Plastic Animation Paper – PAP:Pro 4.0 for free.

Woah!  plastic animation paper for free!

sweeeeeeeeeeet!

So I uploaded the movie to youtube and put it on the downloads page.  You can also see it here:

Some day I’d like to re-write greasePencil so it’s actually got good drawing tools and isn’t such a hack.. but I probably won’t get around to it for a while.  Of course, if Autodesk wrote it appropriately for integration with Maya, that would be AWESOME, too.

js_matchObj.mel and js_matchObjUI.mel.

I’ve heard of others missing these as well, so I added them to the downloads page, along with js_iterator.mel.

If you’re missing them.. enjoy!

note: you must be logged in to download.

Integrating a Creature Rig Into a Production Pipeline

1. Definition of a “Pipeline”
   1. Examples: Film, Modeling, Shot
   2. Determining how animation rig itself fits into the rest of the pipeline
   3. Animation-based transfer
   4. Control-based transfer
2. Definition of a “creature”
   1. Creating a node to represent the “creature”
   2. Defining Types of nodes
3. Orienting Joints
   1. Manually Re-orienting joints
   2. Automatic re-ordering
4. Animation Control Concepts
   1. Iconic Representation
   2. Limiting Selection and keyability
   3. Rotation Order
   4. Extra Gimbal Control
   5. Customized PickWalking
5. Automatic vs Manual Shoulder Control
   1. History of the discussion
   2. Constraint based control
   3. SetDrivenKey based control
6. Creating a “realistic” forearm
   1. Radius and Ulna
   2. Creating the Control Structure
7. FK/IK Back Control
   1. History
   2. Creating the spline IK
   3. Adding Stretching
   4. Creating the IK Control Structure
   5. Adding FK
   6. Adding Twist
   7. Adding Stretch Warning
8. Procedural Animation Rigs
   1. What is a procedural rig?
   2. Creating the rig
   3. Updating the rig
9. Included MEL Scripts
   1. endName.mel
   2. jsChannelCtrl.mel
   3. jsConstObj.mel
   4. jsCreateCreature.mel
   5. jsDefineCreature.mel
   6. jsGetShape.mel
   7. jsListCreatures.mel
   8. jsMovIn.mel
   9. jsMovOut.mel
   10. jsOrientJointUI.mel
   11. jsPickWalk.mel
   12. jsRenameWindow.mel
   13. jsRotateOrder.mel
   14. jsScaleJointsByCurve.mel
   15. jsUnlockTransforms.mel

Fast Animation Rigs – Bridging the Gap between Speed and Functionality

1. Fast Animation Rigs
   1. Global Concepts
      1. Display Layers
      2. Easily identifiable Controls
      3. Appropriate Rotation Orders
      4. Tidy Scene
   2. Leg Control – fast reverse foot setup
   3. Isolation of Movement
      1. History
      2. Head
   4. FK/IK Arms
      1. Maya’s fk/ik toggle
      2. jsFkIKSetup – a better solution
   5. Misc Speed Techniques – What’s fastest?
      1. Direct Connections
      2. Expressions
      3. Point Constraint
      4. Drive from same source
      5. Math Nodes
   6. Other Speed Techniques
      1. Object visibility
      2. Shaded Mode
      3. Nurbs vs Polys
      4. Keeping track of FPS
2. Pipeline Methodology
   1. File Structure
      1. Base Directory
      2. Revision System
      3. Resolution System
      4. Updating
   2. Incremental Rigging – Blocking, Animating, Finessing
      1. Switching Between Rigs
      2. File Referencing
      3. Transferring Animation
3. Fast Animation Technique
   1. Gather Information
   2. Thumbnail
   3. Staging
   4. Blocking
   5. First pass
   6. Second pass
   7. Third Pass
   8. Facial
   9. Secondary/External
4. Included Mel Scripts
   1. jsAddBoolAttr.mel
   2. jsAddMessageAttr.mel
   3. jsAddStringAttr.mel
   4. jsAlignToJoint.mel
   5. jsChooseItem.mel
   6. jsCopyAnim.mel
   7. jsCopyPos.mel
   8. jsCopyRot.mel
   9. jsDuplicateControl.mel
   10. jsErrorMsg.mel
   11. jsFindChildJoint.mel
   12. jsFindConnected.mel
   13. jsFindFkIkChars.mel
   14. jsFixPrefix.mel
   15. jsFkIkArmRig.mel
   16. jsFkIkSetup.mel
   17. jsFkIkSetupEverything.mel
   18. jsFkIkWin.mel
   19. jsGetRefFile.mel
   20. jsMakeFkIkConnections.mel
   21. jsreferenceRig.mel
   22. jsReferenceRigUI.mel
   23. jsRigUI.mel
   24. jsToggleFkIk.mel
   25. moveIkToFk.mel

Seriously, go read them.  You’ll be missing out on some pretty neato spreadsheet magic.

Go on, it’s okay.  I’ll wait.

…

Okay, you done?  Great!

In part III, we’re going to create the Collection bit of the spreadsheet where we get the value of our cards and calculate how much our collection is worth!

Oh man, can’t wait to sell the whole thing and buy a new Apple Tablet.

Yeah, I know they don’t “officially” exist yet, but I’m allowed to dream, aren’t I?

Okay, our current spreadsheet has two Sheets.. a blank Collection sheet, and our Pricelist that we downloaded and imported in part 2.

The Collection sheet is going to have the following columns: Card Name, Count, and Value. These should be pretty self explanatory, but just to make sure everyone is on the same page here..

Card Name will be the name of the card I want the value of.  It should match one of the names from the Pricelist sheet.

Count is the number of these cards that I have.

Value is going to be the associated price of the Card Name from the Pricelist sheet, multiplied by the Count.

So far so good?  Great!  Here’s an image of my spreadsheet so far with those headings placed at A1, B1, and C1.

Let’s go ahead and just enter the name of a card in A2.  For the fun of it, let’s pick a card that’s worth quite a bit of money.  How about.. Ancestral Recall from the Alpha series of cards.

Select A2 and type:

Ancestral Recall (A)

Obviously nothing happens yet, because we haven’t told C2 to get the price.  We’ll use the VLOOKUP function here to make the query.

Select C2 and type:

=VLOOKUP(A2;Pricelist.A2:B14317;2;1)

Remember.. the first field is the cell we want to grab and the second field is the array we’re going to search.  The third is the column within that array that we’re going to return, and the fourth is whether or not we’re sorting.  Since our pricelist is sorted alphabetially, we’re going to enter “1″ for the sort value.

Notice something special in the second field.. we’re specifying a specific sheet to search for the array: Pricelist.A2:B14317.  This tells oocalc to go to a different sheet than the one we’re currently on.  If we didn’t do this, we would be searching the current sheet, and that wouldn’t do us any good at all.

We’re not quite finished yet, we still need to enter a Count.  Let’s pretend that we actually were really lucky and found 4 of these Ancestral Recall (A) cards.  Go ahead and enter 4 in B2.

Notice the value didn’t update, so we need to update the VLOOKUP function to multiply the value by the count.  Change VLOOKUP to:

=VLOOKUP(A2;Pricelist.A2:B14317;2;1) * B2

Not bad!  However, we still need to make a few more adjustments.  First, remember in part 1 when we copied and pasted our function it would offset the search values?  That’ll happen again if we copy C2 to C3.  Give it a shot and see what you get:

C2: =VLOOKUP(A2;Pricelist.A2:B14317;2;1) * B2

C3: =VLOOKUP(A3;Pricelist.A3:B14318;2;1) * B3

Some of the offsetting is fine.. A2 to A3 and B2 to B3 for example.  But the Pricelist.A2:B14317 being changed to Pricelist.A3:B14318 isn’t going to work.  Again, we need to use the $ symbol to lock down the cells we don’t want to adjust.

Change C2 to:

=VLOOKUP(A2;Pricelist.A$2:B$14317;2;1) * B2

Now you can copy and paste the field without it doing the wrong thing.

BUT you notice that if you DO paste into C3 without putting the name of anything in A3, you get a big lovely #N/A.  That means that the function is working, but it’s not returning a valid value.  That’s pretty ugly, isn’t it.  Let’s fix the display by telling the function to just return a blank string if there’s noting in A3.  We can do that using a Conditional!

We’re going to use an IF statement to check and see if A3 is blank.  If it is, we’ll display a blank value.  If not, then we’ll use our VLOOKUP function.

IF works like this:

IF ( Test; Then_value; Otherwise_value).

For example, if you had a value of “foo” in A1 and put this function in B1:

=if (A1=”foo”;”doo”;”darn”)

B1 would see that A1 does indeed = “foo”, so it would return “doo”.  If we did:

=if(A1=”poo”;”doo”;”darn”)

and A1 was still “foo”, then the expression would see that A1 didn’t equal “poo”, so it would return “darn”.

Does that make sense?

Here’s how we’re going to change our expression in C2:

=IF(A2=”";”";VLOOKUP(A2;Pricelist.A$2:B$14317;2;1) * B2)

Then copy and paste this into C3.  Notice the #N/A is gone?  That’s because we’re using the IF statement to check and see if A2 is blank.  Since it is, then this reuturns a blank string.  That looks much better!

Now let’s go ahead and enter another expensive card name in A3.. this time let’s use.. Badlands (A).

Notice the Value didn’t update.  That’s because we didn’t enter a count number.  If we simply change the value of count to 1, you’ll see the Value gets updated correctly:

Wouldn’t it be great if by default the count assumed it was always 1?  We can certainly do that by adding another function into our Value function.. MAX.

MAX will take a list of numbers and return the maximum number.  For example:

MAX(1;50) = 50

MAX(0;10;20;-5) = 20

MAX(.5;.7;150;10010) = 10010

Since we know that most of the time we’ll have 1 or more cards, we can assume that our anything lower than 1 should be returned as… 1.  So all we need to do is change the part of our function where we get the count from B2 to MAX(1;B2).  Then if B2 is 0, it will still return 1.  If it’s 10, then the funciton will return 10.  Sweet!

Go ahead and change C2 to the following function and then paste it into C3:

=IF(A2=”";”";VLOOKUP(A2;Pricelist.A$2:B$14317;2;1) * MAX(1;B2))

Notice that C3 now returns the proper value of the card.. and if you change B3, it will still add up correctly.

Nice!

The last bit of the tutorial is probably the coolest.. I can’t wait for you to see it!

You’ve probably noticed while scrolling through the list of card names that some of the Magic cards can be quite hard to spell..

It would be really easy to accidentally type in a name wrong and get the wrong value, or no value at all.  We could put in some crazy checking, but with 14,316 cards.. I’d much rather there was an easier way to search and enter card names.

Luckly, there is!

We can use the Validity feature of OOCalc!  It’s a great tool that lets you specify what exactly can be allowed to be entered into a cell.  We’ll use it on the Card Name column to ensure that only the cards shown in the Pricelist can be entered!

To do this, select A2.

Go Data -> Validity

This will bring up the Validity window:

Here, you can tell oocalc exactly what type of item to allow in the cell.  The coolest thing is that you can choose a Cell Range.  That’s right.. we can pick the range of cells that are in our Pricelist that have the actual names of the cards.  Not only will this limit the input to only allow those names.. but it will actually create a dropdown option box so the person entering the names can just simply pick the one they want!

Yeah, that’s a LOT of italics, but it’s so cool!

Go ahead and tell it to allow a Cell Range:

Now enter the range:

Pricelist.A$2:A$14317

Make sure Show Selection List is on.

Click OK

You’ll notice that there’s now a pulldown next to A2.  Go ahead and click on it.. you’ll get a pulldown of all the items in the pricelist!

Just pick the one you want and you’re done!

The rest is up to you.. just copy and the rows as you need them and you’ll be able to get the values of each card!

Enjoy!

If you recall, we ended up with two tables.. a price list and an itemized list of things we’re going to purchase, complete with the number of each item, the price per item, and the total cost.  Here’s the result:

Now we want to do the same thing, but with the price list for our entire Magic The Gathering collection.

Sweet.

In the last post I mentioned a great site where you can get the current going rate for Magic cards.. http://www.magictraders.com/.  So the this part of the tutorial will be how to take the price list and create an Open Office Calc spreadsheet with it.

It should be noted that I’m using Open Office 3 for this tutorial on OS X.  The same principle should apply for Excel, Open Office 2, and most other spreadsheet programs.  I like Open Office because it’s free.. open source.. and pretty powerful.

Step 1: Download the price list

To get the price list, simply go to the MagicTraders website navigate to their pricelists.

You’ll see that they have a few different price lists you can download.  For my collection, I just needed the Non-Foil Physical Magic Cards, and picked the Pipe-Delimited Format. This looks something like:

Card|Price|StdDev|Average|High|Low|Change|Raw N
AErathi Berserker|0.75|0.00|0.75|0.75|0.75|0.00|1
AEther Barrier|0.40|0.10|0.40|0.50|0.30|0.00|2
AEther Burst|0.42|0.12|0.42|0.50|0.25|-0.00|3
AEther Charge|0.25|0.00|0.25|0.25|0.25|0.00|2
AEther Figment|0.27|0.13|0.27|0.56|0.03|0.00|15
AEther Flash (6th)|0.44|0.20|0.44|0.71|0.25|-0.00|3

By inserting the “pipe” or “|” character between fields, it’s very easy for OOCalc to interpret this and turn it into a spreadsheet.  Simply click on the link (you can go there directly by going to: http://www.magictraders.com/pricelists/current-magic-excel.txt).  This will display the link in your browser.

You can then download this file as a text file simply by going File->Save Page As.. and saving the text file somewhere you can find as current-magic-excel.txt.

I usually just save mine on my desktop so I can find it easily.

Step 2: Load the file into OOCalc

Next, we’re going to load the file as a spreadsheet into OOCalc.

In OOCalc, choose File -> Open

Navigate to your desktop (or wherever you saved the file) and load current-magic-excel.txt.

Oocalc will launch a Text Import wizard that will allow you to specify how Oocalc should interpret the file.

As you can see, right now it’s just importing each line as one big field.  We want to break up the items by the “|” character.  To do that, we’re going to click the other checkbox, and type a | character into the field.  You’ll imediately notice the difference in how the fields will be imported:

Click OK and oocalc will open with the entire price list.  It’s a big spreadsheet, but the whole thing will be in there loaded just as you’d like.  Super sweet.

This is a brand new document that Oocalc created.  If you look down at the bottom of the window, you’ll notice a little tab that says Sheet1.

What we’re going to do is insert another “sheet” so our document contains two sheets.. one that’s our collection, and the other that’s our price list.

Step 3: Making Multiple Sheets

Right-click on Sheet 1 and rename it to “Pricelist”.  That way we’ll have a dedicated sheet that we know is our pricelist.

Click OK

Next, we’ll add another sheet and name it “Collection”.

Right-click next to Pricelist and choose Insert Sheet.

Name the sheet  Collection.

Click OK

Now you have two sheets in your document.. Collection and Pricelist.  By clicking on the tabs at the bottom, you can flip back and forth between the two.

Save your document so you don’t loose any of your hard work!

In the next post, I’ll show you how to create the collection list, and use the super-crazy-handy Validity tool so you don’t have to type in the names of your cards each time you want to add a new one!

Just recently some friends at work have started playing Magic The Gathering again.  MTG was one of the first collectible card games from Wizards of the Coast. I got a bit hooked on it back in the late 90′s and used to play quite a lot with friends.  The “official” definition from Wikipedia goes as follows:

Each game represents a battle between powerful wizards, known as “planeswalkers“, who use the magical spells, items, and fantastic creatures depicted on individual Magic cards to defeat their opponents. Although the original concept of the game drew heavily from the motifs of traditional fantasy role-playing games such as Dungeons & Dragons, the gameplay of Magic bears little resemblance to pencil-and-paper adventure games, while having substantially more cards and more complex rules than many other card games.

There’s even a YouTube channel that teaches you how to play!

Honestly, it’s not nearly as geeky as it sounds.  In fact, I believe quite secretly that it was playing this game that really made my wife think “wow.. this American’s not nearly as dorky as I first thought!”

Please.  Let me have my delusions.

Anyway, I kind of forgot about the game for the past 6 years or so and was a bit surprised the other night when it came up in conversation.  What was even more surprising was that one of the animators at work mentioned how much his cards were worth the last time he sold them (to protect his identity, I’ll call him “Don”).  Turns out he made quite a healthy buck by selling his cards to a collector over EBay.

I realized that I actually have quite a few cards sitting down in my basement that might actually be worth some money, so I pulled them out and started looking through various web sites to try and figure out how much they might be worth.

This ended up being incredibly tedious.  For each card I’d go to EBay, search for the card type, find a few prices, average out what the card was worth and try and come up with a “good guess” of what the card is going for.  Every card search was taking 5-10 minutes of investigation.

There had to be a better way.

I realized that what I really wanted was to get a full list of all the card prices that I could find, then take a list of all the cards I have and cross-reference them to determine the prices.  I did a bit of searching and found an awesome site called http://www.magictraders.com/ that has updated price guides every day and week.  The great thing is that you can download the lists into a text file that is easily slurped into a program like Open Office Calc!  For example, if you go here: http://www.magictraders.com/pricelists/current-magic-excel.txt you will get something that looks like:

Card|Price|StdDev|Average|High|Low|Change|Raw N
AErathi Berserker|0.75|0.00|0.75|0.75|0.75|0.00|1
AEther Barrier|0.60|0.29|0.60|0.99|0.30|0.15|3
AEther Burst|0.42|0.12|0.42|0.50|0.25|-0.00|3
AEther Charge|0.25|0.00|0.25|0.25|0.25|0.00|2
AEther Figment|0.27|0.13|0.27|0.56|0.03|0.01|15
AEther Flash (6th)|0.44|0.20|0.44|0.71|0.25|-0.00|3
AEther Flash (7th)|0.36|0.14|0.36|0.56|0.20|-0.00|7
AEther Flash (WL)|0.34|0.04|0.34|0.37|0.30|-0.00|2
AEther Membrane|0.29|0.05|0.29|0.37|0.25|0.00|4

Cool, eh?  It has the card name, the price, the average price, high, low, etc etc.  Tons of data.

So once I found this, I figured I could just turn that into a table in Open Office Calc and then cross reference it with my list of cards.  But how to do this elegantly?

I thought I would start by taking the same concept.. a list of items with a price and see how I could build a way of building a list of how many items I had and how much they cost.

I’ll explain in greater detail.  Let’s say I wanted to go shopping and I was going to purchase 3 apples, 2 bananas, and one feijoa.  I want to find out how much that’s going to cost.  I also have a list of a bunch of fruit and how much each item costs.  What I can do is use that second list as data to figure out the total cost of what I’m going to buy.  Let me show you how.

First, I’m going to create a list of fruit and cost by opening up calc and creating the following list:

As you can see, it’s a list of fruit and their associated costs per item.  Then I want to build a list of what fruit I’m going to purchase.  So I added this table to my page:

Now I just typed in the fruit and number of each piece that I wanted to purchase:

Here you can see both the initial list and the items and amount of each item I want to purchase.  Notice there’s no price showing up in my purchase list yet.  This is where the fun begins!  What I want to do is cross reference the item with the price from the list above.  For example, in cell C9, I want the function to answer the question “What is the cost of an apple?”.  Another way to put it is: “Please look at the item in A9.  Find that same item in the list from A2 to A5.  Once you’ve found that item, tell me what the value is from the B column.”

Fortunately, there’s a really easy way to get this information using the VLOOKUP function.

Simply put, the VLOOKUP function will allow you to search an array of cells to match a certain string and then return the result from the specified column.

In other word: VLOOKUP(<string to search for>; <array of cells to search>;<column from the array to return from>;<mode>).

In this example I would do:

=VLOOKUP(A9;A2:B5;2;0)

So let’s explain each section.  The first item.. the “string to search for” is A9.  This is the cell we’re going to look at.  In the case of row C9 we’re asking the vlookup function to search for the word “apple”.

So where do we want it to search?  Well, we have a price list, so we want it to search in that list, right?  We know apple is SOMEWHERE between A2 and A5.  So we should put that as the array, right?  Well, we could.. but the VLOOKUP function wouldn’t be able to return the information we want.  The way this function works is you pass it all the columns the function will be dealing with, then you specify which column it’s going to return from.  We’re looking for both the name and the price of it, so we enter BOTH columns in our search array: A2:B5

Then we enter the column we’re going to return the value from.  In this case, B2 is the value we want.. that’s in the second column, so we enter 2.

Finally, we tell the function that we don’t care about sort order, so we set the mode to 0.

So here’s the function that we enter in that cell:

=VLOOKUP(A9;A2:B5;2;0)

And what result do we get?

Pretty nifty, right?

Now, let’s copy that function and paste it into C10 and see what the result is.  Select C9, hit ctrl+c (or command+c on the mac).  Then go to C10 and hit ctrl+v (command+v on mac).  You should get the price of the banana.

This seems pretty straightforward, right?  just copy and paste.. copy and paste.  However, if you check out the function for cell C10, you’ll notice it’s changed.. the new function is:

=VLOOKUP(A10;A3:B6;2;0)

Did you see the difference?

The range that the function is searching has shifted down a cell.  Previously the range was A2:B5 and now it’s A3:B6.  This is because we didn’t explicitly say what the range should be.  When you enter a cell coordinate into a function, you have to tell open office calc whether or not to shift those cells when you copy and paste.  So how do we do that?

OOcalc has a nifty way of locking those cells down.. simply by entering a $ in front of either the Cell or the Row.  So in our case, we need to actually change our initial function in C9 to this:

=VLOOKUP(A9;A$2:B$6;2;0)

Now, if we copy that and paste it into C10 the function will look like:

=VLOOKUP(A10;A$2:B$6;2;0)

Notice that the search area stayed the same, ensuring we’re searching the correct cells, but the cell representing the string we’re looking for shifted appropriately (A9 to A10).

The next step is to simply copy that function to all the other slots in the C row that are appropriate.  In the case of our list, just to C11, but if you wanted to buy more produce.. add more lines and go for it!

Now that we have the cost of each individual item, we need to tally up the cost based on the number of items we’re going to purchase.  To do this, select D9 and enter the following function:

=B9*C9

This will give us the actual cost of each item of fruit.  Copy that function to D10 and D11 and we’ll get the cost for each item we’re purchasing.

Finally, we want to sum up the total cost.  Here, we’ll use a simple SUM function to get the number of items we’re purchasing, and the total cost (minus taxes, shipping fees, etc.).

In B13 enter the following function:

=SUM(B9:B12)

And then copy that function to D13 and we’re done!

Now you can see how easy it is to build a list of items based on an initial price list.

In the next post, I’ll talk about how to extend this to creating a really useful way of tracking your Magic Card Collection and value.

Another georgeous and awesome cousin Zeva Bellel has a great site called Paris By Appointment Only.

Now, one of my cousins from my dad’s side of the family has started this really cool project called The Grok Project.  Starting in november, Ian is going to spend three years steping through the entire history of science and technology by re-creating and experiencing as much of it as possible,  blogging about the whole thing (yay internets!).

Some of the cool things he plans on doing to “grok” science are:

• Make stuck stone tools
• make copper tools
• make woven cloth
• visit a copper mine
• impress cuneiform writing on clay tablets
• Measure earth’s circumference/diameter using eratosthenes’ method
• make a blowgun
• build hand-cranked rotary fan
• build a trebuchet
• measure the speed of light
• hot air ballooning
• assemble an internal combustion engine
• scuba diving
• build a telephone
• build a vacuum tube
• extract/splice DNA
• build a humanoid robot

and more!

Check out the project as it moves forth.. I smell a TV show coming on!!

I’m not one to usually covet microsoft products.. but oh man this looks amazing.  I love my tabletPC.. I’d love it more if it were a mac.  But this.. this.. this may pull me away from mac..

MAY pull me away..

Right off the bat I am definitely liking the ability to quickly add tasks using the simple “a” hotkey.  You can also organically add contexts as you work by simply typing something like:

Email ron@happyhollow.com about the backpacking adventure @email

and it will quickly add the context for you.  Very handy!

You can also have nested projects, and you can color them to make it easier to tell them apart. Below, you can see my task list for the next 7 days.  Notice how clean it looks?  I love the nested projects, the clear color separation, the projects & contexts.  It’s just clean and easy to read.

Now this doesn’t mean I don’t have any issues with how todoist works currently.  Firstly, switching a task between projects isn’t as easy as it could be.  Currently you have to click on a little down arrow, choose “move to another project” and then choose that project from a list.  It would be better if you could just drag it to the project.. after all, it’s listed right there on the left!

Also, you can’t do group edits yet, you have to edit things one at a time which is frustrating.

When entering a task, you have to click on the date field.  I wish I could just tab over to the date, or just enter “wednesday”.. but right now I have to click on the date field.

Of course the biggie.. there’s no mobile application for it yet.  Arrgh!

1. It has to be cross-platform.  At work I use Linux, at home I use Mac, and in meetings I use my iPhone and pen/paper.  So I need to be able to add tasks in any environment, and get access to my information at any point as well.
2. It has to be fast.  If it takes too long to enter data, it’s not worth it.
3. It has to be flexible.  There’s no way I’m going to be able to develop the proper system right off the bat.  I’m expecting it to modify and change over time, so I want it to be flexible and easily scalable.
4. It has to be fun. If I don’t like using it, I never will.
5. It has to be visually pleasing.  Seems shallow, but when I look at it I want to think “woah momma!” not “oh grandpa, put your pants back on”.

Thanks to a quick email by the developer of http://gtdagenda.com who is doing a great job of getting the word out about his system, I’m making it my first pick to try using a GTD methodology for my work.  I’ve been using it for day and a half, and will post the results of my findings over the course of this week.  Since I’m learning this software as I use it, I’m sure there are going to be things I discover or things that power-users can tell me that I’m not aware of.  If you have particular tips and tricks about various softwares, please let me know!

This isn’t a full review, just some first impressions based on using it for the past day and a half.  Your mileage may vary.

GTD Agenta – First Impressions

My initial thought as signing up was that the website itself does a great job of giving you an overview of how the tool works.  It’s got screen shots, breaks things down into sections, and a quick read gives you the basics of how you can use gtdagenda rather quickly.  It even gives some examples of how to impliment GTD and ZTD with their tool.  Very handy!

Below I’ve listed some Pros and Cons based on my initial experience.

Pros

Dan (the developer) is very responsive. I’ve emailed him a few times and he’s been very quick to get back to me with responses and notes.  I’ve certainly used other software where the developers take a long time to get back to their users, or never do.  Dan responds personally to email, and also does a great job about getting the word out about GTDagenda.  He obviously is very passionate about it.

Eventual IPhone application (no ETA). One of my requirements is an iPhone application that syncs with the tool.  Currently GTDagenda has no iPhone app, but it does have a mobile version that works pretty well.  Unfortunately, I’m often in meetings where I have no internet access, and need to be able to have something local that I can sync with.  Dan has mentioned that there is an iPhone app on the way, but there’s no ETA on it.

Context/Projects list on right is very nice. I really like that on the right hand side of the screen are you list of contexts and projects.  You can quickly filter by either of these and each one shows you how many tasks are in those contexts or project.  Cool!

Projects with tasks but no “Next Action” flag turn red. This is a great way to make sure that all your projects can move forward.  Super awesome fantastic!

Interaction is relatively fast, no long redraw time . While not the speediest web app, it’s certainly no dog.

Checklists.  A great way to help you form productive habits.  Like going to the gym every day.  Nice.

Calendar on the sidebar. I like the calendar on the right to quickly see what’s due or done on any given day.

High Level Goals. Basically this is like grouping the projects into bigger projects. Handy for doing things like “Projects – Mine” and “Projects – Others” for projects you’re responsible for, but other people are doing them.

Email Notification – you can have GTDagenda email you every day with your “next actions”.  Nice!

Cons

No current iPhone app, only web access. If you work where you have spotty access, this limits ability to use GTDAgenda

Only 1 context per task. I like to use multiple contexts to handle people, departments, locations, etc

Can’t assign a “person” to a task. For example, if I’m waiting for John to finish a shot, I want the @waiting for context, and the @john context.

Very linear workflow.  You MUST create a project and a context before you create  a task.  If you’re in the middle of creating a task and then you need to add a context, you loose your task creation.  This really inhibits my workflow.

No quick way to add a task. You must be in Task/Next Action, or project pages.

Adding contexts and projects wasn’t intuitive right off the bat. The first time I wanted to add a context I had to hunt around to find it.

UI seems a bit messy. I prefer the clean UI of Todoist

Date due can’t have a specific time, only a day

Not “AJAX”ey enough. This is totally subjective, but I prefer the interaction of Todoist.

Can’t reorder tasks on Today. If I have a whole bunch of Next Actions, I would like to be able to look at them and then order them in the order I want to attack them.

No automatic assignment of Next Action. I would like to be able to automatically assign the next todo in a project to Next Action as soon as I complete the current Next Action.  This way I can stay in the Next Action page and just keep cruzing instead of having to then go over to the Projects page, set my next action, and then head back to the Next Action page.

Difficult to separate various tags in page lists. When looking at my list of things to do today, it would be great to easily see what I’m waiting for, what’s a @work task, etc. Having colored lines for specific tags would help this workflow.

So there you go.. first impressions after using the tool for one day.  I’ll keep on it for the week and then see how it goes with my weekly review at the end of the week.  Thoughts?  Suggestions? Opinions?  Send ‘em my way!

The place where I snagged this one is: http://www.webdesignlessons.com/

I tend to look at new themes quite often, testing them out, seeing how they work, and ultimately deciding not to change mine.  However, this one I felt was really fun and nice, and I love the featured blog post up at the top of the page.  Definitely go check out some of their other themes!

Oh, I did make one slight hack to this theme, and that was to add a link to the comments from the little bubble next to the post.

That was done by taking this line:

<h4><?php comments_number('0', '1', '%'); ?></h4> 

and replacing it with this one:

<h4><?php comments_popup_link('0', '1', '%', 'commentslink'); ?></h4> 

.post-top h4 a {

     color:#cdcdcd;

}

I think.. I believe.. that I’ve fixed it.

See, I read in passing that people like to use iframes to include hidden pages.  So I did a quick search on my site for iFrames, and found a post that had one in it that I wasn’t expecting.  So I removed it.. and now I’m not getting those errors anymore!

Sweet!

Please let me know if you see more malware warnings, and what page you were going to when you found them!

Thanks!

Wow.. my old office is now a museum!  Crazy!!

If anyone goes, I’d love to see photos.. I’m curious if my old desk is still there & if they have maniquins representing the animators “working at their desks”.  Is the ping pong table still there?

here are a couple of songs..

Check out the rest!

THRU YOU | Kutiman mixes YouTube.

Please go check it out ‘cuz it’s totally awesome!

I’ve been trying to write a really cool spreadsheet that will allow me to keep track of various phases of a project. I’ve got some fun things working, but have gotten stuck with one of the oddities of the way open office handles conditional formatting.

For those of you who don’t know, conditional formatting is a cool features that allows you to change the style of a cell based on the content. For example, I can make a cell “yellow” when the project is launched, green when it’s in progress, and black when it’s done.

The problem is that there are only 3 conditional formats allowed.. and there are WAY more than 3 phases to a project.

I’ve detailed my problem in the open office forums here, but if any of you have any suggestions I’d love to hear ‘em!

Cheers!

This friday I’m going to be speaking at the Digital Media Arts College graduation ceremony.  I’ve spent the past few weeks trying to write a speech about owning your career & working towards a goal.  It’s been quite fun driving around, pretending to give the speech, realizing that I have WAY too many stories that are WAY too long to fit into a 15 minute talk.

Next week I’ll post the finished speech here for people to read, but in the meantime I thought I’d include one of the stories I had to cut.  This isn’t a “funny” story, but it’s meant to illustrate a point:  that it’s possible to achieve a goal if you understand how to work towards it.

When I graduated from the University of California, Santa Barbara in 1996, I was working for a 3d animation software company called Alias|Wavefront.  You may have heard of them, they created the software Maya – one of the most popular 3d animation software’s around.   I had been interning at Alias|Wavefront for 6 months, learning the ins and outs of Maya and was on the track to become the key tech support person for the product.  This is because every other tech support person was focused on supporting the legacy products: Power Animator, Wavefront, Kinemation, Dynamation, TDI, etc.  I was new, so instead of training me up on their older products, I spent my time learning Maya.

At the time, Maya was in Alpha stage, meaning it was so brand new it didn’t even have a file->save option.  Seriously.  You couldn’t save a file.  Since Maya was not even out the door, there wasn’t much to support so I spent most of my time testing the code & making little demos.  At one point I was in a video conference meeting with some developers in Toronto when I heard about this guy Bubba who was making a short film in Maya.

My ears immediately perked up.

Short Film?  Here?  Somebody is making a short film?

I didn’t even know that a job like that was POSSIBLE at Alias|Wavefront, let alone that someone was doing it.  I immediately thought “man, that guy is so LUCKY!  I want that job!”

I knew that my career at A|W wasn’t heading in that direction, I was headed to become the guy explaining to the customers that the drink holder on the computer wasn’t too small to hold their coke, the can didn’t fit because it was a CD drive.

So I set about figuring out a way to switch departments.  I didn’t want to just leave the current job for a number of reasons.  First, burning bridges is bad.  It’s the worst thing you can do.  There’s a saying, it’s not what you know but who you know, right?  There’s a third part to the saying..  It’s not what you know, but who you know and how you treat them.  So I didn’t want to piss off my boss.  Second, I didn’t know if Bubba needed anyone else on his team.  Third, even if he wanted another person, there was no way he’d know about me.

I realized that the first thing I had to do was solve the problem of my boss being upset if I left.  Since I was one of the people in the support department with the most knowledge about Maya, it stood to reason that I was going to be the main support person once Maya got released.  If I wasn’t there, then the team would have to scramble until everyone else got up to speed.  So I spent the next few weeks writing up a course explaining everything I knew about Maya and how it worked.  It was designed to help people who already knew other 3d software understand how Maya worked so they could get up to speed quickly.

Then I went to my boss and told her that I’d like to teach the class to the support crew in Toronto.  Kind of spread the knowledge around so we wouldn’t be hit too hard once Maya went out to beta customers.  She thought it was a great idea & sent me to Toronto the next week to meet with the team up there.

While there I introduced myself to Bubba.  I told him that I heard he was working on a short film & said that if he needed any help I’d be happy to help out.  We talked for a bit & I showed him a few things in Maya that I had picked up over the past few months.  He invited me out to sushi with the other two members of the team (Corban and Adrian) so they could tell me about it.  We talked, and ate, and drank sake, and beer, and had more sake and more beer, and more beer, and more sake, and at the end of it they said that they’d be happy to have me help out.

They were also happy to stick me with the $300 bill, but I was so happy I didn’t even care.

6 months later I moved onto that team full time & stayed there for 3 years, creating demos, short films, and generally getting to travel around the world & talk about Maya.

This experience demonstrated to me that just wanting something isn’t enough.  You have to actively go out and seek it.  To work for it.  And most importantly, do it in a way that doesn’t piss anybody off.

Some of you may remember a website called 10 second club which has been around for a few years as a great testing-ground for animators. The concept was brilliant.. every month post a sound file and then let animators try and do their best to come up with the most unique and entertaining animation for that audio.

Unfortunately, 10secondclub is no more.. but fortunately, some excellent friends have opened up 11 second club (it’s one better!) which is basically the same thing, except this time it’s hosted by AnimationMentor.com!

Animation Mentor has provided a completely rad prize for the winner each month.. an official eCritique from a real animation mentor!  That’s right.. it’s a chance for the winner to get a critique just like the ones that we give students at the school.. but not only that, everyone can see the critique and learn from it!

What I love about this is that it gives the animator a great tool to improve themselves, and it also gives everyone a chance to see what an eCritique actually looks like.

The first critique was done by the famous Victor Navone, a hugely awesome person and animator who is just so talented it almost hurts.

The second critique was done by yours truly.. a very fun experience & I hope that Kevin (the november winner) finds it useful & informative!

Anyway, go check out 11secondclub.com and enjoy the experience!

So I had some pretty strict commenting regulations when I started this new blog to try and reduce the amount of spam.. but I noticed that I haven’t been getting many comments at all.  So I’m easing up the restrictions a bit in the hopes that it’ll mean more people will comment.

If we get overrun by spam, then I’ll have to tighten it again to needing a login/password in order to comment.. but until then, hopefully we’ll get a few more people talking!

Of course, it could just be that I’m not posting anything worth commenting about. 

Well, check this out..

Lenses for your iphone!  Cool!

Magnetic zoom & fish-eye lenses for iPhone 3G – SlashGear.

This is the coolest interface for drawing curves.  I love it when people start thinking outside the box about interfaces and how we work with our computers.  I can’t wait to see what the future holds.. especially when you start looking at this type of thing, combined with a multi-touch interface..

Another example is Jeff Han’s multi-touch demo at TED in 2006.  We have this type of thing available now with microsoft surface and with the iPhone.. sooo cool.

Oh yeah, and happy holidays!

This is so helpful.. it’s something that’s been frustrating me quite a bit.  I mean, I’m a HUGE apple fan.. I love ‘em.  Great computers.. great interface.. great design.. but they just piss me off when it comes to DRM.

For example.. I own lots of music.  And I want to listen to it at home, or at work.  Sometimes I’m at work and I buy music on my mac there.  But I can’t connect my work mac to my iphone to sync because you can only sync your iphone to ONE MACHINE.  AGH!  hell, at home I have 3 macs that I could possibly want music or movies from, but it still only lets me sync with one machine.

I also own dvds from all over the world.. but I can only switch regions 4 times on my mac.  Why?  WHY??  It’s my mac.. they’re my dvds.. let me switch regions to play them!

GAH!

Anyway, this post helps with some of the frustrations…

Copy Music from Your iPhone or iPod to Your Computer for Free.

As you can see, there were times when I wasn’t able to record what I was doing, especially wednesday.. a tough day.  But in general I got about 8 or 9 hours recorded.

You can also see that this was a very productive week for me.. over 15 hours of directly productive work.  That includes animating, giving reviews, etc.

Strategic mettings went well too, 11 hours of strategy.. planning for the future and making sure that I have stuff ready for.. you guessed it.. production!

Admin time is nice and small.. about 3 hours over the course of the week.  That includes email, time sheets, working on spreadsheets, etc.  You want to keep that admin stuff as small as possible, otherwise you’re wasting time!

And the thing I’m happiest about is the ME time.. 7 hours i was able to devote to bettering myself.. 5+ of that being gym specific time.  Some of it having lunch, or going for a walk.. VERY important to have that time when you can get it!

I’m going to continue the experiment next week and see how it goes!

When I first made the move I tried to do everything.. animate, supervise, fix problems, etc.  It was driving me crazy, and the quality of my work and of my supervision suffered.

I had to learn to delegate.  As difficult as it is to let things go, in order to survive you really need to learn to delegate anything that you don’t need to handle.  There are a couple of reasons (as always).

1)  you don’t have time

stop deluding yourself.  Yes, you want to do everything, but there aren’t enough hours in the day and you can’t change that.

2) the more you take on, the more you have to take on.

You know the old adage, give a man a fish and he can eat today, teach a man to fish and he can eat forever?  It’s totally true.  I know that it feels like as a supervisor your job is to solve every problem that your animators have.  That’s not exactly true.  Your job is to remove roadblocks and things that inhibit them from getting things done.  If you can help them solve their own problems by providing the correct resources, then in the future they’ll be able to help themselves and others.  If you always solve it, you’ll always have to solve it.  Does that mean that you should always pass the buck?  No, sometimes you do need to step in and fix it yourself.  But you should use that as an opportunity to teach.

Anyway, back to time management.

So it feels like you’ve got more work than there are hours, and there’s just no way to really get a handle on it.  I totally know how you feel.  I’m like that constantly.  It’s a real “problem” in that I always feel behind.  But I know there are probably at least 3 or 4 hours per week that I’m wasting and not taking advantage of.. so here’s what I’m going to do to try and tackle it.. try it yourself and see if it helps!

1)  I’m going to get a real sense of where my time is spent.

2) I’m going to look at where I need to spend my time to get my job done.

3) I’m going to try and make the changes necessary to adjust to a new schedule that actually works.

So how am I getting a sense of where my time is spent?  Simple!  I’m tracking it!

There are a number of cool online tracking tools you can use that will allow you to track hours, minutes, etc.. The one

I’m trying right now is called Toggl.  It’s in beta, but it’s really easy to track your time on various projects..

I’ve broken mine up into a series of sections:

Strategic – things I’m doing that will allow for future production – like setting up shots, character planning, meetings, etc

Production – things that lead directly to produced work (animation, reviews, etc)

admin – things that are administrative.. time sheets, spreadsheets, email, etc

Self – things for myself.. lunch,  gym, blogging, etc.

Then as I work, I can just pick which category I’m working in and make a note of what I’m doing.  At the end of the week I’ll be able to see where I’m spending my time & how I can manipulate it to better manage my time.

We’ll see how it goes..

I’ve tried gyms and weightloss programs in the past and always kind of give up on them.. the only time I ever really kept it up for an extended period of time was right before we had our first child Aurora. At that point I was giong to the gym every day for about 6 or 7 months and was in the best shape of my life. I felt & looked great (or so I was told , and had more energy than I can imagine.

Unfortunately, I left for a 4 day weekend and missed 2 days at the gym.. and after that, I just sort of gave up. It was like I would be ready to go, get a little busy and think “well.. I didn’t do it yesterday, so I can skip today and just go tomorrow..” and then the next day “okay, I’ve already skipped 3 days this week.. I’ll start clean on monday..” and so on and so on until I just didn’t go anymore.

And then 2 kids and 2 years later.. I’m at 199 pounds and nice and flabby.

But no longer. I know my problem.. I need to obsess and work out every single day or I’ll stop. So to help myself keep on track I’ve joined this website called gyminee and so far it’s been great.. 4 days in a row of working out and counting. I’ve lost a whole pound (woot!) and I’m already feeling much better.

What I like about gyminee is that I can create a workout or subscribe to another workout by other members. It has an easy way to track my progress over time, and I can even enter results directly into my iphone with it’s special iphone web app!

It’s been really handy at the gym. I pump up my music, click on the web-app, and as I work out I enter my results in real-time. Super crazy convenient.

So check out gyminee and if you join (or are already a member), add me as your buddy! then we can keep pushing each other to get fit!

I’m hoping that it’ll let me forgo the need for a true forum.. I’ve been having trouble keeping it up to date, as i just don’t have the time to really devote myself to a forum, but I do want people to be able to post questions & have them answered..

The cool thing about disqus is that it can handle threaded comments, and it’s possible to view everything as if it were a forum.. sort of.. just not sure exactly how it works.

time to investigate, I guess.

This year they’ve put some of us at Leo decaprio’s hotel The Standard.

Very nice hotel… I feel like totally not cool enough to stay here

Off to breakfast…

Of course, bbpress will have to release the newest version (0.9) so it’s compatible with the current version of wordpress.. but hopefully they’ll do that soon and I’ll be able to upgrade.

It’ll be nice to get away from joomla/smf and have something smaller, faster, and easier to work with.

In the meantime, here’s a photo.

компютри втора употреба