My name is Stephen Alvarez, I’m a photographer. I’ve worked for National Geographic Magazine most of my career, and most recently, I founded a nonprofit called the Ancient Art Archive. I remember being very young, and someone putting a camera in my hand, and suddenly I went from being inarticulate to being able to say
Last week we shared Part I of III exploring Houdini software system requirements, we looked at how different hardware configurations performed rendering Flip, Grains and Pyro scenes with a focus on Houdini’s built-in render engine Mantra. Today we present Part II in the series, the role of cache disk and RAM in a Houdini workflow.
Houdini is becoming one of the most popular and highly regarded CG and VFX applications today. It can be used to model, render, animate and simulate objects and scenes with a great deal of precision and control non-destructively. A key characteristic of Houdini is the use of nodes, networks and assets in a step-wise or
SIGGRAPH 2019 felt like an in-between year as relates hardware, with most big developments happening in the software arena. This is our roundup of highlights from the event this year, many of which are very helpful to media professionals especially VFX and CG pros. GPU rendering continues to make big strides into VFX and CG
Christopher: Hi Curvin, thanks for making time to talk today. What I thought we’d start with is your background. How’d you come to visual effects, and teaching Houdini? Curvin: So I sort of straddle the fence between technology and art, for sure. Since I have a bachelor's degree in sculpture, which I think is what
Even though it's summer, and you're probably thinking about the beach, the mountains or maybe a road trip with friends and family, summer is a good time to reflect. Though it's certainly not always the case, things often move a little slower in summer, and it's a good time to do a quick mid-year check-in.
Christopher: What is the core focus of what Optimus does in terms of content creation? Ken Winke: Sure. So first, we call ourselves a post production house. Primarily we do post work for advertising clients, brands, and agencies here in Chicago. So that’s anything from a traditional 30 second TV spot, to something that’s more
Christopher: So thank you for making time to discuss your background and the kinds of projects that you guys are up to at Cortina Productions. I'm excited to hear about it because… it's really pretty impressive what you are creating, in particular for other national museums. Andrew: Yeah, it's a very unique kind of niche
If Zbrush and Keyshot are core applications tools to the work you do, then CPU is the deciding factor in performance. ZBrush and Keyshot are multi-threaded apps, meaning generally speaking the more hi-speed cores you have, the faster your jobs will get done. While a dual Xeon configuration can give you a speed advantage with
It may be genetic at this point with "Apple" products: beautiful, quiet hardware designed for media professionals, which makes little difference in the key metric: performance. While something of a PC vs. Mac conversation, we did want to take a brief look at the new Blackmagic eGPU pro and con, and compare it with more
