Matt Jones Tech
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  • Switching from Windows to Manjaro Linux

    I use Adobe CC on a Windows machine for my video production pipeline at work. I do video side work on the weekends, and have used Windows and Adobe for those projects as well, but I’ve always felt trapped. Like I’m a slave to Adobe or something. I’ve spent most of my professional career learning and using software like Premiere Pro, After Effects, and Photoshop.

    Making the Switch

    I’ve used Ubuntu a TON, as it’s a super popular distro, and it was my introduction to Linux. A few months back, I was checking out https://opendata.blender.org/ and noticed that a good chunk of data was coming from a distro called Manjaro, but I’d never heard of it. Shortly after seeing all that performance data, I decided to give Manjaro a shot. After some basic research, I discovered Manjaro is actually based on Arch (unlike Ubuntu, based on Debian).

    I gotta say, installing Manjaro was a breeze (cursor theme). I will admit however, I have never known the pain of installing Arch. Like actual Arch. But I’m aware of the memes. So I’m sure it’s pretty involved. While I can’t exactly go around trolling like, “btw I use arch”, I was seriously surprised at the installation and how much was up and running right out of the box! Ubuntu is pretty straightforward, but depending on the hardware, you may need to find a few hacks or packages to get everything full up and running. For example, I couldn’t get the wifi working when I put Ubuntu on my 10 year old Macbook until I installed a special package that didn’t come with the default install.

    Everything Works.

    Immediately… Very first boot up. Everything works. Hardline network connection works. Wifi card works. GRAPHICS look great. Manjaro automatically grabs graphics drivers for you upon install! And I was actually impressed with the pre-installed software collection. Most of the time, in Ubuntu, I have to delete a bunch of crap software I’ll never use. But Manjaro… Like, I use Steam all the time. It’s pre-installed. Libre Office pre-installed. Tweaks pre-installed. Gparted pre-installed (this might be normal). But I was really surprised how little I actually had to do post-installation.

    Smooth UI Experience

    It’s a bunch of little things that add up to a massive amount of time saved. One of my pet peeves in Windows is switching apps on the task bar. If your app has multiple windows (like Blender, and a render window), you have to click once to reveal thumbnails, then click the thumbnail of the window you want. If they’re small or detailed windows like terminals, good luck. I love the single hot corner in the upper left to give you an expose-like look of all your running apps. I love the best-of-both worlds option to launch a full-screen app tray from the bottom left, or tap the drop-down xcfe-like ‘start menu’ from the upper left. It’s pretty awesome. Just gotta get used to typing pacman -S instead of apt-get

    Haven’t logged a ton of hours on Manjaro just yet, still very much in the “moving in” phase. Feeling great so far. Looking forward to diving into my brand new postproduction workflow in Manjaro using Blender, Resolve, Gimp, Inkscape, and Ardour. More on that in the coming weeks! Peace

    matt

    September 9, 2019
    Blender, Linux, Video Editing
    Blender, linux, manjaro, open source, pipeline, workflow

  • [VIDEO] “Never Forgotten” Full Animation

    Well… I guess it’s time. I’ve been working on this animation for longer than I care to admit, but I’m definitely ready to release this thing into the wild, take my lessons and move on. And when I say ‘lessons’… I mean LOTS of lessons. And I’m so glad I tackled this project the way that I did. I had some triumphs and some failures, and best of all I learned more about 3D animation during this project that I have in a very long time. Lots of familiar concepts like cell fractures, rigid body physics and particle sims, as well as TONS of new stuff like character animation, rigging, and interactive cloth simulation, clothing stitching, procedural shaders and loads more. So here it is in all its glory, the intro animation for “Never Forgotten”:

    matt

    September 5, 2019
    3D Animation, 3D Modeling, Blender
    3d animation, b3d, Blender, open source, pipeline, workflow

  • VFX Workflow: Start to Finish

    Last week I ran into some problems with a project at work that required me to have just basic knowledge of rigging. After burning over an hour watching and rewatching tutorials, and, because I was under a tight deadline, I got frustrated and eventually just edited the mesh directly to get a basic pose.

    Beginnings

    Now that I’ve hit the deadline and delivered the project, I spent the following weekend to fix my problem once and for all.

    I started with a basic mesh comprised of 7 different primitives.

    Which is fine, for arriving at a character shape fairly quickly, but trash when it actually comes time to rig and animate several primitives as if they were one. So once I got my turtle shape, I joined 2 primitives at a time, and joined up the meshes as best I could. Pair by pair, until I had a turtle mesh and a shell mesh. In hindsight, I would have just joined up the shell and the turtle to get one mesh, but that’s what this whole project was for: learning. Once I had my meshes joined, I marked my seams, and UV unwrapped. Then it was time for texture painting!

    Texture Painting

    Not the best UV unwrap, but it works for this project.

    Rigging

    Once my turtle was painted, it was time to rig. Now that the pressure was off, I had an opportunity to actually learn how to properly built a rig, set up IK constraints, and orient joints using pole targets. Woo!

    Motion Tracking

    Now that I had my rig all finished, I was ready to animate. And my IK constraints made it WAY easier to set a few keyframes and get a halfway decent animation. Next, motion tracking.

    This one actually took me a few hours because I was having to relearn how Blender’s requirements for reconstruction. 1) Blender requires 8 continuous tracking points from the first frame to the last to even have enough data to reconstruct the scene. 2) the average solve error needs to be 0.3 pixels to get an accurate track. My first try resulted in a solve error of 35.6 pixels. So eventually, after learning the requirements, trying some addons, and manually helping it along, I eventually whittled the solve error down to 1.4. Close… Technically usable, but still not the best. In the end, I learned a TON from building this little guy from scratch. So without further ado, I present to you, Shelly.

    Hopefully this helped someone. Thanks for reading!

    matt

    May 7, 2019
    3D Animation, 3D Modeling, Blender, Compositing
    3d animation, b3d, Blender, compositing, motion tracking, pipeline, rigging, vfx, workflow

Prove all things; hold fast that which is good. 1 Thess 5:21