I just wrote a post on my blog about the advantages of using procedural workflows in CG art/animation and Visual Effects work. It barely scractches the surface of the subject, but I'm sure it may be of interest to many of my fellow deviant artists.

You can read the full ramble at my blog.

The first version of Autumn Leaves is now available for download from the scripts section of my website. It's the first MEL script to find its way there.

Autumn Leaves automatically creates an optimized setup to simulate dozens of flying / falling tree leaves, with proper collisions, deformations, dynamics and aerodynamics. You only need to have high-res and low-res models of your leaves (you can combine several different models), and a NURBS surface to place the leaves on. After applying the script, you cand add more stuff to the simulation, like fields, or collisions with animated objects and characters.

You can see this very simple example video.

This script is an evolution of a technique I developed to do leaves simulations in the film Planet 51 (which, by coincidence, comes out in US cinemas today!). It creates a relatively fast low-res single nCloth simulation, and transfers its animation to the high-res leaves through the use of wrap deformers.

I have many ideas of how to take this tool further, and make it more powerful / flexible. So if you use it and have any ideas for improvements, let me know. Same thing, of course, if you find any bugs (they are always there, creeping about somewhere...).

You can find more info at my blog.

I very recently moved to London, to start working in amazingly cool movies at the Moving Picture Company. And what to say... work is great, surrounded by very talented and knowledgeable people, and it is very exciting to discover a whole (and huge!) new city, meet new people from all over the world...

To cut it short: I'm in London, it's exciting, and if you live around this corner of the earth, drop me a note because I'm in the discovering/meeting mood.

A couple of months ago I had the scare of my life. One morning, my main hard drive just decided to stop existing. Poof. Dead. I lost all my photos of the last 3 years, huge parts of Projects that were in progress, and a countless number of other precious information that just hurt too much to think about. I do backups of most of my things. Often. But not everything. Not often enough...

I will reassure you immediately (before you start crying for me, or getting angry at my stupidity), and say that all the information was finally recovered by Seagate. More importantly, it opened my eyes: manual backup isn't enough. I needed to set up a system of regular, automatic, daily backups (that way, if something breaks, I only lose one day of work, which is bearable). Thus, I set on to plan a way to have all my vital files backed up easily and frequently.

The first part of the plan was to have a software which would back up chosen folders to a second local hard drive periodically (every night). It has to be a second physical hard drive, and not just a second partition, because if the drive has a physical failure, all its partitions can go to hell. If it's in a separate physical drive, the chances of both hard drives breaking at the same is minimal (I will not be liable if you got a jinx and it happens to you). For this you have many efficient softwares, both free and commercial. Just to name the one I use, SyncBack Freeware. But there are many similar ones, so you should check them out and compare.

But I still needed another thing: what if burglars come into your house and steal the computer? what if your house burns, or if an asteroid falls on it. You lose it all. Files and Backup. So I found something called Mozy. It's a free software which automatically and regularly backs up any folders/files you select to an internet storage. This way your files are physically backed up to a place at the other side of the world. The whole planet would have to go to hell for you to lose your files, and then I guess you wouldn't be there either, to care about it!

As I said, it's free, secure, private, and it gives you 2 GB of free online storage. It's also the easiest backup software I've ever seen. You have no excuse. BACKUP YOUR FILES NOW! Tomorrow could be too late. Tomorrow, your computer might not boot, as it happend to me on that tragic morning.

You can visit the following link to sign up, which will additionally set me up as a referer, and will give us both an extra 256MB of backup space. It's win-win all the way:

https://mozy.com/?ref=ZCD7Q7

For this, you can also enter my referal code (ZCD7Q7) when you sign up.

BACKUUUUUUUP!

A question for all the CG artists out there:

What format do you prefer for tutorials:

A. Video
B. Text and Images (webpage, pdf, doc...)

I have a couple of ideas for some interesting tutorials I could make, but I wonder which format would be best, and I would like to know your opinion.

Please answer in the poll I posted at my blog, for centralized answers, although feel free to comment at will right here.