Well something had to wake me from my blogging slumber, and this certainly is it.

Radiohead are a band I have a lot of respect for. They try something new. First they did it by releasing their latest album ‘In Rainbows’ for download at whatever price you wanted to pay for it, before eventually releasing it on CD. A great marketing ploy, but still a risky one.

That was interesting, but the release of their new music video for the song ‘House of Cards’ takes that very much to the next level. They chose to film their video entirely without cameras, instead using lasers to collect 3D data of them singing and other clips, the results of which formed their new video. There’s even a youtube clip of how it was made.

Okay, so that’s quite interesting. It’s different. But, enter Google, and it becomes more so. Google have taken that very data that makes up the music video, and they’ve shoved it into a 3D viewer, so that if you’ve got the patience to let it load, you can actually spin around and zoom in on the music video playing out in front of you. The above screenshot is of me doing just that. It’s strangely cool, and quite satisfying to play with, take a look at it here, and you too can be creeped out by Thom Yorke singing to you as you zoom in on his face.

And keeping with the ‘free’ theme of their album, Google has also put up the actual raw 3D data so that you can take it and manipulate and display it in anyway you should see fit, provided you know what you’re doing, which is another great touch. There’s a youtube group for those who do have a play to put their videos up for everyone to see, which I’ll be keeping an eye on.

Take a look at everything there is to know, including the video itself over on Google Code, you won’t be sorry.

Oh, and I suppose I should also mention that I saw Radiohead play live in Glasgow Green at the end of last month, for the first time. They were great, they played plenty of the classics, and some recent stuff, making for quite an evening. Even the constant rain didn’t dampen the crowd’s spirits, although the occasional rogue umbrella in the way tried to.

On entering the cinema, I discovered a nice little souvenir on my chair (and everyone else’s for that matter, although obviously I didn’t take theirs). Everyone was given a rather classy Ratatouille card (see below) outlining the film, along with some nice Ratatouille artwork. It was a nice touch certainly, and I’ll certainly be treasuring mine. I noticed the odd person leaving their card behind, but foolishly didn’t run over to grab another one on the way out. I don’t know that it would have had too much ebay value anyway, but we’ll never know now!

So anyway, the film was introduced by Pixar’s Dylan Brown who was the Supervising Animator for Ratatouille, and has been animating with Pixar since ‘A Bug’s Life’. There’s an interview here by ‘The List’ magazine related to this premiere. Dylan seemed to be equally as enthusiastic about being able to introduce the film as he was with his time spent in Scotland over the last week. Dylan told the audience later that John Lasseter had commented when they were in Paris for the international premiere of Ratatouille, that they should really make films that are set where they’d like to visit, so perhaps we’ll see a Scottish-based story from Pixar in a few years!

As per Pixar tradition, Ratatouille was preceded by a trailer for next year’s film (Wall-E in this case, which from what I’ve heard and read about, sounds like a fantastic story), followed by a short film. This year’s short is Lifted, about a trainee UFO navigator who can’t quite control his ship enough to abduct his target. It’s funny, it’s brilliantly animated, it’s Pixar basically. I think Boundin’ is still my favourite Pixar short, but ‘Lifted’ was a great little film, that shows what can be done with a simple idea.

Onto Ratatouille, which is really a return to form for Pixar. I love all Pixar’s films, but Ratatouille really sits nicely with my favourites, ‘Toy Story’ and ‘Monsters Inc’. Pixar have always been about the story, and this one shows they’ve still got it in that department. I’m not really going to review the film here, and wouldn’t want to spoil anything for those that haven’t seen it yet, but it’s a film with a great pace that certainly didn’t leave me bored. The whole film is set in a particularly nice looking Paris, at a famous restaurant, that’s going down hill. The main characters Remy (the rat), and Linguini (who reminds me a little of Fry from Futurama), have been so lovingly animated and provide such great (and in the case of Linguini, often stupid) character, it’s hard not to warm to the film. The stars of the show really are those two, but in true Pixar style, the ‘evil’ character of the film, Antono Ego (who’s a food critic) gets some of the best lines, and biggest laughs, particularly when we see his home.

As I’m a bit of a CG fan, I have to comment on not just the wonderful animation, but also the look of the film. The food (of which there is a lot in this film) looked eerily realistic (perhaps too realistic in places give the general cartooniness of the characters), and Pixar have certainly taken things up yet another notch from their previous films.

At the end of the film, Dylan Brown came back on to give us a 20 minute presentation on how they put together Ratatouille. Dylan started by talking about how every Pixar film starts from a simple idea. You can see a drawing of this idea from the photo I took of his first slide, at the top of this post. Dylan talked us through the stages they went through in animating a couple of scenes, and had a funny demonstration of how some beginner animators put together their walk cycle. He suggests that the best way to visualise such things is to think of every step as a way to stop the character from falling, aided by some silly walks on his part.

He then went on to talk about the animation rigs the animators use. He pointed out that there are no limits on some aspects of each character, nicely demonstrated with Remy’s arms:

I missed some of the amusing faces he had Remy making as his arms were stretched, but you get the idea. He then finished with talking about a couple of easter eggs hidden in Ratatouille (there are as ever, many to be found apparently). One nod to Pixar’s ‘The Incredibles’ came in the form of a performer miming on the bridge as Linguini walks by, who was Bomb Voyage in that film. The other was unlikely to be spotted by most people, and you’ll see a grainy shot of it below – the Pizza Planet truck from ‘Toy Story’ crosses over a bridge in the distance at one point in the film along with other cars. Blink and you miss it.

A question and answer session then followed. Dylan confirmed the forthcoming Pixar films already known about, and seemed to wish he could talk about what would follow. When asked about whether Pixar would do 2D, he said he didn’t think Pixar would go that route, but he was excited about the other Disney studios returning to such things, particularly with John Lasseter overseeing things now across Disney. Questions were also asked about Pixar doing a joint live action film with others, which seemed to be mostly wishful thinking, as Dylan said it was news to him, and that he’d definitely be signing up for it were it actually true. But it would seem it’s not.

Dylan did a great job of enthusing the audience over Pixar, and was a great guest to have at the premiere. Altogether it made for a great few hours of Pixar love. The Edinburgh International Film Festival is also polling audiences as they leave film screenings to vote via a card handed out on how many stars you’d give the film (up to four stars). The ‘Audience Award’ will be given to the best rated film by audiences, and as you can see on their site here, so far Ratatouille is taking the lead. Suffice to say, one of those votes was for the full four stars option, and I’m sure you can work out who gave it that.

Me.

I haven’t been to see it yet in Edinburgh, but will be certainly doing so, the Toy Story Zoetrope is worth the admission price alone. They’re also running quite a lot of related events; film screenings, animation workshops, and talks by those in the animation industry. In particular the Meet the Pros talks seem particularly interesting, but although I was annoyed not to be able to make it to the first one with Pixar’s Elyse Klaidman, Curator and Dean of Art and Warren Trezevant, animator, all of these talks are going to be available via a video podcast. Highlights of this first talk that was held on the 2nd of March are now up for download, with the full version coming soon, and remaining talks becoming available shortly after they’re held.

There’s links to subscribing to the podcast over on 55degrees.

Well, it wasn’t really a mouse, but my aforementioned SpaceNavigator – but there’s a beta driver for Vista which sorted that out nicely for now.

With the official consumer release of Windows Vista due tomorrow, I thought I’d give an update on how I’ve got on with Vista over the last few months since I last talked about it. You may remember that my big issue with giving up Windows XP for good, in favour of snazzy new Vista, lay in the lack of good drivers from nvidia. There’s been the odd beta driver released since then which have certainly improved the situation somewhat, OpenGL performance became actually usable under Maya, albeit with some buggy quirks – the 3D viewports would go white when you took away focus from them to tweak a channel setting, and wouldn’t refresh until you clicked back on them, which is far from ideal.

Nvidia is expected though to release some much improved drivers sometime on January 30th, with a bit of luck they’ll do the trick – there’s been some leaked variations of it in the last couple of days, but I’ll hold out and see what the final release is like. They’re not the only ones to leave things late though, the few gaps left in the area of driver support have been largely filled, not so much on my laptop (which has worked just fine with the drivers available back just before the business launch in November, although some were updated by Windows Update along the way), but with my fresh install of Vista on my desktop.

Yes, I finally took the plunge and introduced Vista to my desktop. I even bought it a nice new shiny 500Gb Seagate hard drive to have to itself, with a view to ultimately migrate from Windows XP on the older hard drive, to this one. I figured the time was right, and that there would be drivers for everything I had both in and out of my desktop PC, but alas – things haven’t been quite as smooth as my laptop experiences. The big sticking point is the wireless drivers. I have a rather expensive but rather excellent internal PCI card from Cisco, the Aironet PI21AG (the same thing as the CB21AG which is just the PCMCIA version without the PCI card stuck onto it).

When I first booted up Vista fresh, it recognised the card fine, it pointed me to my wireless network, and all looked to be well. However, on typing in my WPA key it all went to hell in a handbasket. After a brief couple of seconds of pondering Vista proudly proclaimed that it couldn’t connect. Any particular reason? Nope, just couldn’t connect. Again and again I tried, but it wouldn’t budge. If I go and look at my network connections, the words “Attempting to authenticate” lurk there for as long as you dare watch, with no hint as to whether it’s having any luck. Okay, I think – maybe the driver release that comes with Windows Vista has been updated, I’ll run a rather long ethernet cable into my network card and see what it finds. There was indeed an update for that very card, and on applying it, it finally connected. Wasting no time, I grabbed drivers for the other couple of missing pieces, my SoundBlaster Audigy ZS 2 sound card needed drivers from Creative’s site which worked fine. My dual-tuner TV card, the Cinergy 2400i DT took to the beta driver from Terratec like a duck to the water.

So, perfect then – everything was working as it should right? Yes, well – a couple of reboots later, and guess what was rearing it’s ugly head again? Yes, the wireless card – it couldn’t connect again, same as before but with these newer drivers. A quick look in the Event log shows the repeated “Layer 2 security key exchange did not generate multicast keys before timeout” error, whatever the heck that means. I’m not alone either, I found a thread on Microsoft’s own forums (going way back to last Summer) that talks about this problem, seems specific to using WPA as the form of wireless encryption. It’s hard to know whether this is purely driver problems, or if there’s something fundamentally wrong with Vista’s wireless network stack. Certainly on my laptop I’ve not really had this issue despite connecting to the exact same wireless router, using the exact same WPA key. There has been the odd occasion where on restoring from a hibernate it’s decided it no longer likes the settings it has saved for my connection, but a reboot has always sorted that out.

Also, rather bizarrely, after leaving it sitting for awhile it randomly decides to just connect = sometimes. I took the opportunity to quickly check Windows update again, and discovered there was yet another driver for the card that had been released just a few hours previously – suggesting that somebody out there might be aware of a problem certainly with this card. Didn’t make a difference though, installing the driver dropped the connection obviously, and I’m no further on. Same lack of connection, same random connection after a half hour wait or so – all rather dodgy. Damn.

Still, as the hours tick by Microsoft seem to be loading Windows Update up with new additions, in the last hour this is how things have changed:

Most of the optional updates are language packs, and the important updates don’t seem overly important (none of the Knowledge Base links go anywhere yet, so who knows really), but still – things seem to be ramping up for the big release. Perhaps a wireless or graphics driver lurks in there yet? Nice of Microsoft to give us ‘Hold Em Poker’, but as I don’t know how to play it, it’s unlikely to distract me from the fact that I have no connection to play with on my desktop.

Still, let’s end on a high – I keep discovering little things in Vista that I haven’t encountered already. Last night a particularly eager software install decided it wanted to reboot my machine immediately with out any warning. Vista however realised that I was kind of in the middle of other things, and threw up the rather flashy screen below listing what I was currently doing. Quite nifty, and for the record – I was only recording Celebrity Big Brother to test out Vista Media Centre. Honest.

Right, so I have no intention of addressing those first few, but as you might have guessed by now – the last one I DO want to try and solve, because if not now, when? This is 2007, those aliens have got to be coming soon, and who’s to say they’ll still allow us to play on our computers?

Luckily, 3D Connexion had my back covered, and handily released the SpaceNavigator near the end of 2006. 3D Connexion has been in the market of alternative 3D navigation input devices for sometime, but until now it’s been a prohibitively expensive road to take. The premise of these devices is that in one hand you have your usual mouse choosing options and the like, and then in the other hand on the other side of the keyboard you have your 3D Connexion setup which is really a rubbery cylinder that you can move in six different axis by pulling it or pushing it left, right, away from you, towards you, pulling it up, pushing it down, twisting it in either direction, the lot really. The idea is that this device should be a lot more intuitive when navigating a 3D scene as you’re kind of moving your hand in the direction you want to go, rather than moving the mouse around whilst pushing a given keyboard shortcut key. It’s much better explained by the makers themselves here, if what I’m saying makes no sense.

I first came across these guys back in December 2004 at the ill-fated inaugural CGI Festival, where I got to try out a product they had going at the time, the SpaceBall, similar idea to the latest products, but with a ball instead of a cylinder. It seemed kind of a neat way to navigate, but one that you’d probably need to spend a bit of time on to get used to initially. However, as I alluded to earlier, these things were far too expensive to take a risk on, even if there were potential repetitive strain injury advantages to be had.

Jump forward two years, and although the CGI Festival has disappeared, 3D Connexion had been bought up by Logitech, and the SpaceBall is gone, there’s a number of different devices from them that do much the same thing. The differences between them seem to only lie in the range of buttons around the navigation device itself, and in the case of the SpaceNavigator, you only have two buttons and an overall smaller design, but a very affordable price of around £50 (if you’re not using it commercially) and the same actual navigation cylinder that the other devices have.

How could I resist? Cheap price, funky blue glow, and the word ‘Space’ in the title – the future has arrived! When this little box of future turned up, I installed the drivers along with the plugins that get installed to support any of the applications it can use on your PC. In my case, really Maya was the only app of interest, although it will work in Google Earth too which is quite nice.

The first time you start up Maya after the driver install, the 3DConnexion Control Panel pops up, which it will do for any supported application. It gives you the option to set individual settings for how you want to navigate in that particular application. You can set how sensitive it is, which direction zooms (I chose the non-default green arrowed option shown in the screenshot to the right because it made more sense to my workflow), you can turn off a given axis, or make some more sensitive than others, or you can reverse the axis, which I did to the zoom function as it just proved irritating the other way round. If the blue glow around the base isn’t to your tastes that can be turned off too, although you’d be mad to – it highlights your new toy very nicely to passers by.

You can also configure what the two buttons on either side of the base of the device do, but in the case of Maya, it’s better to do this within the custom panel available within the application for a greater number of options.

The custom panel can be opened and closed within Maya by clicking on the new shortcut button added to the top of the screen, or at its default by clicking on the right hand button of the SpaceNavigator, and it gives you access to some application-specific options with regards to navigating a Maya scene, and configuring the two buttons. These buttons can be set to effectively run any command, be it a ready provided menu option, or a custom MEL script, which is handy.

So, options aside – how does it handle? Well, the danger with this kind of thing is to expect too much of it, which was initially my problem. I almost expected just to rest my hand on it and find that suddenly I could zip about in 3D without barely a thought, and that I’d become SO much more productive. The reality the first time I tried it though was one of wanting to throw the damn thing out of the window. Make no mistake, you need to spend a bit of time just getting used to it, making tweaks to the sensitivity, working out if each axis makes sense as it’s currently setup, and just generally mucking around. I actually found that after 15 minutes of playing, I had to just walk away and forget about it for a bit. On returning to my PC though somehow it all started to click, and I have to say – after a month of use it’s really become a very useful asset.

There’s no doubt I can navigate to a particular point in a scene far more quickly and intuitively than with a mouse. With the SpaceNavigator you can be both rotating, moving and zooming all at the same time, rather than one at a time with a mouse, which really makes the world of difference once you become used to the whole thing.

The SpaceNavigator is relatively heavy, and the combination of a rubber bottom, and rubber grip for your hand means it doesn’t really slip away from you as you use it, which is probably just as well, as this thing isn’t perfect.

The big problem I had was really working out where exactly my hand should be to use it effectively. For general panning around you can just plonk your hand on top of it and push around, but it’s not terribly accurate, and the motion of twisting it, or pulling it up into the air can be awkward. Instead, I’ve found resting my hand beside it and kind of pinching the whole thing with my fingers works best. The pulling up motion still isn’t great, I sometimes find the base not quite heavy enough and have to kind of hold it down with a couple of fingers, but on the whole it works out well enough.

What I can’t get used to though is the two buttons on either side. They just feel awkwardly located, and difficult to push from the angle that my hand is at. I usually find myself having to stop and look at it before realising I’m not pushing the button correctly. I naturally want to push it down towards the desk, but the button needs to be kind of squeezed in towards the centre of the device, which with my left hand is fairly fiddly on the right hand side, and almost totally unusable on the left. I’ll often have to take my hand away from its usual position and go out of my way to push the buttons. This kind of counteracts the overall efficiency of using the SpaceNavigator, so the buttons lie unused most of the time as a result.

And that in a particularly large nutshell, is what the SpaceNavigator is all about. It could do with some greater application support: I could do with being able to use it in MotionBuilder and Houdini, it would even be fun to use it with something like Photosynth come the time. It does however come with an API for writing support into applications, along with some example applications, some of which allude to the device being a lot more intuitive to use than it actually is and aren’t very practical. New versions of the software come out frequently though, so you never know what’s around the corner – the device does already support a large number of applications listed here, and they’ve also just added support for Mac OS X, in addition to Windows.

Autodesk Maya 8.5 just came out a couple of weeks back, so I’m personally hoping they add support for this latest release as soon as possible – I don’t want to go back to the old-fashioned way, and it’s the only thing stopping me using 8.5 in anger (the new Python scripting support is great).

The SpaceNavigator gave me a little glimpse of a better world of 3D navigation, and although not perfect – it will do for now until I can navigate purely through mind power. Something for the space year 2008 maybe?

Update (12/03/2007): Please see the comments for the latest on the SpaceNavigator. Basically, Maya 8.5 support came out shortly after I wrote the above, and having tried it this last weekend it works a treat, even under Vista. 3D Connexion have also just let me know that the costs to buy one of these should normally be around £39 + delivery, and there are more retailers selling it now so shop around.

3D Connexion also tell me that there apparently also used to be support for MotionBuilder in the good old days of Kaydara, so anyone who’s keen on getting support for this product with the SpaceNavigator should go and rattle Autodesk’s cage. Similarly, Houdini support will only come if Side Effects have enough people requesting it.

Anything you can think of in the field of Computer Graphics is probably covered in some form of presentation at a SIGGRAPH conference in recent years, so if you’ve even a passing interest, you could do far worse than take a look at the site.

Irn-Bru’s take on the classic animation of The Snowman is well worth a look. Haven’t seen it on TV yet, but having watched it over on youtube, I don’t think I’ll ever be able to watch the original Snowman with out smiling at the thought of the slightly thuggish boy with the Irn-Bru can.

Oh, and dentists are outraged.

My laptop (a Dell Precision M70) has 2Gb of memory, which seems to be the optimum amount these days where Vista is concerned, certainly I found RC1 ran noticeably faster than XP on the exact same system, heck even the battery life seems to be better. In fact, once Vista was installed I found myself more inclined to use my laptop over my desktop (which still sits with Windows XP and occasionally Suse Linux on it) – something about the whole experience just works, and I guess it helps that it never crashed once the whole time I had that release candidate installed.

However, two weeks ago it became time to nuke Vista RC1 in favour of the RTM (Release To Manufacture) release – Vista was complete at last, and having skipped RC2 I was keen to see how the final product had turned out.

Just before shutting down Vista RC1 for the last time though, a dialog box popped up – turned out that Windows Error Reporting cares much more about your wellbeing than XP ever did. I was allowing Vista to pass back error reports for crashed applications, and lo and behold, it had found a couple of solutions for problems that I didn’t even know I had, and was still awaiting another solution. It had decided to tell me what I could do to rectify the problem, with links through to the full solution. XP always seemed a bit hit and miss on this (almost always miss) – Vista seemed to actually care – aw shucks, who knew?

Anyway, I digress – while that was certainly cute, I was more interested in trying out the final release – and I hoped that I’d maybe even be able to get rid of XP from my laptop shortly after. This all went pretty well, nothing had changed too considerably on the face of it since RC1 (more shiny icons, and a new tinkly startup and shutdown noise aside), and much as RC1 had settled in nicely, so now has Vista RTM. My laptop has a new lease of life, something a replacement recalled battery can never bring – fast, clean interfaces rule the day.

Unfortunately, my eagerness to get rid of Windows XP will have to wait a little longer though. For general work, Vista suits me down to the ground and I find myself loath to reboot back into XP, but as a Maya and Houdini user (both CG packages that need some good OpenGL support), there’s still a bit of a way to go. No doubt nvidia (my laptop came with a Quadro Go1400) has some new drivers almost ready that will start rectifying that problem, and by the time Vista hits its consumer release in late January, with a bit of luck there will be decent performance to be had. Until then though, its really not usable for that kind of work, and although I *could* use XP drivers, that would mean getting rid of a lot of the shiny new interface elements – not essential, but hey if I’m going to use Vista, I want it to look its best!

Side Effects are doing a road show, the first (and only European) stop of which was in London. Compared to the night before, this was a smaller crowd in a more relaxed setting but they had a lot to show off, both in terms of what the current version can do, and some of what’s coming in the next.

I won’t bore you with the details, I’ve actually done that already over on 3D Buzz, prompting Side Effects’ Product Marketing Manager, Robert Magee to make a post about their take on the features found in the next version here, but a good night was had by all.
All good stuff, and a nice end to the CG-ness of my trip to London.

On Monday evening I had the pleasure of attending a lecture at the Tate Modern by Joe Letteri, VFX Supervisor at Weta Digital in New Zealand. He’s been with Weta since they started work on ‘Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers’, and his talk was about the making of the recent remake of ‘King Kong’. Supernatural Studios that organised this lecture and indeed, the other two lectures that form part of this series (there was one last Monday, and the last is next Monday – wish I could have attended them all) seem to have really hit upon something. The Tate Modern is a great venue for these lectures, and it seemed to really attract a good crowd of all ages and interests, not just the usual people who are either already in the CG industry, or trying to get into it (that’d be me then).

The talk certainly got the crowd excited, the way in which Weta recreated 1930s New York was impressive indeed, quite a mammoth task. When it came to King Kong himself though, there was a surprise guest who joined the lecture to give things from an actor’s point of view – Andy Serkis, none other than the actor behind Gollum from the Lord of the Rings, and King Kong. Andy’s a fascinating guy, he has a lot to say about the whole process, something that’s still relatively alien to a lot of actors, but which Andy is clearly excited about being involved with.
A great night, the last lecture next Monday is being given by staff at Glassworks and The Mill, wish I could make it!