VizWorld.com

Next time you’re negotiating a raise or a new job, be sure to look at this spreadsheet from ‘VFX Soldier’ that compiles salary data across the vfx, animation, and gaming companies.

The Animation Guild conducts a voluntary wage survey every year. There is also a website called VFX Wages that also encourages artists to voluntarily submit their wage information. My information comes directly from the facilities. It does not include bonuses, stock options, or weekly guarantees.

I feel this information is useful to get a better understanding of what artists and technical directors can expect to be paid when they are negotiating their next deal at facilities such as DreamWorks, or ILM, etc.

I’m still looking at the data myself, it’s pretty extensive. I’m still looking at the numbers myself, but he’s already noticed a few interesting trends:

I deliberately separated PDI and DreamWorks Glendale so it’s a little easier to compare wages. DreamWorks has two facilities, one in Glendale, and PDI in Redwood City. The Glendale facility is under a contract with The Animation Guild while PDI is not. The wages are generally higher in Glendale which begs the question:

If unionization is so costly, why doesn’t DreamWorks send more of it’s work to PDI? It’s only a few hundred miles up north.

You always hear the argument that if a place goes union they’ll just send the work elsewhere but the irony here is that the Glendale facility is massively expanding and has been doing about 2 out of the 3 films DreamWorks produces each year.

He’s sharing it as a Google Spreadsheet, but it’s generating enough traffic that Google is dropping back to ‘basic’ mode.  If you want an offline version to review, I’ve uploaded a PDF version (27Meg) you can look at.

via Wages In The VFX, Animation, And Games Industry « VFX Soldier.

Graphics employment

Dictionaries and Thesauruses have been around for decades with no noticable improvements in how they work.  Visuwords combines Princeton University’s “WordNet” database with a clever flash-driven visualization tool to create a graphical online dictionary visualizing all of the relationships between words.

Visuwords™ online graphical dictionary — Look up words to find their meanings and associations with other words and concepts. Produce diagrams reminiscent of a neural net. Learn how words associate.

Enter words into the search box to look them up or double-click a node to expand the tree. Click and drag the background to pan around and use the mouse wheel to zoom. Hover over nodes to see the definition and click and drag individual nodes to move them around to help clarify connections.

Free to try out, hit their website for a demo.

Visuwords™ online graphical dictionary and thesaurus.

Science interactive, visuwords

A short animation from Craig Kane shows a clever combination of ZBrush, Photoshop, 3dsMax and more.

Returning home after a hard days work of villainy, Cosmo-frog spots a planet on his ship’s sensors.

The planet – Ujahuta – is a nature reserve filled with an abundance of flora and fauna, and the greatest resource to a famished space-hunter. With a quick re-plot of the ship’s course, he is on his en-route to a quick lunch.

Little does he know, however, the Ujahuta’s eco-system is not as innocent as it may first appear…

via Pugly: short animation on Vimeo.

Graphics animation, short

Pixar’s recent “Toy Story 3″ is just the latest in an unprecedented string of 11 hit films in a row that have earned over $5.7Billion.  To celebrate this unfathomable success and show the heart that lies at the center of Pixar, the Oakland Museum of California is hosting “Pixar: 25 Years of Animation”.

The 500 pieces of art on display here illustrate the history of Pixar, and the process that this studio’s artists & animators go through in creating their films. The process itself is all not much different from the way that animation was created back in Walt Disney’s day. Concept art is created using oils, pastels, and other mixed media, but now it includes digital graphics. With all these tools characters must be created, as well as a story and the world they inhabit.

The exhibition runs through January.

via “Pixar: 25 Years of Animation” reveals the art at the heart of all those hits – Jon Nadelberg – Contributors – JimHillMedia: Walt Disney Company news, reviews, history & commentary, Jim Hill.

Graphics museum, pixar

Over at KitGuru they’re caught wind of some “background buzz” that AMD may finally be killing off the ATI brandname, rolling the video products under the AMD banner.

The world is full of weird paradoxes , surprises and contradictions. Apple PCs have always been famous for graphics and yet they don’t support DirectX or, generally, ship with anything faster than a single, middle of the range graphic card. Intel and graphics are two words that most people don’t readily put together, yet Intel is the biggest supplier of 3D graphics processors in the world. In a world where cinematic gets wheeled out every 18 months to describe the next generation GPU without a hint of irony, should we be taken aback by the loss of a brand like ATI?

The ATI brand has quite a long history, but has been a bit confusing since they were acquired by AMD.  Even AMD’s own press releases seem to get a bit confused sometimes about “AMD Video Card” and “ATI Video Cards”.  Bringing it all under one name would cut the costs associated with maintaining 2 high-profile brands simultanously, but remove any pretense of niceties between AMD and NVidia, and ATI and Intel.

via ATI logo finally gone? | KitGuru.

Hardware amd, ati, rumor

If you’re an avid After Effects fan but always found Eyeon Fusion interesting, then aeTuts has just the tutorial for you.  It begins with just the basics of workflow and the node-based design, and creates some simple animations.

Intro To Fusion For The After Effects User – AE Basix | Aetuts+.

Graphics aftereffects, eyeon, fusion, tutorial

In the film “Knight & Day”, vfx house Rhythm & Hues got the job of creating a herd of stampeding bulls in full CG, and adding them to several chase scenes in a variety of environments including a stadium, the city streets, and eventually some traffic.  Over at FXGuide they discuss the process in-depth, including their own custom little gadget, the HDReye.

“We have a little box called a HDReye, a little cube that has a camera on each side that we developed about 5 years ago. It takes bracketed photography in about 30 seconds to give out a whole HDRI. Because the environments were so diffuse on this show, it worked out well in terms of not having a 4K HDRI. It was more about 2K.” Standard gray and mirror balls were also used, as well a mock-up of a bull with horns. “And of course we had the real bulls in the shots,” added Steele. “For about 3 shots, we augmented the shots with CG bulls so they were right next to real ones. It was really huge just to have that. How dark the bull skin gets in the shadows, the brightness on the horns, how much spec you get on the tip of the nose.”

via fxguide – maya:after effects:avid – Knight & Day.

Graphics movie, rhythm&hues, vfx

An impressive little tool called ‘Dejavis’ has just come online, providing tools and stubs to create your own online interactive visualizations and publish them with ease.

Déjàvis is a sandbox for data visualizations. It allows you to develop pluggable visualizations in a declarative style and deploy them to dejavis.org. You no longer need to start from a plain HTML file. The HTML frame is defined by the sandbox. You can modify the HTML using placeholders (name, description, author) which are specified in a manifest.json file. Of course you can manipulate the DOM with Javascript at any time.

The stub code is all CoffeeScript, but they allow you to easily strip it back down to bare bones and use whatever libraries you prefer.  you can check out a quick demo at http://dejavis.org/ , and see the future of flash-free all-javascript interactive visualization.

via michael’s dejavis at master – GitHub.

Science interactive, source, Website

Jonathan Feinberg has just released on GitHub a clever Python-like wrapper for Processing, the result of an interesting encounter with a group of 8th graders.

I recently gave a talk about Processing to a group of rather bright 8th-graders, as part of a computer-programming summer camp they were attending at my office. Their curriculum up to that point had been in Python, which is an eminently sensible choice, given the pedagogical roots of the language.

The kids were really turned on by the demos–I showed them the white glove, and Golan Levin’s New Year’s cards–but they were bogged down by Processing’s C-like syntax, which really seems arcane and unnecessarily complex when you’re used to Python.

The full code and some demos are available at GitHub.

via jdf’s processing.py at master – GitHub.

Science processing, python

Hotel Rewards Cheat Sheet.

infographics