gargamon

5 hours ago, thaibeachlovers said:

just checked but apparently he hasn't made it yet. I'll be sure to read the reviews after

Of course you're not capable of watching it yourself and making up your own mind. You need to wait for the right-wing spin telling what to think. 

6 hours ago, JonnyF said:

This is gold for Trump, gold I tell you. More ammunition for him to rally his supporters behind the notion that his political opponents are terrified of facing him at the ballot box

Who cares what the Trump supporters think? They're voting for Trump regardless. Trump's problem is that the number of his supporters is not getting any larger. 

12 hours ago, SailingHome said:

offered to buy the room since she is having difficulties paying taxes and ongoing maintenance at her old age. She likes that idea. the laughter I tried not not let out in her presence was the insistence she will not take less than 650k. Unmodeled it is worth 460k. Remodeled to incredible luxury next to me is listed at 600k.

So obvious answer: buy the 600k incredible luxury unit next door. Moving to the new unit would be simple. 

Call it what you will. Darwin awards for them all. Evolution in action.

Too stupid to get vaccinated? This is what happens.

And for the right wing morons that are trying to blame the “illegal immigrants“ (better called legal asylum seekers), the problem is not just in Florida. Canada, with few illegal immigrants, is having similar problems with measles in the unvaccinated idiots. 

3 hours ago, kwak250 said:

Hey! It’s been a while since I’ve posted-

Now, I have a consistent problem where I open my mouth intending to add just a sentence to a conversation and a nine-volume encyclopedia pops out instead. Accordingly, my attempt to answer the poster succinctly turned into a post-long response that I decided might as well just be a post, so here it is!

Thanks for your comment! You may be right that Spider-verse isn’t the best example, and certainly I wouldn’t hold it up as an example of the kind of production I intend to create--just as a very good example of stylized CG. I suspect that rendering in a stylized way, and making this style work with their existing methods, was quite expensive for SPI! I recall an artist who worked on Paper Man describing it as twice the work of ordinary CG. That's certainly a danger with stylized approaches--but I think it's an avoidable one.

The problem, it seems to me, is that you really can't approach this sort of production as if it were conventional CG, with a conventional methodology and pipeline, and expect to reap the cost benefits I think are potentially realizable with it. You'd have to treat this kind of production very differently.

For instance, you mention simulation as something that would be difficult with non-continuous motion, and you're quite correct. So simulation itself would be the first thing on the chopping block for the production, outside of the occasional FX shot. It's one of the many steps that gums up the works of CG production and prevents us from getting to that an-artist-can-sit-down-and-just-make-something state. Plus I generally don't like its results on an artistic basis (at least in this stylized context). When traditional animators animate clothed characters, the clothing takes part in the character's silhouette and becomes a part of the performance. They never had any difficulty animating cloth by hand.

Yes, I am actually claiming that hand-animating cloth would be faster then simulating it, and I know how insane that sounds from a conventional CG perspective. But stylization completely changes the game. Consider the monkey test I posted a few months back.

The monkey is unclothed, of course, but there definitely parts of his body that require secondary animation, notably his hair tufts and ears. The hair tufts at least would most likely be simulated if this shot were approached in a conventional manner. The way I approached the shot was not only to animate them by hand, but to animate them from the very beginning--the very first key poses I put down already included the ears and hair tufts as an inherent aspect of those poses, already contributing to silhouettes and arcs. It’s pretty difficult to get an accurate idea of exactly what percentage of my time animating the shot was devoted to them, but I’m going to guess it was only a few percent.

This is only possible because the stylized look allowed me to ignore the “higher frequency” details that would be required for a fully rendered character, and I expect these same details would also be unnecessary for character clothing. I’m much more interested in character silhouettes then I am in wrinkles and clothing detail, so some simple secondary that’s really just part of the character’s pose would actually be more effective.

The idea here is that this isn’t just any form of stylization--it’s a specifically chosen set of stylizations that support each other in the goal of massively reducing the amount of work involved. And that means choosing subjects that work with the grain of those stylistic choices. For instance, you may be wondering how I’d approach a long flowing cape or a long coat. The answer is...I wouldn’t. I wouldn’t generally put characters in long coats or capes. There are about a million stories you could tell that don’t require anyone to wear a cape. Creating low-cost CG in this manner would be about making the design choices that let you get the most bang for your buck production-value wise while maintaining the essentials of character animation, a very different goal then that which I suspect drives companies like SPI and Disney to create stylized CG.

This also applies to the NPR rendering. There are a lot of ways to approach this problem, and some may be very time consuming! The two-tone methods I’m using here aren’t, though. I was able, as an individual with some understanding of the problem but no custom tools, to sit down and do the shading for the Monkey test without much trouble. Partly this is again choosing the most direct path to something that both looks good and is efficient to create. The simple two-tone present in the monkey test carries far less detail then the more painterly frames from Spider-verse, but I think it wouldn’t have any difficulty supporting emotionally engaging characters or exciting action scenes.

That said, the efficiency of this process could be improved a lot, and there’s a lot of room for R&D here--there’s still a required level of manual tweaking that I’d like to get rid of, and the two tone shapes could be improved. I’m hoping to tackle some of those problems this year.

There’s still the question of how that process, however reasonable on a small scale, would scale up to a large production like a feature film. In many ways, it may help to think of the look development for such a production as being less like a conventional film production pipeline, and more like a game. Ideally, except for certain FX shots, such a production would not even have a rendering/compositing stage--what you would see working on the shot would simply be the shot. It might be quite literally “in-engine” if using a game engine as the hub of production turns out to be the right way to approach it (this is something I’m getting more and more interested in). While this doesn’t remove all potential issues with scaling the approach to feature film size, I think it does drastically simplify the problem. Of course, we haven’t actually produced a long-form project using these techniques, and I’m sure there are going to be unforeseen roadblocks, so we shall see!

In any case, thanks again for your comment! I hope this illuminates how I envision this production process being different from the way I imagine that Spider-verse is being done, and why I think that the immense cost gains I’m claiming here are achievable.

I'm a bit unclear on what you're trying to say. Maybe you could expand it a bit so I could understand. 

I saw you the other day. Huge falang with man boobs and no shirt.

Please stop going out in public. 

They're looking for a reason to get you kicked out of Thailand. What did you do? Annoy them with useless drivel? 

Here's how it works. Each VPN provider has a pool of IP addresses at each server that it gives one of to your connection when you connect to that server. Once the provider (BBC in this case) determines your IP is in one of the pools it will block you.

I recently switched from nordvpn due to their ridiculous renewal policy that charges full price when you renew. My  new VPN, torguard has a renewal policy which gives you the rate you signed up at automatically at renewal. 

Anyway, I was having the same problem as the OP, but not with the BBC. Torguard assigned me a fixed IP address that was not in any pool that will never be caught by the BBC, etc. Because I was about to cancel, they did not charge for this feature that is normally extra. So 3 years for $66 and renewal at the same rate when that expires.