Getting Started, Documentation, Tips & Tricks

not really, guess what separates a xyz software operator from an animator, director etc. sky explained a similar situation from his field, discriminating between "engineers" working on blueprint designs and engineers who actually engineer designs, etc (can't find the thread right now).

education/skills/knowledge is still king


a demo reel is just a (current) portfolio for this type of job. everyone knows that you had all the time in the world to put it together up to your hearts content. some studios/art directors may ask for earlier reels in order to better understand your progress/ideas/technique.

KEY is getting down on it in order produce a decent corpus of work for your ideas. visual work is something that you put on a wall/screen. to the experienced eye, telling the difference between real work vs. a few quick+drty push-button filters, ain't hard.


nice one Ryan, personally i'd love to see more nekochaners using their stuff instead of just talking numbers like GHz vs MHz or (latest) versions on pc/lunix/mac being "better"


go cut your story on your sgi or whatever you have, yeah it'll take more time than on the latest trillionHz box. so what? we have way more tech than decent stories/works. not having the latest version of a specific filter won't make any difference, trust me.

I had a friend at Walter Landor who was appalled (tm Sky Writer) at the fact that most of their new hires couldn't use paper and pencil. He'd say, "Go sketch me up a quick overview of your idea" and they couldn't do it.

^ it's what scares me w/ most kids who just consume buzzwords. every time they see/hear something they like, can only come up with a single question "what software did you use?"

all this faster easy magic push-the-button nonsense is frying perceptions left & right, high & low, like a mile a minute. we're all expertz now dude, i got mo magic buttons, just don't ask me to do anything original.

the baloney stops when the green flag drops

Its actually quite scary how many software packages are out there with pre-built solutions that any idiot can modify, or buy a box of models... Its like clip art. Crap. Sure .. its a means to quickly create something 'visual' and 'pretty', but as soon as you want to add more realism, or detail, or motion, fluids.. etc its problem. Motion capture is great! Sure it takes the dog work out of animation , but tends to leave messy key frames. Its almost impossible to alter anything without cleaning up the data. It limits you in what
style you'd like to animate in. Expression exaggeration, etc.. FaceStation for example is pretty incredible, but using good old blend shapes and a little mel/python scripting tends to give you far more control.

Or games... IR just feels better for tooling around in BZflag or Quake than the latest Radeon. Nothing beats a machine with real heart and soul Megahertz be damned. Did I just provide the perfect counter-example to your point? Absolutely

All the great classics weren't made with today's latest and greatest.

And to the OP: If you can't decide try them all, but a good suggestion is to learn a program that a friend knows. When I first tried blender I knew immediately I wouldn't like it and went back to Maya, which I learned when UT2004 came out because a "lite" version came with the game to make your own characters and static meshes. I've never tried softimage, but I've never had the opportunity. I don't spend enough time monkeying around to make it worthwhile at this point in time.

smooth maneuver sybr, give me some funky sax + drums and ah bee straight :)

truth is, poor OP just asked about software suggestions, but the "how do i go pro?" question popped-up quickly (and it's always encapsulated anyway) which made me want to give some honest facts.

it was late.

The end is nigh ! repent ! repent !

I still prefer cad programs. If you want to make a box that's 3' x 4' x 6' it's easy. Who knows how big that thing is in Maya ?

just wait for Clytemnestra to stab Cassandra in the back again (as if deafness by choice is not enough)


hmmm... we could cook up a design, run it through your machines and produce Clytemnestra key-rings?

Which Hollywood movie will be around 2500 years from now ?

I always liked Clytemnestra. Can we say "Chickens come home to roost ?" Not a single one of the Greeks was very likeable. (Sorry, fu)


Came back for a visit in June ... now I know what Odysseus felt like. Somebody really screwed the place up while I was gone.

For the key rings, we could just make miniature bath tubs. That'd sneak right past Homeland Security, sieg heil ! It could be a secret code, like the willow pattern

sorry what? none of them was meant to be likeable, it's the only take in show-business where gods resemble human nature and vice versa

keep Clytemnestra, screaming bitch is all yours, no problemo. i'll club with Iris, coolest chick for my taste + she can take me from NY to Athens in 5 seconds flat (science didn't come up with the teleporting machine so far, i still gots to use airplanes)

Joyce did a good take too, somewhere down the road Beckett got seduced by that french chick, but these guys could write…but hot damn talk about coming back to a broken house...

The greek gods were fine, much more realistic than the monotheist nonsense. It was the greek warriors I don't like so much. The trojans always came off as more sympathetic.

Maybe that's a modern mental connection tho ... when you go off slumming you don't stick a couple of greeks in your wallet, you take a few trojans


I'd be screaming too if someone decided to sacrifice my daugter ... if Agamemnon was so hell-bent to go off to war then let him walk.

Clytie kept the faith and did her duty at the end, gotta like her a little. And the ax in the bath tub, worthy of Alfred Hitchcock

hell yeah!

ain't it sublime that all great wars were started by a neurotic guy who just couldn't get an erection?

remember the baboons in the opening shot of stanley's "2001 space odyssey"?, a reference to our true nature that usually shows up when we're about to fuck up big time. expertly choreographed by stanley, tribute to the classic works

there's also this thin almost hidden paranoia about life and death when it comes to sacrifices.

the romans were pretty cool dudes too, got all the tech that did matter for their time, made money (but money never made them) and then got back to the basics. snotty baboons doing showbiz at the colosseum: gladiatorial shows, animal hunts, and hungry lions against (other/bad) people.

federico had the balls (and skills) to do it on film.

(jets go about the keyrings )

Until you get an autocad drawing not made in autocad which is scaled different than any standard, 3 different ways, none of which are documented. That happened to us a few weeks ago.

"Maybe it's the print setting?" "no." "It's metric, isn't it?" "yes." "maybe their metric is actually inches?" "no." "Maybe there's another scale somewhere?" "probably, look, you know this beam is supposed to be 17.4 meters so just scale everything to that." "It won't scale." "What?"

Turns out the whole drawing was in some sort of read-only container file that had been imported into a dwg by a 3rd program different than autocad and the program used for the drawing. Yes, cad programs are wonderful; but nobody "plays with them for fun" for a reason.

You can specify unit size, So one maya unit can be set to 1m, 1cm, 1 inch and so on. Read the manual
Or if you're stuck ask Autodesk ^^

When that happens I close the drapes, burn some incense, invite the nice young men in their clean white suits over, check the grounding system on the computer then attempt to open the file. Usually there is a loud crack of thunder, a blazing flash of lightning and that block of town goes dark.

Autocad is the work of the devil


Can you take a sketch, dimension it, and get a model of the size you need ? I don't mean to imply that one way of working is better than another, but if you are used to real-world sizes ...

Problem with AutoCAD and DWG fileformat it uses, is that there is just too many versions of it. It seems like they are changing it on every release of their software just to force people to upgrade, because otherwise they would not be able to properly open drawings saved with the latest version.

I personally save my AutoCAD files to AutoCAD 2000 format, so they can be opened on most CAD software. DXF is a good fileformat for compatibility as almost all programs can open it. Only downside is that all formatting is lost and on bigger drawings there is a lot of extra work to get all the linetypes and widths right.

If you could convince other people to do that it would be great

Back to the ship .... Now I decide I want the entire thing to be a shell 13/16" thick so hit the shell tool, enter < .8125 > and awaaay we go ... I've never been able to get Maya to produce models to sizes easily. Probably couldn't make a furry animal in a cad program so easily either, but ....

(it would take forever to do this in Acad, theino. Plus if I decide that 13/16 is too thin, change one number and the entire model regenerates. Nice. Unless you're doing landscaping or architecture, grab a solid modeller ...)

hamei: what cad program is that you are using on IRIX?

That's just pro/e. You can customize the fonts to make it look more Irixxish.

If Unix-M were here we could get into a war; he likes Catia and I-DEAS better

Principle is the same tho ... seems that a lot of people want to "start learning 3d modelling" but they neglect to consider cad programs. If you are interested in modelling to an accurate size and shape, a cad program would be another way to go. And if someone is interested in it as a possible profession, cad is certainly worth considering.