Autumn is Beautiful :-)

Some autumn photo's I took the other day around Dundee.

Autumn Leaves

Walk in the Park

Sunset

New Showreel

I've updated my animation show reel with a walk cycle of the Alfi character from my 4th year film. I would welcome any constructive feedback if anyone watching has time to give it.

I still need to upload some photo's from my trip to London and to Aviemore but finding the time to pick out the best ones and edit them a little has been pretty hard seeing as I've been putting a lot of my free time into the walk cycle you see here.

Playblast Codecs

I've never really been taught anything about codecs to I thought i'd post up the results of a quick test that I did this morning. All test were conducted with the same PC on the same playblast settings, see below for details

MS-CRAM codec

The MS-CRAM only takes a few seconds to playblast, even at HD (1400x788) resolution. As you can see the quality is pretty good and this 3 second clip uses 47.0MB. I would highly recommend using this Codec because of the (relative) high quality, quick render time, and small file size.

IYUV codec

This codec produces similar quality results as the MS-CRAM codec. However the time it takes to render out is a lot longer than MS-CRAM. However, it is worth noting that this is only really noticeable at higher resolutions, when I did a quick test at a lower resolution the time taken by IYUV and MS-CRAM were much the same. The main problem with IYUV is that the file size is a lot lager (127MB), 2.6 times larger than the CRAM file. I would recommend this codec but only for low resolution playblasts.

MS-RLE Codec

This codec has the worst quality of all three that I tested and although it renders quickly, it is no faster than MS-CRAM. The main benefit to MS-RLE is the tiny file size, just 1.28MB, but this does come at a heavy price and the poor quality causes the video to be almost useless as it is difficult to see what is going on in the scene. I would only recommend this Codec if disk space is a serious issue, otherwise it is best left alone.

I did attempt to use the MS-YUV codec and the Toshiba YUV411 codec but both caused the following error message in maya:

"// Error: Unable to create video track. Check format. //"

I hope this has been helpful

Animex Festival 2011

Pictures from Animex Festival 2011

Dundee Railway Station going to Middlesbrough

Teeside University Building

Animex Festival Registration

Me and Ed Hooks after the Workshop

This was a fantastic experience and I would recommend anyone to go see Ed, the author of Acting For Animators, if they get the chance.