I just recently finished working on The Nailspot website during my free time. The Nailspot is a premier nail salon and spa located near the greater Houston metropolitan area in Kingwood, TX, next to Kingwood High School. It's a great, newly-opened, nail salon with luxorius Luxan tubs and Lonestar Spa Chairs and a great ambiance. Definitely an experience you don't want to miss.




On a side note, the Ninja project is coming along smoothly. Now titled, "The Avenger", my team managed to pull something together for the Spring Show. The other team, who interestingly enough called their piece "Ninja Avenger", managed to get together a nice good solid piece for the show. Our team still has a ways to go, and we have 3-4 weeks left to get it together for the final. Colin Sebestyen from MoveCraft and Cobra Creative, was there with us till the last minute of the deadline, midnight on Sunday. He definitely helped bring my piece together, and with his help I feel we got a decent amount of work done for the Spring Show. Thanks Colin for taking the time to help us out into the wee hours of the morning Saturday and Sunday night, definitely appreciate it.

With the consent of my team, I will try to post up the final version of The Avenger in 3-4 weeks when completed. I'll also talk to the other team, and see if I can get their work up here too, with credit where credit is due of course.

The week right before Spring Break, Catherine came into our motion graphics class and informed us of a new category being put into the Spring Show, VFX Motion Graphics. Sweet, seeing as how our motion graphics class is the first and only class in the VFX department, whatever we turn in will more than likely be in the show. We have no competition. Problem is, we were only given two more weeks to work on something amazing to knock the socks off of people, with the impending deadline of April 19th. So eight of us got together and formed Team CRYPTALBAYSPLOSIONOMICRON (later split into two teams for different concepts). One of our team members, the talented Roger Apolinar, is currently VFX Supervisor at Paralux Productions. He was able to get a hold of the RED cam for a night and managed to recruit some martial arts talent to shoot in the greenscreen studio. With martial artists Isiah Flores and Michael Gonzales showing off some sick moves in the studio, we managed to get some amazing, beautiful RED footage.

Speaking of which, if there are any of you using Windows right now, REDCINE seems to be the best option to handle any R3D files you can throw at it. Actually, I'm not sure but I think it's the only option right now, at least it was the only one that I could get to work. There was a solution to open it up in AE CS4 but I couldn't get the RED settings to pop-up. If you need some place to get started, I recommend watching the tuts from Final Cut User here. They'll give you a basic overlook on the app, and give you a better insight on just how awesome RED is.

I'm currently working on doing the roto and keying right now, so nothing new for my mograph buddies, but I thought I'd post up some my prev work in progress. This first pic is to be the intro of our project, a 2.5D matte painting depicting an ancient Asian landscape.



I made it in Photoshop, and then rendered out layers to switch to After Effects and displaced along the Z axis.



A styleframe/storyboard in which our hero character hides behind a wall. 3dsmax.








More to come soon, I promise, but there's still lots and lots of work to do!

Often times I find myself moving Nuke scripts back and forth between my computer at home and the labs in school. If you work on multiple computers with your Nuke scripts, you've more than likely experienced broken Read Nodes.

But fear not young padawan! There are ways to avoid spending 15 minutes redirecting Nuke to all your files. I've come across a couple of scripts to fix your Read Nodes, but by far the most jaw-droppingly easy one comes from The Foundry itself. If you haven't checked it out yet, the Nuke Master Class last January was extremely beneficial and I highly recommend everyone to check out their videos and source files.

In their Python videos, they quickly demonstrate fixPaths.py, which attempts to automatically fix the paths of all the missing files in your Nuke script. Here's a little excerpt from the second Python video showing the FixPaths script in action:



Again, please please please, I urge you to go visit the Nuke Master Class and view the entire video in higher res. It will be worth your while, I promise.

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This second method I learned from a good friend of mine, Devank, who put together a PDF based on another tutorial from The Foundry. You can download his original PDF here.

The rundown of his interpretation goes a little bit like this:

1. Create a NoOp node and set its name to Path.




2. Right-click on the NoOp node in the Properties panel and select Manage User Knobs. Add a Filename knob and rename it to Project_Path.
   



3. Enter or browse to the path of your project directory.
   



4. Now all you have to do is copy and paste this little code into all your Read nodes before the filename to insure it links to the Project directory.
   
   

   [value Path.Project_Path]

   
   
   
   


5. Now whenever you switch computers, all you need to do is change the Project path in the NoOp node and your Read nodes should fix themselves.