something similar though without 'multi-touch'.

That said, there's something to be said for designing a website that will gracefully scale when it's on a phone.

But when the browser identifies itself as a desktop browser, what's left? Javascript can pick up the screen size, but what about PHP? All my pages are created in PHP...

(more...)

and it's not even in the theater yet - but the trailer is.

If you've seen Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull in theaters this weekend, then I'm certain you've seen the first trailer for David Fincher's The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. You might remember seeing a rather weird trailer with Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett and no dialogue but with beautifully melancholic music - that was the Benjamin Button trailer. Remarkably it's not online yet, so I can't exactly show it to everyone, but I can say that is absolutely phenomenal. I was not expecting it when I went in to midnight showing of Crystal Skull a few nights ago, but I was astounded at what I saw. I've got to start talking about this now, I can't constrain myself, because this trailer looked downright amazing, so much so, that I'm already claiming this is next year's Best Picture.
- FirstShowing.net

It's not often that a movie that's neither a remake nor a sequel creates such a staggering worldwide buzz within days of the appearance of its trailer (and only in theaters!  Except for a Spanish bootleg, there's still nothing online).  But just as I'd said weeks ago when I first saw the edit (when there was still bluescreen and placeholders for some scenes and we were watching versions of it with various pieces of temp music): the freakin' *trailer* gave me a lump in my throat.

Apparently it's not just because I was emotionally connected to it.  I've seen several bloggers say that they've gone back to their local theater 4-5 times SINCE THURSDAY NIGHT just to see this trailer again.  With words like "phenomenal", "masterpiece", "extraordinary" and people already insisting this will be the next year's shoo-in for the "Best Picture" Oscar, and finding that others have commented months back that just reading the script made them cry, I think I'm working on a great, great film.

DD's work looks great (I've seen a good bit more than is visible on the trailer, now, and I'll leave it to the future to reveal exactly what they're doing on it since I have yet to see any mention of it in the press) and I'm proud as hell of what we've been doing at Asylum.

It was good to come home today after a really long day  (I was on set for something else today from 7am to 10pm) and check the internet for the trailer and comments which I'd heard were appearing.  When you're doing something you love, have the respect of your peers, and get to work around people you actually look up to: it's a pretty nice way to live your life.  If I ever start aging backwards, like our dear friend Mr. Button, remind me to start doing this sooner.

I know I sound like a broken record to some, but I had this footage sitting on my workstation and didn't want it to go to waste.

Since my earlier blog about normals-based relighting of rendered cg elements (something that can obviously be done in the original CG software if time allowed), I'd written a short piece on relighting real-world footage. Since then, I expanded on it slightly and now I've put it up on YouTube as a quick technique video.

A detailed video covering the normals-based relighting process is located here.

I noticed the other day that my own 2d crowd generation software tool (DynaCyc) is ranking higher on google than Massive Software's listing for their incredible 3d crowd sim software.

In fact, if you google "Crowd Generation" there are two hits for my own websites before theirs comes up.

While DynaCyc is nowhere near as sophisticated for generating realistic behavior (it's more of a dynamic matte painting tool than a crowd generator - I created it for doing plants and trees to algorithmically make forests and such), it's pretty cool that I'm placing so well.

I really need to get the tutorial for my uv remapping tool recorded so that people can start using it. At the moment, though, I'm working 12-14 hrs a day, 6 days a week scripting some fancy animation pipeline tools.

The funny bit is something I've come to realize of the last couple days: while I fully grasp the minutiae of what I do, some of what I'm doing just baffles me in the big picture. I wrote a tool for "recasting" an animation from one space to another. For instance, if there's an object in a shot done during previs, and that original object has a particular animation on it, and there's a camera with a camera angle that we like... but the object itself is given a different animation in our scene because it has to fit in the "world" relative to other objects and be moving at a certain speed, reach a certain place at a certain time... I can take the camera motion from the original animation and transform it to the new shot maintaining the relationship between the camera and the element... while replacing that element's animation.

That's tricky... but I know how to make it happen and I've embodied it in a deceptively simple tool.

Separately, I worked out a method for stitching multiple animated shots containing a common object and many separate cameras together. The object's motion remains constant, and the cameras follow it along the path. Additionally, I developed a method for steering that element so that I can change its motion, adjusting the cameras to follow it.

That last one works using the first tool... so they end up all being connected to each other.

Once that happens, it feels like magic. I no longer understand the big picture: how we now have nearly a hundred separate shots stitched seamlessly together, but with different animation... and still working with the cameras and tracked objects matching to the footage? That starts to get away from me... I can conceptualize it as steps, as stages to reach a goal... I can break it down into its component parts: but the whole big process I understand only in that way: as big steps. I don't hold the whole thing in my head at once, though I use the tools that make it happen several times a day.

What's also funny is how much I'm even animating at this point... and I'm no animator, believe me. Let me write you a few expressions, though, and I can sometimes fake it.

I am officially in crunch...

It's mini-crunch, though, because we're just working to get things together for the trailer. Most of the staff isn't actually working overtime, but there's a few of us... the dynamics/fluid guys, an animator or two, the cg supe and me, piecing together the necessary bits to get the shots ready for the trailer.

I wish I could be a little more clear on what exactly it is I'm doing... When the trailer comes out in a couple weeks I can at least indicate then what segment of the film I'm addressing - I'd rather leave that part as a surprise for when the trailer hits (not to mention that talking about things like that would get me in hot water).

In a sufficiently vague sort of way, I can say that there's a segment I'm working on right now that's around 76 shots long, each ranging from 50-300 frames, that has a common element that's travelling between them. Our tracking team has been tracking that element, and its progress through each individual scene, for each of those 76 shots (and at least that many more as well that I'm not dealing with yet).

The particular task I've been working on is basically a continuity script. It's a MEL script that gathers all of that data: cameras, animated and matchmoved elements, and stitches them together end to end in a master shot. This way, the element that's moving through the scene will maintain an accurate location relative to the CG environment.

To coincide with what's happening in each shot, it's necessary on that big grandaddy master shot to make adjustments: turn something here, nudge something there... and that affects the path of that common element throughout all of the individual shots.

Do you see where I'm going with this?

Basically, if we imagine that I'm talking about a man driving a car across the salt flats in Utah (not at all what's happening in this film), there are features on the horizon that we want to be consistently and realistically moving in relation to the view of the car. If the driver swerves to miss a rock, we want to change the path he's taking across the salt flats (even though in the original plates, that driver would have been sitting in a stationary vehicle in front of a bluescreen, with some hydraulics underneath making the car tilt and sway to add realism). Our view of the car from the camera should stay the same... Car and camera must maintain their relationship... but the position, speed, orientation, etc of the car and camera combined will need to change. If there's a guy on one of those sail-carts out there, we need to make sure his path is realistic and that he's in the right place in the background of each shot...

Remember that the car, the driver, and the camera are often the only real things here... the sail-cart, other things on the horizon, in fact the entire salt flats... all are cg or augmented with cg.

So I've been developing tools for funneling data from all of these shots... everything from camera data to object matchmoves, world-space offsets for each shot, and animation data... stringing it together into a seamless master scene, manipulating the paths and locations of elements in that master scene and transferring that data back into the individual shots. If we need our hypothetical salt-flats driver to swerve this way and that across several separate shots, I'm making sure that it doesn't just "kinda look right" but that we can get that data integrated into the object and camera motion of several live camera plates.

If somebody didn't ask me if I could do it, I'd probably have never thought it could even be done.

If I'm kinda scarce around here in blogland, it's because I'm catching a much-needed nap in between long shifts.

I just commented this to a thread on a film where there has been rampant speculation about the casting of a particular character. This character is generally thought to be of a particular ethnicity, and there's been a lot of discussion over who will be cast in the role. Popularly, people seem to be hoping it will be of the same ethnicity as they believe the character to be... but when we're talking about someone of Mediterranean/Arab/North African/Middle Eastern ethnicity - it's sometimes hard to find the right one. If the character was originally Pakistani, do you really have to find a Pakistani to play them? Or is it ok to get someone from Afghanistan or India? Is it racist to cast an Italian-American? or is it racist to say that you *can't* cast one?

Ultimately, I deleted my comment there. In reality, it's like that old (and not very PC) maxim: Arguing on the internet is like competing in the special olympics. Even if you win, you're still retarded.

This particular comment was on an upcoming movie version of a video game. I decided to reproduce it here to let everyone know that I haven't died. I was just sick most of last week and while I soldiered through work every day, I basically came home and slept - so my effects blog suffered. The original poster had ranted about the casting of Jesus in The Passion of the Christ, the Spartans in 300, and various other distant historical characters in what he felt were ethnically inaccurate ways. Here was my response:

The original character back in 1989 was a stack of animated pixels about a hundred raster lines tall. As I recall, there was nothing about that tiny sprite animation that suggested any sort of ethnicity. It was Mario Brothers set in a middle eastern palace - so let's not make it out that the casting in a feature film version of a video game franchise is making any sort of political/social statement. With any luck, it'll be a great, fun movie: one we'll all enjoy, one that will be chock-full of fun stunts, visual effects and a good Action-Adventure storyline.

You write like you think the Greeks of 2500 years ago bear more than a passing ethnic similarity to people who live in Greece now, or that anyone has the foggiest idea if Jesus looked like a modern Mediterranean or an African. It's been a long time... I'm not sure we even know what *anybody* looked like back then. Casting a modern Israeli is just as irrelevant as casting a white man.

I feel like this sentence:

It is about people of a particular ethnicity not feeling like they can connect to a character in a movie unless they are the same 'ethnicity' or 'race' as them.

is as validly pointed at you as it is to anyone else.

Hollywood is all about makebelieve. When Bollywood makes a film, they cast predominantly Indian actors - because that's what their audience wants to see. It's not that the studio execs are racist, or even that Indian viewing audiences hate white people... It's that yes, for the most part audiences *do* connect to characters that are as much like them as possible. Movies aimed at a female audience have lots of female characters... Movies aimed at children usually have a bunch of kids in them. Movies aimed at white people are likely to have lots of white people in them too. Same with anything from Tyler Perry or Martin Lawrence - movies targeted at black audiences have lots of black people in them... and when I went to see "The Bucket List" guess what? Half the theater was in their declining years. Think we'd have brought out all those retirees to the theater if it was about a couple 20-year-olds dying of Hepatitis? Because I sure don't, and I don't think it's because grandpa hates his grandkids.

I really dislike that we're not a lot more accepting of differences of all kinds: race, gender, ethnic diversity within races, age, sexuality... but not everything that a particular group is interested in is racist, sexist, homophobic or what-have-you. And not everything that's marketed to one of these groups is symptomatic of some gigantic social ill.

After a fairly exhausting week, tonight was my night to really kick off a weekend... and what better way to kick off a really world-class weekend than to go see an old friend perform with a band in Hollywood?

Went to Relax Bar out into the sorta sleepy grungy part of the Boulevard of Broken Dreams (better address and directions at the link above)... Weird little venue, that. Meredith and I both were having college flashbacks of places we used to go hear bands back in the day. Difference for her was that here she was performing in one.

That Meredith would be Meredith Meyer, who some old Orlando friends of mine may know. It's not every day you find someone you've known in a different place and time that's found a working niche for themselves elsewhere - but there it is. It was exciting to me to get to hear her tonight, and doubly good to see and hear just how beautiful she sounds live. Am I gushing? *shrug* Maybe. But it's deserved.

I'd love to go on more about the evening: it was excellent. Found another couple bands that I really enjoy hearing live. The whole night was good, but a couple of those bands were ones I'd go hear again and again - and in a city packed to the rim with excellent bands, that's saying something.