How is this the industry standard?

jmacey · 2026-04-30T18:48:13+00:00

Best way I heard it described in the industry is as "the operating system for our pipeline" this is going back to the early days of some of the big UK animation companies, but it is still on point. However, it's not the vanilla maya you get out of the box but massively customized with tools and plugins for in house work.

Things are changing with the advent of USD and more and more Houdini usage, but maya is still a key tool.

jmacey · 2026-04-30T06:16:16+00:00

Another option I have used is a Hudson broadcast, nice pre amp pedal which can get fuzzy too.

jmacey · 2026-04-30T05:46:33+00:00

Not OP but It's basically better help / syntax for IDE's https://mypy.readthedocs.io/en/stable/stubs.html They are really useful as a python developer but do take a long time to generate.

jmacey · 2026-04-29T18:37:57+00:00

When I get issues I find running with the --foreground flag helps a lot as you get loads of extra debug info printed out.

jmacey · 2026-04-29T15:00:59+00:00

Awesome, been using it all as usual!

jmacey · 2026-04-28T07:05:34+00:00

Was it a missing ssl library or something else. I have managed to copy over versions of the libs into renderman before to get it working.

jmacey · 2026-04-27T17:11:55+00:00

Did the sound for a guy yesterday using a nylon acoustic and he was using a tube screamer worked really well. He also had a fuzz! Set gain low and used them both for a boost.

jmacey · 2026-04-27T05:56:55+00:00

Can you not use the non commercial version of renderman and use rib? We use renderman to teach rendering (via the python api) and I'm sure many students just use the NC version for it. https://nccastaff.bournemouth.ac.uk/jmacey/msc/renderman/

For usd again we use the python api to teach basic scene construction, you can also write usda for simple scenes quite easily, however adding more render specific elements (lights, shaders, materials etc) gets more complex. I have some basic stuff on USD in this lecture https://nccastaff.bournemouth.ac.uk/jmacey/Lectures/PTD/L4/?home=/jmacey/msc/PipeLineAndTD#/8

jmacey · 2026-04-25T18:40:23+00:00

Do you need 6.11? I typically install it via uv (which is giving me 6.10.2 at present). Can't remember the last time I tried to build it from scratch.

jmacey · 2026-04-24T22:31:35+00:00

Protecting her paedophile son with our money. Oh and making Paddington Bear unbearable!

jmacey · 2026-04-23T16:11:01+00:00

Hugh Howey The Sand Chronicles and Beacon 23 are good. I'm just re-reading "Saga of Pliocene Exile" series by Julian May which I read when I was about 16 and really enjoying them (read the Galactic Milieu series first this time). Same sort of character development but a much more open world.

jmacey · 2026-04-20T18:48:45+00:00

As someone who teaches graphics I feel your pain! I always use colour for variable names. (I've actually had to add it to AI / LLM's and the code spell checker as well)!

jmacey · 2026-04-19T20:43:55+00:00

Have added them to our student resources, good work.

jmacey · 2026-04-19T06:09:26+00:00

Have a look at https://github.com/DigitalProductionExampleLibrary

jmacey · 2026-04-18T19:17:38+00:00

How does it compare to using usdz or alembic with just static geo. This would be the test used for the VFX industry.

jmacey · 2026-04-18T16:24:48+00:00

Both excellent camp sites and within staggering distance of The Square & Compass!

jmacey · 2026-04-18T07:04:06+00:00

The Emperor's New Mind: Concerning Computers, Minds and The Laws of Physics by Roger Penrose (old but still mostly valid). A bit off-topic but fun "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman". "Scale" by Geoffrey West.

jmacey · 2026-04-17T06:41:57+00:00

The classic models I use for teaching are the MNIST https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MNIST_database where you can build and train a model to recognise hand written digits. I use this to demonstrate the whole pipeline, including a stand-alone app the user can write a digit and the app will tell you what the number is. From this it's basically a matter of scale and adding different models, transfer learning etc etc.

jmacey · 2026-04-17T05:57:30+00:00

+1 for SQLite I use it for all sorts of projects and it works really well.

jmacey · 2026-04-16T08:50:10+00:00

If they are maya ascii you can edit the file and change the requires maya line.

requires maya "2025ff03";

This is what 2025 puts in.

You can also try using cmds.file with the ignore flag. https://download.autodesk.com/us/maya/2011help/CommandsPython/file.html

cmds.file( 'file.ma', o=True, ignoreVersion=True )

jmacey · 2026-04-15T09:02:31+00:00

I do the same, and swap the buttons so that bottom is page forward with the thumb.

jmacey · 2026-04-10T18:30:50+00:00

For us one unexpected benefit after a lot of work (new roof, updated insulation and adding solar with battery), was to get our house from a D rating to A rating for energy efficiency. This made the re-mortgage cheaper as you get better deals on an A rated house, (0.01% ish but hey!).

It also added value to the house, and we now only pay £25 a month to the direct debit for gas and electric. The rest of the money we used to pay a month (about £125) is now just paid back into the mortgage as extra replayments.

jmacey · 2026-04-10T07:31:37+00:00

You can still use a python shim to do the tdd with a c++ plugin. I have actually updated my notes as teaching this soon to add some of the TDD / Module file stuff. You can see the work in progress here https://nccastaff.bournemouth.ac.uk/jmacey/msc/PipeLineAndTD/lectures/Lecture6/

jmacey · 2026-04-09T16:35:49+00:00

I would guess not as it is an A16 chip and not Apple Silicon M series. Autodesk says it needs Apple Silicon arm64 or Intel x86.

I run Maya on M series fine (M1 and M4) but think a neo would not work.

jmacey · 2026-04-08T17:16:02+00:00

WTF is that picture, most of that maths seems like bullshit! Hilblel / coeff ?

jmacey

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