•postbrooklyn•

I searched high and low on the internet for an explanation on how to do this, but found very little of value to my own circumstance, namely — someone who doesn’t know squat about unix shell scripting and is in the position of watching his Qmaster program not function correctly (which seems to be the way it was designed to work…). Anyway, it works fine on the intel mac pro, but on a G5, qmaster is a deadbeat. What to do? Well, the only way to batch render in Shake (something I have to be able to do, or I can pretty much kiss this deadline goodbye) is through qmaster…or a series of exec commands issued from the Apple Terminal. I found that nugget online. Well, I tried it and it gave me a bunch of gobbledygook for error messages. I knew that I was having trouble getting the exact right connection of pathways and whatnot to make it sing and I didn’t have a clue as to what that would be. Enter Qmaster! It appears with a “submit” button grayed out so you can’t use it, but you can select a Shake script to render. And when you do select one in Qmaster — it gives you the exact command line terminology to use. So, you copy and paste a series of these selections together, separated by a semi-colon and then you can paste it into Terminal, hit return… and watch as the unix shell powers your batch render. Kind of a crappy workaround (and I hope to figure out Qmaster’s foibles at some point), but it beats not being able to batch the files (considering I have approximately 80 composites to render out in the next few days)…

I learned how to make an explosion in 3D today. Needless to say this is quite exciting, but I’m sure I’ll abuse it far better than I’ll use it for the next few months.

I’m sure tomorrow will bring some newfound excitement, too.

Sometimes… but, today, it seems to be working with me. I made the mistake of “downloading” some models of neurons for our latest show “The Brain Fitness Program.” And after playing around with those very capable little models, I discovered that the kind of animation I needed to do would require a bit more flexibility than those models could provide. Rather than trying to tinker with that and risk blowing it all up… I figured, “Heck, why not reinvent the wheel?”

This is the kind of thinking that usually gets you into trouble. However, after a few cautious experiments, I found that I could place a glowing orb in a semi-transparent rough cell body…and voila, nucleus! And then, a few more shaders, and the neuron axon looked kind of electron microscopic and bumpy. And with this, I could actually make my pre-synaptic neuron ends partially transparent and put little baubles inside them to be neurotransmitter stand-ins. And the coup de grace? Finally figuring out how to make a little pulsing trace of volumetric light to show the nerve impulse. And the result:

So, Apple Shake is indeed an incredibly powerful program. I do read, though, that it’s at EOL in terms of development (which is saddening), but seeing what it can do currently is really pretty amazing and I’m not sure what you would want from it that isn’t being handled by some other application. It’s clearly a compositor’s tool — and that’s pretty much it. I’ve been working in After Effects for nearly a decade, so I get compositing — but node based compositing was a totally new idea for me.

It seems highly ironic that I’m starting to compile green screen composites for the show “The Brain Fitness Program” — about neuroplasticity — with a program that I have to struggle to simply understand to begin with. But, that’s the good thing — learning, as I’m now quite aware, is really what you want to keep doing in order to strengthen your brain as you age.

So, I guess it’s a good thing. It’s also a good thing because Shake can handle keying some of these tougher green screen shots far better than After Effects with a simple swap in the metaphor. Plus, it’s integrated with Final Cut, so it makes the whole process a little bit less of a data management nightmare. I think. We’ll see…