Always always always remember wrapping your paths in quotes. I keep running into stuff I wrote break because someone saved a file with a space in it and I forgot to wrap the path in quotes.
This works:
blackwave.exe -d 50 superwave.wav
This doesn’t:
blackwave.exe -d 50 super 2.wav (two file arguments, ‘super’ and ’2.wav’)
To fix this:
blackwave.exe -d 50 "super 2.wav"
So remember: whenever you are using path rembemer the
"\""+ variable + "\""
(or something else that suits your language)
In Softimage on Windows, if you fetch the TEMP environment variable e.g. from witihn python (with the os.environ dictionary), you will get a different directory when you get the TEMP variable from outside Softimage.
Outside Softimage you get:
C:\Users\<username>\some\path\I\cannot\rembemer
within it you get:
C:\Users\<username>\some\path\I\cannot\rembemer\XSI_temp_###
Just in case you wanted to write files to TEMP and read from them later.
After seeing an excellent post (as usual) on Hamish’s site about a profiling utility he wrote I decided to give it a try today, and man is this thing useful or what. It helped me find bottlenecks in two of my scripts today and I can only imagine how much of the user’s time it will save.
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.
