A night out, fascinating conversation

Okay, here are a few things I talked about with some friends tonight and thought I'd share more broadly.

• The Variety Show, friend and former student Kevin's video blog
• Bill Bowles, Interactive World Traveler, friend and former student Bill's video blog
• Some crazy spambaiter stories
• A neat abstract Bob Sabiston video
• A funny Bill Gates vs. Steve Jobs cartoon
  

And here are things I heard about but haven't checked out yet:

• The TED talks
• Korsakow-System (for producing database narrative films)
• Textpattern, a web content management system
  

negative frames in shake

I once again post this for future web searchers who cannot find the answer they seek.

The problem I faced today grew out of the fact that some of our Maya scenes dip into negative frame numbers. RenderMan handles these reasonably well, outputting images with the following style of frame numbering:

frame.-0001.tif
frame.0000.tif
frame.0001.tif

shake, as far as I can tell, seems to expect the negative sign to fit within the padded width. In other words, it's looking for:

frame.-001.tif
frame.0000.tif
frame.0001.tif

After trying a few clumsy solutions, I ended up using conditionals in shake to manage this. Here's what my SFileIn nodes used to look like:

surfLayer=SFileIn("u1_12.surfcolor.#.tif");

(The # in shake implies 4-padding)

Now they look like this:

surfLayer=SFileIn( time < 0 ? "u1_12.surfcolor.@@@@@.tif" : "u1_12.surfcolor.#.tif");

This seems to import prman-made tiffs just fine. For some reason, I used a different format on the output line. I can't recall if I had to or if I was just experimenting, but either way, this works:

outp=FileOut(a,time < 0 ? "u1_12_comp.%05d.tif" : "u1_12_comp.#.tif","Tiff","rgb");

Hope this is helpful to someone, somewhere, sometime!

"Catch" in Tiburon

"Catch" has a time and day now at the Tiburon International Film Festival. 11:10am, Sunday March 25. It's part of an animated shorts program.

I'm worried that the time and day of this program will attract parents with their little kids. From the thumbnails of some of the films, I don't think they're all going to be kid-friendly. I think a lot of festivals do this still with animated shorts: assume they're all for young people and schedule them that way. Well, I haven't seen all the films so I can't say for sure, but the guy with a gun to the back of his head sure doesn't feel preschool to me.