Proof of An Unspeakable and Conscious Evil

I believe that there is an implacable evil in the universe, a conscious evil that exists between life and death and which constructs for each of us a personalized living hell with which it torments each and every one of us.

For some people, this living hell may be an eternity on Facebook. For others it may be an ex-girlfriend or boyfriend or both who has reappeared and wants to renew the relationship. For some it will be that email out of the blue from an old colleague explaining how much he has always hated you and all the things that he or she has done behind your back to damage your career. Each one of us is different, each one of us will be made to suffer.  We will all have to face his or her own Room 101 and rot in our own individualized hell. ⁽¹⁾ 

This conscious evil will wait, it will bide its time, it will prepare, and then when you let your guard down it will strike. I know this because I have gone before, I have faced this evil. It happened like this.

Apparently, and without meaning to, by going into "computer animation" I had become a "starving artist" and so decided to see if I qualified for state assistance.  This was with great reluctance because I still had a residual self image of being self-supporting in spite of our modern globalized economy.  I have not been very good at bureaucracies in the past, nevertheless I persevered and became qualified for what we used to call “food stamps” but now goes by other names.

It is a good program, by the way, and we should support it. In fact, were I actually an artist who cared about the poor in our society, it would certainly be a good thing to discover just how these sorts of programs work and who is eligible. In this case it is only for those who are truly poor, without income and without savings. But if you are in that category, it will allow you to eat. It wont pay your rent, or keep the power on, but you will eat.

I had not been careful with my paperwork, and I had to go get my Social Security papers and return to the social welfare office and present it. It took a day to get the paperwork, and then I knew it would be most of the day to present the Social Security card and deal with that requirement.

And as I sat, alone, in that dreary office, and waited, penniless, for four hours, this pitiless evil of which I have spoken struck without warning. For there, on the LCD monitors was a “cartoon” to engage the children who waited with me, and there over and over again was a Pixar movie about some cars in the desert.

The Devil's tool ?

Oh cruel fate! Oh despicable evil. To wait until I was down and then force me to watch this movie over and over again while I, a pioneer of computer animation, had been unable to make a living at his craft. To gloat at my (economic) failure, to laugh at my defeat.

Recall that in America, success and failure is judged exclusively by the size of one's bank account.

See, it seemed to be saying, see how worthless you are.

Immediately after this incident, a project started and I no longer qualified for this program.  But even so, I know now that this evil is out there, waiting. I believe it waits for you as well. It waits for all of us. 

______________________________________________

Notes:

1. "Room 101" is a reference to George Orwell's 1984.

R&H Closing Causes Panic on Facebook

R&H closing has caused panic amongst the 3D bunnies. They have had jobs for 26 years while the rest of the field suffered, and now that it is their turn, the world is ending. In a sense it is. But we don't really know what is going on so I will find out and report back.

Updates:

2-13-2013 Late in the day, I had a long discussion with a friend who knows R&H well, the visual effects business well, John and Pauline well, etc.  I am still processing his information.   As I understand it, there is a good chance for R&H to emerge from this, but it is an unfortunate and complicated situation, and whatever happens, it does not look good for LA employment.  Thus in rebuilding, they are more likely to rebuild in, for example, Vancouver, than in LA.  Oddly, Vancouver is more expensive than LA, except for that 60% refund that the Canadian govt provides, of course.   The studios are doing their best to put R&H out of business through their stupidity, but that is nothing new.

2-13-2013 An unauthorized source at the local SIGGRAPH meeting reports talked to two former employees, and quite possibly misheard stuff, but that R&H has laid off 100 - 200 people, mostly older and more expensive people.   The source also speculates that it was the real estate acquisition in El Segundo that caused the problem of cash flow in part.   There is further speculation that R&H may not need more than 100 people in Los Angeles to manage their overseas work force.   This information was from the previous day, I just got it today.

2-12-2013 Late in the day, I read some Facebook posts by people complaining about being laid off after 26 years.   Oh, boo hoo. Welcome to the club, goddamnit.  It is clear that people do not really know what is going on and are spreading rumors.  They need to understand that this is understandable but dangerous.  By spreading rumors, you may be contributing to making a bad situation worse.

2-12-2013 Wall Street Journal article on R&H
http://blogs.wsj.com/speakeasy/2013/02/12/oscar-nominated-life-of-pi-visual-effects-studio-to-file-for-bankruptcy/?KEYWORDS=rhythm++Hues

Real Time Programmable Shaders and Me

[or is it "... and I" ?]

As part of my Solari Sign simulation, I am working through more of the learning curve on Open GL shader language, e.g. GLSL or programmable shaders.

It is pretty cool but it sure is awkward.

There is a list of things you have to get through that are arcane in the extreme before you can do basic programmable shaders: compiling, linking and running shaders, creating and setting uniform variables, creating and using texture maps, figuring out the relationship between traditional Open GL and the new programmable shader paradigm, and so forth. As with so many things in Open GL, going from the documentation to real applications is not well documented or self-explantory. The list goes on and on, and when you need to add a new feature, you have to be prepared to dive into the bits for days before you emerge.

But once you build up an infrastructure to make these things manageable, then it is a lot like writing shaders in Renderman circa 1988, but in real time.

And real time is fun.

For example, out of frustration with an object that was relentlessly invisible no matter what I did, I mapped a texture map variable I had been calculating left over from a previous test. To my amazement, I picked up the texture map from the last digit of a digital clock I had running on the display. Only in this case it was mapped on an object that filled the screen, and it was changing every second.

Its soft because the preloaded texture maps are 128x128 but that could be easily fixed. 

Anyway, I think NVIDIA or someone should do the following:

1. Document the relationship between Open GL and GLSL with modern examples.

2. Write and document a toolkit, maybe libglsl, that lets one do basic GLSL functionality at a slightly higher level.  If no one else has done it, I may do it.

         Such things as: read shaders from disk and compile into a program, defining and setting

         uniform variables, loading and enabling texture maps, etc.

3. Create a good implementation of noise, classic or simplex, and make it available.

        There is an implementation of noise that looks very good online, but it is 10 pages of

        code and its days of work to transfer it to your program. That is less work than it would

        be if you had to write it from scratch.

As for using real time graphics for work directly in motion picture filmmaking, in other words, as final footage, that will only work for certain kinds of graphics.  For visual effects and most final animation such things as advanced filtering, motion blur and global illumination is either required or highly desirable.

For a very low budget film of course, anything is possible.

Favorite Mistakes in Computer Animation 1

As everyone who has done computer animation knows, some of our favorite images are not intentional.  In fact, they were so not intentional that they are actually mistakes.

Even worse, you have to be very careful not to show mistakes to a client, because they might like it, and then you might really be in trouble because you might now know how to get that look again or to control it.  One of the worst things that can happen is for a client to like a mistake but want 10% more of whatever it is that you did not intend to do.

Here is a recent mistake that I like a lot.  Its an early attempt at volume rendering of a protein molecule, with an effort to visualize the nucleus (protons, neutrons) and the electron clouds of the atoms.  Clearly something has gone very wrong... You can see what looks like circles off on the perimeter: those are the individual electron clouds where there are few enough that you can make out individual clouds.

Obviously, in the center, things get out of hand.

I think it looks like a good early effort at a galactic explosion of some sort.

Unemployment in VFX & Computer Animation, Part 1

This is the first post in a very complicated topic, the issue of employment and unemployment in the fields of computer animation & visual effects production.  For those of my friends who live and work in the beautiful and rarefied air of academia or the "fine" arts, there has been a major retrenchment of visual effects and (possibly) computer animation production in California and Los Angeles.   A tremendous amount of work has moved overseas and those companies that remain are seemingly expanding only in that they expand their overseas divisions.   But how much of this true, what the numbers are, what the reasons and causes are, and what is to be done about it, all these things are somewhat vague.   But if you can accept for a moment that hard numbers are, well, hard to come by, there are some things we can say with reasonable certainty.

1. A tremendous amount of high end visual effects work has moved overseas.  That is indisputable. There are in my estimation roughly 10 or so major players in high-end visual effects in the top tier, then perhaps another 50 or so middle-tier companies, and finally hundreds of rather small companies (which of course come and go with a depressing regularity).   A review of the Cinefex online database of upcoming visual effects films (which requires a bit of interpretation to distinguish which vendor received $20M in work from those that received $20K in work) shows projects being awarded to WETA (New Zealand), Double Negative (London), MPC (London), Cinesite (London), ILM (SF), SONY Imageworks (LA), R&H (LA), and Digital Domain (LA).  

2. It is alledged that tax subsidies of New Zealand, Canada and the United Kingdom (all Commonwealth countries) is the cause of a tremendous amount of work being awarded to these countries.   That is certainly true in the case of Canada, it may also be true in the other two cases, but there are other factors at work.  What is clear is that for a variety of reasons these governments have chosen to support these industries in their various countries and that this strategy has certainly worked, whether or not it has been the only cause of their success is debatable.

3. It is not clear whether the State of California and the US Government has been merely indifferent to the loss of work and jobs to overseas, or whether they actively support that move.  Why would they support the loss of jobs and revenues ?   Because they know where their real money comes from, and that is from the major studios, not from the visual effects companies or income taxes.  The studios make money in many ways, but in broad strokes they make money by making entertaining movies, keeping their costs of production and labor down, and licensing their intellectual property.  Obviously moving production to countries that lower their costs of production in straightforward ways (as Canada certainly does) is desirable to them.   But I am not sure the studios actually work with politicians to support these policies, it seems to be the dominant and bipartisan goal of Washington at least to do anything necessary to impoverish the American worker and the VFX industry is just a tiny part of their very successful policies to do this.

4. It is also alledged that a tremendous amount of work goes to India.   Certainly many of these companies have divisions in India.   R&H was the first to set up an Indian subsidiary, Sony Imageworks certainly has one, and the "dimensionalization" companies are in many cases Indian-owned.   Although India is part of this phenomena that we are discussing here, it is less clear how much high end work goes to India, and how much of this is straightforward compositing and wire removal.

However, the above issues are just the first part of the story and there is much  more to say.  What is the role of the VES (visual effects society).   To what extent is the unemployment due to a glut of workers ?  To what extent do these workers have unrealistic expectations ?   How has "animation" been affected in contrast to "visual effects" now that both of these industries have wiped out their "traditional" colleagues and have gone entirely digital (in other words, is this unemployment nothing more than justice for evil done in the past )?

More in Part 2.