Friday Flashback #22

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From “Fuel For The Mind”, edition 1, La Cite des Enfants Perdus—Buf Compagnie 1995
(aka The City of Lost Children)

http://vimeo.com/24917633

I remember watching this back in the old days when I worked at Softimage/Microsoft.
Many thanks to Miquel Campos for giving me this CD.

What’s this flea made of anyway? It’s not an electronic model, not a digitized photo, it’s a cute little chimera concocted in C. G. I., modelled, dreaded, and animated by his creators at the Buf Compagnie, using a mythological method of mathematics that took hundreds of hours on the computer.

The surface texture was obtain-ed by using several layers of lovely materials such as beach pebbles, green beans, snake skin, pig skin, leather, etc. The animators studied hours and hours of documentary films to find out how fleas act out there in nature. Now they know everything about how fleas hop, skip, jump, land, sting and drink, and do scores of dirty itchy tricks that have earned them a worldwide reputation.

Given the variety of shots where the flea would star, the animators modelled a series of fleas with varying degrees of definition. The most sharply defined had no less than 800.000 polygons.

Prix Ars Electronica 1996

City of Lost Children trailer

3d World: In depth: Autodesk Project Skyline

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Autodesk looks to build the future of game development with Project Skyline, first shown at GDC 2011

Without a vision, the people perish. It’s a situation that can even affect digital media creation software companies like Autodesk; or perhaps that should be, especially affect companies like Autodesk.

As a giant of the industry, the company has been acquiring major rivals such as Alias and Softimage over the last few years, resulting in a more tempered product management approach to the major 3D applications.

But the big fish of the pond is running out of water to swim in. Where does Autodesk’s vision lie?

via Autodesk Project Skyline | Game development.

Softimage 2012 Service Pack 1 available for download

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Download it here.

The latest service pack for Autodesk® Softimage® 2012 software includes 70 fixes. See below the fold for a complete list of fixes

Coexistence
Softimage 2012 SP1 is a full build and can co‐exist with Softimage 2012.
Softimage 2012 is not required to be uninstalled first.
Licensing
Softimage 2012 SP1 uses the same license as Softimage 2012. When installing Softimage 2012 SP1:
• Enter the product key 590D1 and your Softimage 2012 serial number, and then click Next.
• If you have a Network license, click Configure to switch to the Network licensing method.

The full list of fixes is as follows:
Continue reading →

Area :: Tutorial :: Mars Police: Hair and Render Breakdown

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Recently posted on the AREA:

When Softimage ICE was released, it was clear that any dedicated user who were not afraid of words like ‘multiply vector by matrix’, have been able to develop a hair-styling system, without writing a single line of code. For Mars Police, I’ve created hair using my own free hair system called ‘Kristinka Hair’.

The system utilizes NURBS surfaces for main shapes, and exclusive procedural approach for details. Kristinka means something like “dear Christine” or “little Christine” in several Slavic languages.

via Area :: Tutorial :: Mars Police: Hair and Render Breakdown.

Another Error 1092 when trying to start raysat service

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This one is pretty annoying. I remember once spending a lot of time on one case before I figured it out.

If you add an entry like to the end of the C:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\services file:

mi-raysatsi2012_3_9_1_44	7024/tcp

where there is no line break after the “tcp”, then the raysat service won’t start and will report “Error 1092”.

But if you add a line break after the “tcp”, or add a # comment like this, then you can start the raysat service:

mi-raysatsi2012_3_9_1_44    7024/tcp        #

Aaaargh.

3ds Max Design and Composite: Cannot check out license from C:\flexlm\maya.lic

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I ended up with a 3ds Max Design case awhile ago, where Composite gave this error at startup:

---------------------------
Autodesk Toxik - Fatal Error
---------------------------
Cannot check out license for "Network License: Autodesk Toxik 2011" from c:\flexlm\maya.lic.

The product key was not found.
---------------------------
OK   
---------------------------

Usually the solution to this kind of error is to set the ADSK_COMPOSITE_LICENSE environment variable to 3DSMAX (or SOFTIMAGE or MAYA), but that didn’t work. Eventually I tried “3DSMAXDESIGN” and of course, that was it 😉 Nobody ever never mentioned that possible value, so I assumed 3DSMAX applied to both 3ds Max and 3ds Max Design.

Surveys, the ultimate question, and the net promoter score

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The above poll is an example of an ultimate question that can be used to calculate a net promoter score.

If you’re a Subscription customer and you’ve logged some support cases, you may have received a survey invitation. You may have even filled the survey out 😉

These customer satisfaction surveys are based on the Net Promoter methodology, which uses a “would you recommend” question to divide customers into three categories: Promoters, Passives, and Detractors.

The “would you recommend” question is known as the ultimate question, and uses a 0-to-10 point rating scale:

  • Promoters (score 9-10) are loyal enthusiasts who will keep buying and refer others, fueling growth.
  • Passives (score 7-8) are satisfied but unenthusiastic customers who are vulnerable to competitive offerings.
  • Detractors (score 0-6) are unhappy customers who can damage your brand and impede growth through negative word-of-mouth.

Based on the survey results, a Net Promoter Score is calculated:

The general idea is that if you know your NPS, you can focus in on what you need to change to increase promoters and decrease detractors. This requires a dialog with your customers; currently support managers are responsible for following up with detractors to find out what went wrong during the support case.

So far, in practice, what I observe is that we don’t get enough surveys returned, so every single detractor has a huge impact on our NPS. Looking at my own NPS scores, I think I would have to focus not on detractors (unless I really messed up) but rather on the passives. Because if you had only one detractor, but everybody else was a passive, you’d end up with a negative NPS. Hardly something to brag about, and certainly not something that will look good to management.