Cloudy outlook

Cloud this….cloud that…..SaaS, IaaS, PaaS……most of you have by now come across the above words in one article, blog, magazine or whatever source of information somewhere. Today I want to give you a brief primer on what the cloud is and what it means for you as a 3d artist. First off I will start with a very basic example……Most of us usually cook our own food at home whenever we want to eat….you just take your sufuria, boil some hot water mix the hot water with some flour and stir till it’s solid enough to be Ugali, fry some eggs on the side and voila!!Dinner is served. On the other hand there are some cases whereby for one reason or another you choose to order food from a hotel/café/restaurant….watu wa terrific Tuesday’s wapi nduru!!!The café will buy the ingredients and do all the cooking and even deliver the food right to your house.

This two examples above illustrate the basic concept that underlies cloud computing. In the first case one does everything on their own in this case 3D modelling, rendering e.t.c on their own computer while in the cloud based scenario all this is done on the cloud using the other parties resources.

If you have ever used Gmail, Yahoo mail, the omnipresent Google apps then you have been experiencing cloud services but you just never knew it. As far as graphic design and content creation is concerned, I am yet to use any of the cloud 3D products on the cloud hence cannot really provide the best advice on whether one should consider them to the traditional setup but I can provide you a glimpse of what it may feel like. I came across the site below clara.io that I believe you can test out to see if indeed you may one day get to fully migrate to working in the cloud.I liked how the site required very minimal input before you could test the service.

The rough guide below illustrates how to go about it.
1.Visit the site clara.io and register yourself.I  used a fictitious account(username: testing,email:testing@loresho.com plus a random password) for this as you can see below:NB:Please ensure your password is not less than 6 characters

Click on 'Start Editing' and let it load

2.You will land on a page similar to the one below.When you click on the 'User account section' on the top right you can see we are already logged in so no confirmation emails or stuff like that are required before we can access the system.The packages on offer are also listed below and the pricing seems rather fair too.Anyway,moving on...

3.Click on the 'Scenes' tab and you will be directed to the following window.After a lengthy deliberation 0.01 seconds that is,I decided I would use an existing scene in their library rather than start from scratch.

4.I picked a car from the list.The "Marussia B2" to be exact.(I don't know why it never showed up in the screenshot below).After picking your car just click your way to the main scene as the following steps show.

5.You should eventually end up in a scene similar to the one below from where you can now explore on your own.

I'm not sure whether it was my computer,browser or the internet but my experience was not very smooth. I have 4gb memory and a very basic graphics card on the laptop I was using a 1Mbps connection (124KBps if you like).I got the javascript message below

after a few minutes of meddling around, my patience ran out and I moved on to other "important matters"…..wow that masked dragon rider following Hiccup and toothless under clouds looks so cool…..ahem!!So that’s how my first cloud experience went. PLEASE NOTE THIS WAS DONE ON SHORT NOTICE WITH A "BAD FOR 3D LAPTOP" SO IT DOES NOT REPRESENT THE CLOUD EXPERIENCE. Try it out and let me know what you think.If you have used any of the available subscription services/cloud, whether from Adobe,Autodesk or other 3D related companies let me know how it went.Godspeed animators!

PS:Sorry guys, I haven’t been able to post for quite a while,I have other non 3D projects that have been eating up my time.

Animation-The January Outlook

The year 2013 has kicked of on a very high note for the Kenyan animation industry.Recon digital released a series of short animations that were done by their team of apprentice animators and from what we can see,we should expect nothing but the best from them in 2013...probably even a TV animated series(domestic disturbance).You can read about their story from Techmoran    

 
In addition...we've been following up on international news and it seems that part of the visual effects company, Digital Domain  has been sold off to the Chinese..... "The latest deal Zhong completed was a joint venture between the US division of the company and Reliance Media Works Ltd of India for the special effects unit and various other businesses and assets of the US visual effects and animation company Digital Domain. Galloping Horse owns 70 percent of the new venture"

The good news for most of us is that we will actually get to see the Legend of Tembo produced and released ‘on schedule’-which is probably in 2014.There is very scarce information regarding the above animation but from the name,I believe it will have a lot of references to Africa or even more specifically,Kenya.We’ll just have to wait and see.
Check out these links for the additional information:

http://www.chinesefilms.cn/141/2013/01/22/122s13453.htm

http://www.chinesefilms.cn/141/2012/11/30/122s13064.htm

http://www.tcpalm.com/photos/galleries/2011/aug/12/legend-tembo-exclusive-first-look/74552/#section_header

Another development that will excite any CG Artist in Kenya, is the prospect of having a 'render farm' with quite a lot of rendering power (not everyone can get a G5 Mac/Mac Pro you know..) right here in Nairobi.This may soon be possible if the project being undertaken at the iHub-Ngong Road, in Nairobi,Kenya achieves it's goal.The iHub-through some of it's members and other partners, is creating/hosting a cluster based computing system that will be equipped with enough power to render most of the processor intensive simulations and photorealistic3D images any CG artist in Kenya aims to create.The iHub Cluster project-conceptualized by a Kenyan ICT guru..Idd Saalim seeks to bring 'supercomputing' to Kenyans and will be used to teach/test parallel programming software developed in Kenya among many other things...e.g 3D rendering so be sure to check their page on the iHub website for any updates.