Saturday, October 3, 2009

My First Demo Reel!

The time has come, and I've delivered my first Animation Demo Reel!

The video below shows my best work so far, though I'm currently working on something else. Maybe later this month I'll update it to a newer version, with more animations and some minor fixes.

I had this video ready for CGCON in Montreal, where I had the oportunity to let the guest speaker, Kenny Roy, give some critiques on it.

Enjoy it and let me know what you think!





P.S.- I uploaded the video on Youtube, but it cut the audio off. Anyways, you can find it here.

Thursday, October 1, 2009

3D Studio Max not "undo-ing"

In the past, I had a problem with 3DSMax (version 2008 in particular) where I was working normally and suddenly, when I pressed the undo hotkey (Ctrl-Z by default) it went back 20 actions (or more), not the last one. Sometimes, it didn't undo any action at all! This was specially critical when animating a biped, when in some cases I had to restart Max several times a day to make the undo work.

I made a research on the internet but couldn't find a solution, neither enough documentation about the problem itself. So, I decided to try some things on my own. First I thought there was a script doing some nasty things, but since some of my friends had the same problem without any custom script running on their PCs, that cause was automatically discarted. I also heard that increasing the number undo levels will correct the situation. Nope, it didn't. I set the number of undos to 150 but the undo still stopped working.

Then, I looked at the processes related to 3DSMax that were running in the background. And I found this little process called raysat_3dsMax2008_32server.exe. Again, I couldn't find much information about it (I believe it's used for render farm capabilities) so I decided to stop the process and see what happens.



The picture above shows the 3DSMax process in the Windows Task Manager.

Bingo! Since then, the undo is almost always working. It's been almost 3 weeks since I discovered this solution, and the undo stopped working only 2 times since then. This is a considerable improvement taking into account the previous 3 to 5 software restarts per day I had to do.

A couple of tips related to this issue:
- To kill this process, first right-click on the clock in the Windows task bar (the bar at the bottom where the "Start" button is) and select "Task Manager". From there, look for the process and press the "End process" button.
- In 3DSMax, a good way to find out if your undo stack is still working, just right-click on the undo button in the main toolbar. This button is located to the most-left of the toolbar, so you might need to scroll it to find it.

So, if you're having trouble with the undo, follow this procedure. I think this problem is not an issue anymore in 3DSMax 2009 and above, but I'm not really sure.

Have fun!

Kron.