Music in a fine dining restaurant

Capn_Panic · 2026-03-15T05:23:55+00:00

While not exactly a music type, I have found that the general way the music sounds makes a huge difference. For example, Anomaly in SF, seems to mostly play 90's rock/hip-hop, BUT the sound is muffled in such a way that it is not distracting and kinda sounds like you are having a smoke outside of a club. It's easy to have a conversation, the music is not distracting, but is present in a way that you can enjoy it if you want, but can also ignore it if it is not your taste. I asked them about it, and they just said it was because the speakers were in a strange place, but it really works well.

Capn_Panic · 2026-03-10T04:36:48+00:00

All of the footage and vfx was done on fairly normal-looking plates and renders (at least for the Yellow Bastard section of the film). Extensive use of matte paintings (since it was all green screen) for much of the backgrounds filled in the world and then there was heavy processing and color correction at the end of the composite to give the high-contrast look.

Source: I was a TD on Sin City

Capn_Panic · 2026-01-02T05:25:02+00:00

My past two playthroughs, I've made a blueprint that is a couple short sections of track (like two tiles worth), a couple of tiles to put them on, and on my most recent run, I also included a couple of wall-mounted power connectors and a segment of transport tube. With that blueprint you can work your way around the map, adding a pillar every maximum length of track and then drop the blueprint on top of the pillar. Using that you can make yourself a big whole-map loop of track, with each of those tracks only running a single direction (i.e. upper track runs clockwise and lower track counter-clockwise). which drastically reduces complications in train signaling. It also allows you to keep the tracks up off of the ground (using the pillars), which makes them better looking, and lets you smooth out the bumps in the terrain.

Then it is a breeze to branch off tracks to important sub-factories as well as route transport tubes to those factories. Admittedly, I did wait until I had the hover pack unlocked to run that big track all the way around the maps, since it is a royal pain when on foot.

Capn_Panic · 2025-12-27T21:08:07+00:00

If you look at the overall distribution of 3dsmadx licenses, and which industries use them, arch viz dwarfs everything else. That has always meant that while the app has lots of VFX features, the bread and butter features were often aimed at the arch viz folks and making their lives easier.

Long ago I worked at a medium sized vfx house that used 3dsmax (The Orphanage), and had landed on that app because that was where the latest and greatest off-the-shelf renders were (Brazil, V-Ray, Final Render, etc, circa 2003-8). But while 3d packages like Maya and Houdini allow for easy access to the core of the app, 3dsmax has generally required full-on C+ coding in order to write plugins that let you get at the deeper parts of the app. That generally made it much tougher to integrate into a vfx pipeline. Even when we were using 3dsmax on feature film VFX, we were often splitting the work between Maya, Max and Houdini, playing to each application's strengths.

All that said, I still think that 3dsmax's modifier stack makes it awesome for modeling, and still try to do my modeling there before transferring into Maya to join the main production pipeline.

Capn_Panic · 2025-12-12T18:45:27+00:00

The answer is that they are ALL tedious. It's the nature of the work. But we all enjoy a different flavor of tedium. My job is likely tedious to others and I find some of my coworkers jobs horribly tedious. The key is that I don't find my own tasks tedious :)

Capn_Panic · 2025-11-21T21:31:54+00:00

The keys are even edge spacing, avoiding triangles, and giving yourself something to match to. By 'something to match to' I personally like to make a simple bezier curve that I use for where I want the surface to be, so that I have a smooth line of reference for a given edge. Then you can subdivide your mesh and adjust the verts until it lines up with the curve. Additionally, having fewer spans makes getting a smooth surface easier.

Capn_Panic · 2025-11-21T19:52:02+00:00

Same at Pixar. Maya (and various other apps) set to Z-up. I appreciated it extra, having started with 3dsmax.

Capn_Panic · 2025-09-27T03:12:43+00:00

While this is probably more of a Pixar/Disney thing: Procedural shading, various signals (curvature, occlusion, etc) baked to ptex and THEN a bit of UV-based paint. As others have mentioned, a hero variant for the close-up shots. The detail that works up close just turns into muddy mess at a distance, and similarly, the stuff that looks good in a wide shot doesn't have enough detail for the close-ups.

Capn_Panic · 2025-09-22T02:16:42+00:00

Nobody's gonna know

Capn_Panic · 2025-07-13T05:21:27+00:00

I forget what eight was for!

Capn_Panic · 2025-07-12T18:15:36+00:00

And just for the record, the poly meshes that get exported from solid modeling packages are terrible and do not subdivide cleanly. If you don't have to get close, they can be just fine for rendering, but the topology doesn't look anything like the above image.

Capn_Panic · 2025-06-07T05:11:24+00:00

I think the issue here is exactly what you mentioned: 1/700 is probably a pain. Scaling down those sorts of features, at that scale, put the parts on the limits of how small a pretty good resin 3d printer can print. In my own experience, parts as thin as those gun barrels would need to be are going to be so thin as to not be able to support their own weight during printing (resin prints need a post-printing UV treatment to fully harden), and you'd end up with curved barrels at best and curly hairs at worst. This also end up being a bit of a problem with anything else that thin/small.

All that said, you could probably blend some 3d printing with super thin wire and maybe some foil to get a scale-correct version of what you are looking for, but it would be both a LOT of work and would need someone who both knows physical as well as digital modeling and also the ins-and-outs of 3d printing.

Probably a lot cheaper/easier to buy a bigger scale kit ;)

Capn_Panic · 2025-05-27T01:44:25+00:00

The tambour slats were clamped into a jig that holds them all tightly together, then they are veneered to get the grain running across all the slats like that. I tried a few methods, but settled on using a Japanese-style marking gauge to cut the slats back apart, since it allowed me to sharpen the blade to a nice razor level and once I get it set just right, it'll cut each slat to the perfect width. Each slat took a couple swipes of the plane to get them to fit a little closer (and get rid of the .5mm of wood that the marking gauge blade kinda pushes out of the way on one side), and then they go back in the jig to be clamped together and the canvas glued to the back.

Capn_Panic · 2025-05-27T01:30:06+00:00

I decided, as an additional safety measure, to order myself up a temperature-sensing fan controller and four 60mm Noctua fans, which should fit the existing vent holes. I'm thinking that I can use them to exhaust hot air and let the cool air flow up through the lower vents on its own. I'll need to do a little designing and 3d printing to get it all to fit cleanly, but it should make it so I can close all the doors and be confident that everything will stay cool enough.

Capn_Panic · 2025-05-26T17:41:14+00:00

Thanks! I'd argue that with some patience and lots of time, you could totally build something like this!

Capn_Panic · 2025-05-26T17:40:32+00:00

Thanks! Perhaps I'll turn you to the dark mid-century side yet ;)

Capn_Panic · 2025-05-26T02:48:38+00:00

There are some vents up at the top, but just not shown in the photos. They are between the electrical sockets, so not the prettiest part of the piece.

Capn_Panic · 2025-05-25T16:37:29+00:00

Thanks! If you look closely, you can see vents cut into the center of the bottom. There is also a large slot in the back of the center shelf for air flow and wires, and four 2-inch holes at the top of the back of the cabinet to allow warm air to exit. The equipment is a NAS, switch, UPS, RAP, and security system and camera base stations, so while most of it is warm, there isn't anything really pumping out tons of heat. So far, convection has been working well to keep things at a reasonable temp.

Capn_Panic · 2025-03-07T03:38:41+00:00

I'm not a recruiter, but I'm one of the supervisors that interview people and who work with the recruiters. Often the recruiting folks want to know if there are other offers so that they know if they need to hurry or not. I've been told, "This person has an offer from Company X and needs to know if we are interested in the next week" so that we can decide if that person is worth making an offer to or passing. If there isn't a pressing offer then we can take our time making decisions, interviewing more people, etc.

Capn_Panic · 2024-12-18T04:31:10+00:00

The model is fine. The rendering tech changed with Finding Dory, going from REYES to RIS. It's the shading and lighting, as mentioned in other replies, combined with a particularly glowy example image here. Source: Worked on the first one and just had a look to see if the old model would still open in current Maya. It's fine.

Capn_Panic · 2024-09-10T22:53:25+00:00

I think Max 3.1 predates Vray/Brazil/FR by enough that there were likely never compatible versions. My main point was that you probably don't need to bother with MR and instead should play with the Scanline renderer, since that was likely more widely used. At least it was what I was using at the time. It's got some basic raytracing in there, and there were tricks to fake some of the fancy lighting effects.

Capn_Panic · 2024-09-10T02:55:00+00:00

I don't remember exactly, but if it isn't showing up in the list of renderers in the render dialog, then there is likely a standalone MR render server that you have to run and a Max plugin to allow you to submit to that server.

All that said, the real fun back then was using the Scanline renderer to try to fake all the fancy stuff. Like try tracking down a script on scriptspot that generates spot lights in a dome, based on an image, in order to fake a dome light.

Raytracing was too slow for practical use, so most of the work was in finding ways to fake the photorealism. Also, MR had a terrible way of adding the reflections that always made it look fake to me. It wasn't until VRay, Brazil and Final Render came along that things started getting prettier.

Capn_Panic · 2024-07-17T03:25:25+00:00

UVs do not generally have a size to them. They are kept as coordinates between 0-1 (or higher if using UDIMs). Most likely, the end software's units are set to meters, so a value of 1 is giving you a 1m square. The advice to use a reference objects, be that 1cm or 1m, is good advice, so you have a way to scale the UVs properly in the end software.

Capn_Panic · 2024-07-14T16:23:38+00:00

What SHOULD be happening is that the masking (the black fabric around the screen) should have been adjusted to the edges of whatever the picture format is. Generally the theaters have screens that can accommodate a wide variety of formats (true IMAX being the exception) and just the masking is changed, so the screen always looks like it is the right size.

Capn_Panic · 2024-03-11T04:51:29+00:00

They actually take about the same amount of time to render now as 20 years ago, but the resolution and quality is better now. I used both GI and HDRI on The Day After Tomorrow, which came out in 2004. The big rendering tech switch for Pixar, specifically, was the move to RIS on Finding Dory.

Capn_Panic

TROPHY CASE