I updated the projects page.
I added info about the ZenBound project and moved all the projects on the same page. Now the link is http://random.gfxile.net/?page_id=69 if you need it.
In the meanwhile I updated a bit of my C.V. too. You can find it from here. I just added some and clarified couple of things. Dropped some old stuff too.
I started to use JIRA and GreenHopper for scheduling, estimating and logging hours for personal projects and tasks somewhere around December 2009. It has now proven to be valuable tool for that. Before that I have had a bunch of different experiences with different softwares. I’ve used several different online and offline TODO-programs, Calendars, Wikis, etc. Of course that is kind of a wide variety of different applications that are meant for different uses but for task estimating and tracking it seems that JIRA is the thing. Although I think it is worth mentioning that I wouldn’t use it without GreenHopper Agile plugin anymore. I have plenty of professional history with JIRA anyway so it was easy to get going with it.
Now I have actually started to timetable my personal tasks at home etc. to quarters so that I have some kind of clue what I have planned to do even that I would not do that. =D Anyway the best part about that is that I can see if I have overbooked myself and can postpone things. Actually one of the very first things I noticed that when I am really being honest estimating the hours I would use for a task and put them in the line, I realize that I think I can do almost double the things that I really can and even when I estimate the hours I still underestimate the time they take. Being able to track that has an serious impact on stress levels and prevents the “everything is due at the same time and my walls fall on me when I lie awake feeling like tied with handcuffs inside a coconut”-phenomena. And those are probably the first and maybe the only reasons you should use some kind of hour estimation/task tracking at work. It helps you. When you know how and why you use it, it will not be an evil plan from your boss to track your breathing but a tool for you. (Of course it does not hurt to know how much time was used on which things and micromanagers tend to ditch the processes anyway as they do not want to get their micromanagement tracked.)
Let’s take a small scale company with couple of guys working. They have excellent communication as they work together in a small office and they think that they can handle every issue with a small chat. That far it works well if the chemistry is in synchronization between the guys. But estimating hours might be a painful thing to do; in most cases the guys just decide that we do X and Y in T time. It goes by gut-feeling or the guys break it down to smaller pieces and estimate. Anyway in this way the estimating and communication may still work. Even calendar is used and they mark that milestone Z should be ready in T time. So far so good. If the guys did all this they are already reaching the basics (simplified it a bit though.) But this is not the stage where the stress pours in.
The stress pours in when a) the estimations do not hold b) goals are not met c) unknown factors arise. The guys will possibly meet a, b and c by the time of T in some form – it may be now harder to go back to estimations, see the whole picture and see that yeah: Here it went wrong or that thing X takes too much time and can be dropped. Disagree? Yes, it can be done but the difference in using tracking tools is that you get a new pair of goggles which give you a future vision to see the wall before you hit it. It is always a less painful experience to say I was wrong and we have to adjust the sails a bit instead of hitting the wall and then turning. Also fast turns are more stressful than slight and peaceful turns. If you’re in the IT-industry you probably have the picture there. =D
Also having a system that gives you a bit more versatile view on the big picture of an project that is ongoing may help with an adhoc-hog. If the adhoc-hog can be given a even a glimpse on how the “small things” that he tend to drop in affects the development he might reconsider in some cases. Of course this is not possible with all the breeds. Task tracking systems are not really tools for dropping tasks in randomly so there has to be some guidelines.
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JIRA & GreenHopper
Pros:
- Easy to use
- Enough plugins (not plenty but enough)
- Solid and simple to customize to your own needs
- Cheap for my level of usage (as I have up to 10 users-license)
Cons:
- The Agile plugin (GreenHopper) has some problems working with Sprints (Moving issues forward from sprint to an another needs duplicating issues per sprint if you want to keep time tracking on track.)
- JIRA needs the Greenhopper to be good so why is it sold separately?
- takes 500M of RAM to run. / Java application
I am slowly getting through my photofolders from 2009. Now that my backlog is only one month instead of over six months it already seems that it is really possible to get it done some day. =D
I updated my Portfolio at random.kuvat.fi but as I am not done with the 2009 yet you can assume some more later on.
The publicly available trips from the recent developing sessions are listed here:
Vilnius Part I
Vilnius Part II
Fall 2009
Winter 2009-2010 (Not finished though)
And here is the quick selection of stuff I have been working with lately:
After getting portfolios done and some stock photo things on the way I am going to lean on the digital 3d side for a while. ZBrush provides a bunch of quite interesting 3d workflows these days…
We had a small fast painting session with friends and the randomized theme for it was Cyborg Banana Interceptor. We had a 1 hour deadline and I probably used at least 45-50 minutes to the painting which was kind of effective as it normally tends to be a bit lower.
Here is what I did:
Also I have been sorting out a lot of photo-backlog lately and here is some picks from the whole set:
I have not revealed or summed up for a while what I am currently doing and I feel that it helps, and probably does not do anything else, even myself to organize my thoughts to write something down. Normally in my year cycle I am a bit depressed in the fall-time when there is a lot less sun and I actually see it like once in a two weeks… With a luck. So this year I have been concentrating to not start that many projects and slept a bit better. Although I have been buying new hardware and learning new things. Learning and fiddling around with new things always gives a small mood-boost. All together I have again noticed that I should always do one project at the time and remember to have some time off. Which I actually did by visiting Lithuania for couple of days.
But currently I’m actually on to these things:
Started an oil painting course. 1/2 of it behind and 3 practice paintings done. Mainly those concentrated only on mixing colors and the subjects were still life cups and bottles. It was good to concentrate on on simple things subject-wise first as the color mixing was the real concern. I do think this was the best thing this fall. Every session gave me really good feeling. Continues on January and possibly then we move further on from the color mixing practices. Really worth it. Probably helps in a lot of other areas of my jack-of-all-trades nature in arts.
Built a new computer. I already wrote about that. 10Gb RAM, Windows 7 etc. Really made my living easier after got it working.
Modeling 3d for a game. Modeling just real-time 3d objects might sound like eating porridge at this stage of my career but the modeling part is actually just the process of carving out an idea. Plus there is some special stuff that matters in this project. Same as in any job – there is always a lot of specifications that can not be seen by people not familiar with the particular subject. Which makes it interesting and dull at the same time. It is a paid job though so dull things goes fine in my radar. In scale from dull to misusing icicles I have been a lot to the icicle end lately and this is not so much of it really.
Creating a layout animation at work for a real-time short/demo. Really nice project otherwise but I do get stuck a lot – especially having creative locks. Layout animation is the first time in the project that I gather up the placeholder stuff on the table to a more whole set of things. That makes it possible to get stuck on anything in the process even that it sounds easy. Although I do like to go on with a process as that might make it a lot more progressive to work with in the future. The layout animation I try to go for is much like what Pixar is doing in their process. Everything is collected to be in placeholder stage together to get some kind of idea of the whole package. Then it is refined for over 3 years in different levels and pieces by hundredfold of people and the end result is the movie. The article I wrote about that creative work should be teamwork really, really, really underlines all the problems in this project. Yes I am doing it alone and no change to that in the radar. So if you are still with me – remember the talk about icicles in the last paragraph? I do not wonder at all why even this short took 8 years: The Passenger.
Learning lighting. The thing I would like to spend a lot more money and time on anyway. Loses for oil painting as for level of interest but a subject where I can be learning forehead-deep for infinity but it does not actually make it go further without the practice. I am now in the stage that I do have a light-scale set of Strobist stuff and played around a while with it but I would need to test things more in practice. Quite sure I have red enough of the theory-side for now. I am planning to take on a project later on to do portraits of some close relatives. Moving slowly with all the photography stuff anyway as I do not have the time to run for full-time photographer-job anyway. I hope this way could teach me a lot faster about 3d-lighting too – the same way as starting photography in the first place has gave me a nice boost in understanding a lot of different creative and technical things connected to composing, painting, 3d, physics, etc.
Rethinking my photo workflow (which is made possible by my new comp.) This kind of a backfired after I found out that my super-indestructible-workflow would not really manage to fly that well. I first planned to have a pipeline where all my .CR2-files would be converted to .DNG’s and after development opened as smart-layers in Photoshop and all the edits would be done non-destructively on top of the smart layer as smart filters and additional layers, saved as .PSD’s and then when needed flattened and resized according to needs in to different sizes and formats. Actually there was only one particularly weak part and it was the filesize and saving/opening-time of the .PSD. *flush* Not entirely though. I will probably move to use DNG’s as it is better and faster than my ancient way of using TIFF as an intermediate-format.
Bought some advanced texturing tutorials from Eat3D.com. Just to go it through and learn in practice. I really need some prep-up on that one. Might drop a word or two later on. Requires some undisturbed time.
Bought JoeyL Sessions Photography tutorial DVD. Already watched a bit from the start. This is totally more “serious” kind of a thing than the first one (which I did buy too and liked a lot.) Probably will drop line or two about it when I have more to say. Link
Bought 5 books on 3d, photography, drawing and animation. The Photographers survival guide almost done. I can recommend for anyone trying to push to advertisement and such business as a photographer. Written by two art-buyers so it is kind of a different perspective but a very valuable one for understanding the business. It does concentrate mainly stating couple of points: Get to know your style, be coherent with it when marketing yourself (using a outsourced designer mentioned at least 500 times), market a lot. In addition to that there is also very practical stuff and scenarios that might happen and everything. Bundled with the book is a bunch of forms to use in different stages. Very well laid out book so it really does not feel hard to carry on. Other ones bought: Ideas for the animated short, Dynamic figure drawing, Force – dynamic life drawing for animators, Digital Lighting and rendering.
Created a maxscript exporter. For a fileformat that started from Ambrose but got tweaked so far that it is not anywhere close to it anymore. Might give it out if I get it cleaned up and simplified a bit and someone is interested. Currently it pushes out a lot of raw data and is very vulnerable for nonspecific data. Got a big help from Phaser when doing it.
As you can notice from my latest posts – we did an entry for the Assembly 2009 shortfilm competition. It ended up to 4th place in the results. Likewise my fast graphics competition entry was also 4th.
The theme for the fast graphics compo was “Over the edge” and the timelimit to create the piece from scratch was 1,5 hours. Which includes packaging, creating thumbnail and filling a form and sending it in. So practically it’s something a bit over an hour.
1280×720 version of the fast graphics entry behind this link.
Whoa. Time passes by with wings and turbines. We’re moving to Kirkkonummi. Or actually moved already. Have been temporarily living at my parents and at my sister & her family. Today we’re planning to finally move to live full-time in our new apartment(!). \o/
I’ve been photoing a lot, done mainly 3d graphics at job. Had one vacation week to renovate the house and handle all kinds of stuff connected to moving. And today I’m supposed to switch for a 3 week vacation. Hopefully I’m not renovating for most of the time. =) Would reeeeaaaaally like to get my workstation built up at the new house and some freetime-art done too as Assembly 2009 is closing in. I’ve been literally living on trash food and energy drinks for a while now as the moving and such get me stressed and busy so the vacation is very welcome.
Another topic I’d like to point out is that to my knowledge doing creative work mainly alone is not effective. Why? – Simply because doing things alone does not give you the opportunity really to mirror your thoughts and develop them. Designing and developing for example a 3d model or environment is a process where you take paths and choose one to go further, then towards the end the path gets more narrow and you need to find another paths or create new ones to continue. This is an iterative process where you eventually have to dismiss the path you started with when you find better ones and iterate back and forth with some of them. When you have a partner to work with, you get double or even more paths you found yourself in the first place. But in return you probably give more paths for the workmate too. That means loosely that there’s four times more design power instead of one. That of course means that you need to have communication going on non-formally about what you’re doing but I’ve experienced that million times. It could be tight working group or even just a lunchtime discussion that opens up the whole scenario again. As long as the team size is small and works well together – the add to workforce by person is exponential. Small team because the communication starts to lack when it grows bigger.
I’m talking this from my professional experience. I’ve been working now alone for one and a half years. It’s really no good. I start to remember why I really, really liked having a very talkative and creative workmates. At the moment I’m really stressed and tight on inspiration and ideas. When I get stuck on a problem, I really have no people to have a lunchtime-chat about it, or one that would say “have you tested X and Y?” and where I could say: “Yeah I’ve done X but Y might work if I add A and B” – “B? oh.. yeah. it could be done with Z”. And so on… It all comes down to a non-formal discussion of different approaches, iterating and the paths. There’s probably people that are good on iterating paths by themselves but I can’t determine if I’m one of them. All I know is that I really need some real artistic feedback on what I’m doing to keep the flow going. I really need the privacy and peace when I develop the thing I’m working for but for the design side I always need feedback to find paths. But when I get a even a single person to work with that syncs well – I’m on fire. I’ve been talking about the topic with several people from very different work environments and professions intensively for dozens of times and found out that most people I know are like that. People need other people to get the real drive.
In plans: