I ran into Doug Hellmann’s site the other day doughellmann.com. And he an excellent collection of articles and examples for a bunch of modules from python’s standard library called Python Module of the Week. The one’s I’ve used and had no idea existed were configparser, optparser and the logging module. But there are many, many more there.

Absolute gold for those of us who havent gone through every page of the documentation.

Well, this place sure has been quiet for the last few months. Might have something to do with having a 14 month old son coupled with working on Thor.

Recently I’ve mostly been making some handy tools for Maya. One thing I learned is that if you playblast from maya using the x264 codec you simply need to remux the file and package it in an mp4 container and then you got yourself a nice quicktime-playing h264 playblast. Very handy stuff.

Busy times. Who knows when i’ll post something again. The supsense is probably unbearable.

As always you can catch my slighly more frequent posts on twitter.

A small tiny update with some fun news. I started working at CAOZ in Reykjavik a couple of months back. (Before that switch I animated two frog-filled Vodafone spots for Miðstræti).

I’ll be working on the first Icelandic CGI-feature Thor – the edda chronicles which is a co-production between CAOZ in Reykjavik, Ulyesses in Hamburg, Germany and Magma Productions in Galway, Ireland.

I’ve been working on the storyboards (editing them together and such) and writing some rigging scripts and soon I’ll move over to some pipeline tools and some more rigging scripts. And of course animating once animation starts. Fun times ahead.

So expect fewer posts than usual. (There is something less than 0?)

I’m back from Siggraph, which was a blast (although a bit hot). Met some fun people and it was unreal seeing my film on the big screen.

At Siggraph I saw some clips of Sony’s Cloudy with a chance of meatballs (in 3d, which I don’t find all that exciting) and this looks like it’s going to be a really fun movie. I’m really digging some of the animation choices made on this film. For example I find the way Flint walks toward the garbage can on the pier in the ‘burger rain’ sequence (you might know what I’m talking about, if not you will in a couple of weeks) awesome. It’s just a fantastic walk!

Anyway, I can’t wait to see this film.

Leaving for New Orleans (via New York) in roughly 6 hours.

In the meantime you can check out my ‘almost’-new reel on the work page

I updated my resume a little bit. I’ve also updated my reel, but I’ve yet to upload it. I’m sure it will turn up here in the near future

These are all small parts of the great “going-to-siggraph” plan.

Well, it’s settled – I’ll be going to New Orleans this August to attend Siggraph. Now I just have to decide what to do and when to do it while I’m there.

We should definitely grab a beverage of some sort if you are going.

I had this issue the other day where I had at some point deleted the sound that accompanied a clip from a timeline. The quickest way I found was the ‘match frame’ (shortcut: f) command. Just put your playhead on the start of the clip you want to get the sound back from and hit f. Then the viewer loads with the source clip (not the clip from the timeline) with the appropriate in and out points. Then you can either hit f10 or use your preffered method of inserting thing into your timeline. And there’s your clip with sound.

I found this extremely useful when I had to recover the sound from around 100 shots. Then I pressed the down arrow key, hit f, f10 and repeat.

Jason Schleifer wrote a really nice post about GTD and some ideas about how to use it for animation.

He’s also got some nice posts about using gtdagenda.com and other nice stuff. Check it out.

Back in the day when I started messing with 3d I was usually planning crazy shorts, and I think this one takes the cake: Ducks at War.

I think I only modeled a few assets for it, and If it looks a bit like Band of Brothers it’s no accident.

Those were the days.

(Click for bigger version)