The 80's called, and they want their technology back - 3D ZX Spectrum (work in progress)

With a couple of days off work, and with nothing better to do yesterday morning, I decided to snap a pile of photo's of my old ZX Spectrum (the one from my earlier posting).

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Hmmmm... Would I jump ship from CG to Compositing?

Good question - and one I asked myself last week after spending a good amount of time working my way through Nuke (NukeX to be exact) and python scripting. It seems that Nuke has snagged me - I'm loving it, and just getting a buzz from working my way around techniques and tools.  Its all been very easy to pick up, and I have to say that the ease of upskilling in this tool is an exhilarating roller coaster ride that I'll keep travelling along.

So - with this buzz happening as I progress along with Nuke, would or should I jump ship from CG to work with compositing instead to get my fix?  Its a tempting decision - I really do love what I can do in post, but the answer would be No - yet on the other hand - Yes...  The reality is that both of these areas are joined at the hip, and they work well together.  CG needs compositing to polish and finalise it's look and style, as does compositing need CG assets for tasks such as front projecting a 2D plate into 3D geometry for additional depth, or creating virtual elements for visual effects work.

This blog post, I've posted a few examples of how I make use of both production processes to both edit my own personal work, but to assist in teaching others...

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Dropping a Nuke on a pesky Python

Well, more like a little basic 101 on using Python in The Foundry's Nuke compositing package.  I wrote this example script as an initial introduction to learning simple python scripting in Nuke.  As well as the chance to dabble in Nuke, it gave me the opportunity to develop a useful tool for my own work...

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Maya and Python - scripted gaming

One challenge I set myself while teaching Python 101 was to show just how easy it would be to create an interactive game, or other user-driven application, that runs in Maya.  The first question was just how do you run python in real time in Maya?  You can't use a loop in Python - this tends to tie up Maya, and its relatively easy to lock up the software this way.  Trust me, I did that - several times.  Its not fun to keep bringing up the task manager to kill Maya...

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Is it a keyboard, is it a plane? No... Its...

...my new acquisition.  I picked up this old ZX Spectrum from our national online auction site, trademe for NZ$10 4 days back, and received it today.  Its got its faults (the keyboard membrane needs replacing) and I'm yet to dig out an old Sinclair power supply to test it runs.

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Hisssssssss! Slithering around rocks in Python...

Its been a week of teaching basic 101 programming in Python, and I must say that I'm getting a real taste for Python as a language for scripting.  Having experience in many different languages over the last 30 years, Python takes me back to my early BASIC days of the 80's, where as kids, we'd learn to program by writing our own games, something that was common back when off-the-shelf software wasn't as prevalent as it is today.  In fact, this home computing phenomenon was what built the foundations of the gaming industry in the United Kingdom.  And some software stores here in New Zealand would offer to sell games and pay royalties - something completely unseen these days...  But I digress...

Python's syntax is simple and easy to understand, and when they said its designed to produce readable code, they weren't kidding.  This made teaching programming for me a piece of cake.  Of course, the hardest part of teaching such a subject to our future 3D artists who are excited to produce animation, models and render can be tricky.

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The 8-bit childhood returns in glorious CG...

As much as I tried, I hoped to post regularly to this blog...  However after a few weeks, I'm back with another post.

A couple of weeks ago, I'd decided to purchase some cartridges for my old Atari 600XL I've had lying in storage for 15+ years from eBay.  The reason I'd not used the machine at all (yes, 15+ years of storage and about 30 minutes of usage mucking about, eh, 15 years ago) is purely because I didn't have any software for it.

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