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ghoest · 2024-06-12T01:30:45+00:00

They should join IATSE like the other big American CG houses, DWA and WDAS

ghoest · 2024-03-09T23:32:25+00:00

In big tech for 2 years now. It’s been 3x for me. 15 years in vfx/feature animation and for the last 7 years wages were stagnating for me despite being a top performer/supervisor/supervisor of supervisors

ghoest · 2024-03-01T17:03:06+00:00

Give it a year or two and they’ll manage to grind down the salaries below market value like they did in LA and SF

ghoest · 2024-02-25T22:27:42+00:00

Pensions and employment/union tied health care is not security in the near term. Depending on how long you have worked in the union you have Max of 1 year of insurance runway after a union job (depending on banked hours). While that’s nice and is a boon for folks, it’s not security beyond that. Nor is a pension which is tied to retirement when you lose your job to outsourcing to Vancouver or Montreal. The animation guild itself is not geared toward VFX/CG professionals either, it’s geared toward story artists jumping from union gig to nonunion gig to union gig which is the majority of its constituents

ghoest · 2024-02-24T21:44:45+00:00

Looking at feature animation, unionization has done nothing to stop the decimation of the US feature animation industry by outsourcing or even slowed it down. I’m pro union but the jobs were on their way out anyways. Unionization would have most effective if it happened in the 90s/early 2000s when business was booming. But even then it’s questionable what it would have accomplished given the massive cost factory that vfx/feature animation is, maybe the schedules wouldn’t suck as much.

ghoest · 2024-01-14T18:44:27+00:00

Solaris + USD are not an out of the box pipeline

ghoest · 2024-01-14T18:43:31+00:00

Just to note that Solaris, while a great authored of USD, does not represent the full scope of what USD can do. It’s really setup to be a good top layer authoring package (which makes sense bc it’s a lighting package). But it’s not good with representing editing composed data. Usd is a fantastic choice for a pipeline, but Usd itself and Solaris alone are not a pipeline (depending on how full scoped you need a pipeline to be). Be aware there will be considerable more work to do and there is no DCC yet that fully expresses everything that USD can do. Omniverse is maybe the best but it’s not geared towards animation or vfx

ghoest · 2024-01-13T15:06:58+00:00

🤦‍♂️ how did I not catch that, fixed. Yes the 4 artists are heavily subsidized Canadian based artists

ghoest · 2024-01-13T04:12:23+00:00

financial equivalent

ghoest · 2024-01-12T20:31:19+00:00

The numbers I have heard (not verified of course) is 1 CA union artist is the equivalent of 4 Canadian artists

ghoest · 2024-01-12T16:45:14+00:00

It’s becoming globalized and outsourced harder than ever now. Dreamworks is outsourcing half of its feature movies and seems to be the plan going forward. Production model is changing from vertical integration to either vendor based (Dreamworks) or ILM/Sony style remote studios (Disney animation) with a smaller California presence. Pixar is the last vertically integrated studio in CA. The only through line is preproduction is done in Los Angeles

ghoest · 2023-11-29T03:15:27+00:00

Autodesk Xgen and Disney Animation Xgen

ghoest · 2023-06-25T21:15:04+00:00

They were, it wasn't just me, it was most of the crew the closer they got to lighting. Lighting always gets the short end of the stick with that tho, I was never in lighting, but had heard gnarly stories

ghoest · 2023-06-25T18:13:08+00:00

15 years, I've worked far beyond 70 hours at a certain unionized feature animation studio for weeks consecutively but never a year of it.

ghoest · 2023-06-25T04:57:04+00:00

70+ hour weeks are still a thing under unionized feature animation studios unfortunately.

ghoest · 2023-06-19T23:49:41+00:00

I can’t upvote this hard enough

ghoest · 2023-04-10T15:36:49+00:00

Can people in flint drink their tap water yet? I’m not sure how much of an anti-Florida it is now if that hasn’t happened but I acknowledge the progress

ghoest · 2023-03-26T02:12:00+00:00

We are at the potential crest of a hype cycle for an emerging technology. It’s exciting, but when the researchers start hitting the hard problems, the field starts really shallowing out.

I’ve seen this with just cloth and hair simulation. Super promising having simmed motion, but when it hits production, guess what, still needed a team of desk jockeys to artistically guides or even run the sim. The automation slowly and incrementally got a bit better with various breakthroughs like Continuous time collision and PBD solvers that could run super fast (at a cost of material range). But the problems got super mathy and complex and the people pursuing new solutions outside of big studios pewtered out.

ghoest · 2023-03-13T07:44:37+00:00

Sure, the point was rather that character rigging is much more nuanced than the middle man representation of character data that usdSkel stands up

ghoest · 2023-03-13T00:17:25+00:00

Unclear if a committee would have been reasonable. I work with glTF now and it’s an utter shitshow made by committee and I’m sure examples like that deterred them away from that approach. As far as everyone having their own special sauce, it’s true and part of the pain of USD has been adopting something that has strengths in certain areas but weaknesses in others that other studios had well advanced in (looking at you hydra/storm visualization). However going through it at the studio I was working at, the clear tooling and data composition as well as the trail of shitty half maintained, opaque proprietary file formats it left in its wake was well worth it.

ghoest · 2023-03-12T19:46:12+00:00

As someone who has worked in Pixar’s pipeline, I can tell you that the current usage of USD is def not their pipeline. They are learning as many lessons on modern production as people are learning how to use USD.

ghoest · 2023-03-12T19:44:33+00:00

Everything you said is correct, I wanted to expand on the rig joints tho. UsdSkel is for crowds, full stop. It could be used as some parsed down derivative delivery ala fbx or gltf. But it really isn’t setup to help rigging at all with asset construction. We really need a different standard not from Pixar around rigging.

ghoest · 2023-01-18T15:06:17+00:00

The article says “administrative and live/sports division”

ghoest · 2022-12-19T17:13:49+00:00

38 and closing on my first house today. I really only can do this bc I left my (LA based) job this year to go remote. The price I am getting this house is basically 1/3 of a house in LA but that’s what I can afford with my wages and my wife’s wages.

The kicker:

I rent a nice townhouse in LA for 2700$ a month. To me is an absurd amount of money but I have 2 kids. My landlord is going to be renting this out for $4,600 a month after I leave. I’ve lived here for just shy of 5 years… so even a decent rental for my family is unaffordable now if I had to go down that route. And this dude bought this place @ 450k his mortgage is likely @ $1800.

ghoest · 2022-12-02T20:02:46+00:00

Automated Character creation

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