Doesn’t anyone else think it’s weird, that a company that makes a good deal of money by selling software for creating web stuff, seems to have no clue on how to maintain their own pages? I mean, we all know that it’s a colorful patchwork of thrown together sub-systems and most of us by now probably have accepted the slowness of the forums, the dysfunctionalities of the knowledge base (I truly do understand the frustration of users there when moderating their comments; it’s just a bloody mess) and even the ugliness of the store, but now even their blogs don’t work properly anymore. Maybe switching to the bitch that is WordPress wasn’t that good an idea, after all? At least the main landing page hasn’t updated properly for several days now. *yikes* That is one of the reasons, why I’m posting that little bit of info here or else you probably wouldn’t find it: Head master of all things After Effects doc, Todd Kopriva, has updated the foreign language versions of the online help to reflect some of the CS5 goodness that English users already have. And really, Adobe, when you can spend 185 millions on gobbling up another web company, clearly you must have those few thousand bucks to hire a WordPress expert to keep your blogs straight, don’t you?

Mmh, this second day doesn’t really offer any exciting news, but I’ve got to write something, so let’s see what we have. First, SideFX now officially presented Houdini 11. Considering that they had an announcement already almost 2 months ago, the Wow-factor isn’t that great. I also wasn’t particularly convinced by their sample videos, but then again those may have been rushed and not show the full potential.

Another, perhaps more relevant news (for the future at least) is the release of some specs for Alembic. Could be interesting, if it really can replace the various deformation, particle and point caching methods and formats used in different 3D apps, but that may be a while. At least they seem to have some good ideas on how to avoid point/ vertex list bottlenecks (the inefficiency of relevant sorting algorithms being a major reason, why many 3D apps eventually will still be slow as molasses when those lists need to be reorganized).

It’s that time of year again… Everybody is going to SIGGRAPH and pushing out new versions of their 3D software and users have to decide which way to go. That has been getting more difficult from year to year in the past already with prices dropping and even "small" programs becoming so feature reach that they already do more than one will probably ever need, but this year seems to be a make or break year for some products.

Most notably, Autodesk is putting a lot of pressure on competitors with their Entertainment Creation Suites Premium (yeah, it really does sound just as awkward and ominous as Adobe‘s suite branding) which include a ton of programs at a good price. If you read the signs, the inclusion of XSI as the baseline tool and the second one (Maya or MAX) being a choice item, you clearly get the impression that there is something cooking behind the scenes, indicating a possible merging of those apps. Not today and not tomorrow, but perhaps 3 or 4 years from now. You also get Mudbox and Lagoa Physics for ICE thrown in, which makes this a quite complete package for everything. Those 7000 bucks are still way over my budget, but considering, that at some point a single app alone would cost this, it’s quite amazing what you can buy for the money. Should be really interesting. They now have pretty much bought everything in terms of technology that they would need, now they just need to put it to use and either create a unified kilelr app or bring all apps consistently up to the same level…

In the more attainable world of mid-range 3D, there is some news on Lightwave. Obviously, their CORE project exploded in their face, but given NewTek‘s track record of poor development management and somehow always prioritizing the wrong things (let’s be honest: Who gives a fuck about creating a full custom skin for his 3D program, when in all seriousness the default one should cater all needs and be production ready?), I’m not really surprised. So before running out of money, they apparently decided to backward-transplant some of the more relevant parts from CORE to the "old" Lightwave and brand it as version 10 to get more people to sign up. Most of it is not particularly interesting to me, though, as I neither have need for game-centric features nor does the inclusion of Bullet physics give me a tingle, knowing how limited it is by itself and that it probably won’t integrate with Lightwave‘s own legacy particles and dynamics. So what’s left? Yes, it’s the interactive viewport rendering that may still pull me in. I’ve so gotten used to using FPrime and also the Preview in modo to tweak my stuff, that I can hardly do without it. It literally has helped me to produce 20 times more balanced, better renderings.

Slightly related to that, but more in an indirect way are rumours about SynthEyes 2011, the newest and latest version of this affordable 3D tracking and matchmoving tool. Adding geometry reconstruction sounds interesting, but then again their awful UI will not make it the most pleasant experience after all. Funnily, I was just running the demo of the 2008.1 version a few weeks ago because we may need to update/ replace our 2002 or so version (which in all these years we only used rarely enough as it is) for a potential upcoming project.

All that interesting 3D software is of course nothing without proper hardware to run it on, and in what seems more than just a coincidence, Apple also have announced the imminent release of new Mac Pros. Now I’m not particularly pro Mac these days, as they really, really, really have a list of serious issues to straighten out, but if someone would send me the money, I’d still take one – and run my Windows software on it (with an occasional boot into OS X). The performance is right and in this price range, it doesn’t really matter which logo is on the box, so one can indulge in the design factor at least.

Today’s again one of those wonderful days when the After Effects Error Code Database gets an update. Yepp, I’ve added a few more of those buggers and amazingly enough there’s always something new and unseen coming up. I have also straightened out most posts that were containing specific information on directories to point to the generic overview pages. This will be particularly handy when this info needs to be updated for future versions of After Effects. As is to be expected, I’ve also eliminated a few typos that caught my eye and have been lingering there for a while. And where do those 1.3 megabytes come from? It’s the size of the WordPress backup file, containing those wonderful 366 posts (= 366 error codes).

*"Babylon 5", season 2, ep. 2 "Revelations"

G’Kar (played by the unforgettable Andreas Katsulas who died much too soon…) would probably say something similar, if he would be confronted with the current state of the motion design industry. The level of ignorance, stupidity and laziness of some young kids is just as scary as seeing a Shadow vessel and the resulting degradation of quality that is to be expected from those generations to come indeed makes you weep. It’s really unfathomable, how someone could even get it in his mind to ask for the 10 most used effects in After Effects so he can just focus on learning them (which exactly sounds like "My work is crap, but as long as I throw on a ton of Trapcode Shine in every project, nobody will notice!") just the same as it completely eludes my comprehension, how someone cannot be bothered to explore techniques and modify them after having been pointed to a tutorial. O my gosh…! At that rate, one day we will be back to doing titles by holding up hand-painted slates in front of the camera because even a simple text animation is too much to ask from these intellectually challenged…