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Transitioning to Bottleship VFX!

Hello,
As you you have hopefully heard, I’ve started a VFX company with some friends, called Bottleship VFX – Http://bottleshipvfx.com, it’s going well and things are awesome!
We are opening up a public community dedicated to FX, and my further training material will be published there.
Stay tuned, cool stuff coming up!

Transitioning to Bottleship VFX!

Hello,
As you you have hopefully heard, I’ve started a VFX company with some friends, called Bottleship VFX – Http://bottleshipvfx.com, it’s going well and things are awesome!
We are opening up a public community dedicated to FX, and my further training material will be published there.
Stay tuned, cool stuff coming up!

Moving the tutorials action to Vimeo and Youtube

Hello guys,

It doesn’t really make sense to be posting the video tutorials over here – I want to be making more of them and have this happening quickly, so going straight for Vimeo and Youtube is faster. Follow me there for this kind of material!

The space here is where the rest will be – I’m planning to post my pipeline tools, for example, and any other thoughts 🙂

I’m also thinking of just summarizing my daily RnD, with Dropbox making file sharing so convenient – expect some small articles on solving FX puzzle pieces and example scenes.

I have some big news cooking up too, on my employment direction. Stay tuned 🙂

Cheers!!

A more robust FumeFX cache tool – set cache paths, batch sim, Deadline sim with progress indicator

Wishing to improve on the basic FFX set cache and the Deadline submitter from the previous post, I came up with this tool. The version you can get here is adapted from our internal pipeline. The interface looks like this:
BtlPipeFfxCachePublic_v02_screenshot

When you open it up, you’ll see a list of all the FFX objects in the selection. Depending on which boxes get checked, pressing the ‘Go’ button will set the cache paths, batch simulate locally, or send a job to Deadline for each FFX.

The cache path is based on the default that you can set in the FumeFX preferences, and looks like this:

FFXDefaultPath\SceneName\FFXName\SceneName_FFXName.fxd

For example: c:\ffx_default\myscene\ffx01\myscene_ffx01.fxd

If the run simulation box is checked, and the Deadline one is not, all the grids will be simulated in a batch. The name of the grid being simmed, and its number in the list, are printed in the listener.

The Deadline jobs, one per FFX, get submitted as MaxScript jobs – this gives access to scripting the progressbar. You’ll see the progress of the FFX getting simulated in the progressbar of the single task that the job contains. Very helpful! Thanks to Kresimir for updating FumeFX so this is possible – the update will be coming out next week in FumeFX 3.5.3.

If you want to use the feature before that, you can paste the contents of ‘BtlPipeFFXDeadlineProgress.ms’ from the download below to the FumeFX script manually.

To install – download, copy the ‘scripts’ folder in your Max root, and drop the macro in your Max. You’ll get a “BtlPipe” category, which will have the BtlPipeFFXCache tool in it.

Couple caveats – It only sets the default path, so make sure the “auto synchronize paths” is checked in the FumeFX preferences. And it only supports the default sim mode for now – no retime/wavelet. These might come later, if necessary.

 

Download:

BtlPipeFFXCache

Enjoy!

Simple Deadline job submitter for FumeFX simulations

I’m writing some pipeline pieces these days, which is quite some fun! I wanted to automate sending FFX jobs to simulate on the farm, and it turns out it’s very easy to write a deadline submission tool for it, using SMTDSettings and SMTDFunctions that Deadline provides. It’s basically doing this:

  • check if there’s a single FFX selected. I’ll expand on batch submitting next.
  • closes the FFX UI and deselects it
  • closes the render scene dialog
  • backs up the render scene dialog settings – render range type, resolution
  • sets the render range to single frame, the resolution to 25×25
  • sets the backburner mode of the FFX to “true”
  • sets the Deadline job name to the scene name, plus a FFX sim tag, plus the FFX name
  • submits the job to Deadline
  • sets the backburner mode back to “false”
  • restores the render settings
  • confirms and prints out the job name to the user

So, quite basic and quite useful! I’ll expand it with batch job submit for more FFX grids, dependant render job after they are all simmed, simulation progress bar update in Deadline, and, of course, bugfixes 🙂 You can get the file below. Cheers!

SMTDFFX_v01.ms

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