I’d like to thank everyone, ever. Sorry if I missed anyone.

Ok, I’ll stop being cheesy and get back to polishing my presentation.

Tim talks on the ideas of how creativity works, and how it can be encouraged. He starts off with an experiment. Everyone has a sheet of cardboard, and they draw a person’s face next to them within 30 seconds. Lots of “sorry”s are exchanged. Tim goes on to explain why adults are so embarrassed when showing their ideas to others. It’s all about trust and security; about being in an environment where everyone is free to try and fail. Then Tim contrasts adults with children, which proudly show their drawings without embarrassment  (most of the time). In early school years, activities like recess and play times let kids express their creativity by trying out different approaches to problems. Tim points out that play does need to have a predefined set of rules for the participants to follow, otherwise play is unproductive.

He then jumps to companies that encourage their employees to be creative and have fun with their work, such as Pixar, Google, and his own company IDEO. Pixar has jungle like huts which breaks the blandness of a regular cubical. Google has a giant dinosaur with pink flamingos. Weird, but cool and funny ideas which encourage playfulness. Finally, Tim explains a couple approaches to testing creative ideas. For physical objects, prototypes work great. They allow people to take a look and manipulate the idea which always generates more feedback. If it’s an experience, role playing helps by identifying the events that occur along the way, giving the designer empathy in the situation they create.

I really enjoyed hearing Tim’s ideas. As someone who has a blast playing with ideas and concepts, I was encouraged to look past the constraints of self doubt and judgment. I’ll definitely take his challenges to play as the opportunity arises.

Maya Batch Render is Slow, use Terminal Rendering Instead

Having Maya open while rendering is a waste of memory, it makes your batch renders slower. Maya opens up a separate program just to render the scene anyway, so its better to render with terminal.

How to do it:

1. Make sure all your render settings are good to go in Maya, then close Maya
2. Open Maya Terminal in Applications/Autodesk/maya2010/Maya Terminal
3. Open “Apple QMaster” in Applications
4. Find where it says “Command” with a little dropdown beside it, and select Maya
5. Press the + button
6. copy and paste this into the first text field: /Applications/Autodesk/maya2010/Maya.app/Contents/bin/Render
7. Click “Choose…” for Project and Scene File. Your project is the folder that contains your Maya Project, and Scene file is the .mb file
8. Set the starting and ending frames how you want under Frames
9. Uncheck Motion Blur (unless you want it, but its really slow)
10. (required to use both processors in your computer) Add the following in the Command text area beside the other commands with dashes, makes sure there is a space on either side of it: -n 0
11. copy the text QMaster generated for you in “Command”
12. Paste that text into Maya Terminal, and hit enter. It should be rendering away.

So it sounds terribly complicated, but its really worth avoiding the headaches of batch render and isn’t all that bad after you’ve gone through it a couple times. Plus, it renders faster.

When working with a large scene, use layers a lot

In this project I had 3 areas each with multiple rooms. I put each room on a separate display layer so I could hide the one I wasn’t working on. I also made sure to put each room’s lights on a separate layer so I could disable the lights, speeding up render times.

When you do preview renders, set the quality to “Preview Quality”

You don’t need perfect quality to see what a scene will look like when its rendered out. Set the resolution to 1/2 of what your final output will be and use preview quality in render settings. Rendering full quality for previews is a time sink.

Use depth map shadows whenever possible

Raytrace shadows look amazing but take forever in an animation. I was hitting 10+ minutes per frame with them, whereas in my final sequence I used depth map shadows which took 1-2 minutes a frame.

Try out both Maya Software and Mental Ray rendering engines

You can switch the render in your render settings. By default it’s set to Maya Software. I found Maya Software to render my textures crisper than Mental Ray, but Mental Ray often rendered faster. The only time Maya Software rendered faster was with many (15) depth map shadows. For render settings, I used production quality, but changed the multipixel filter to 1.4 to make the renders sharper.

Set Reflections To 1 or 2

In large scenes, if reflections are set to 10 for example, the reflection will bounce back and forth 10 times, which is slow. 1 or 2 will usually look good enough.

Lower the Texture Filter setting

In each texture with an image, set the Filter property to around 0.125. Default is 1.00, which makes textures fuzzy. Unfortunately mental ray seems to ignore this, but it works for Maya Software.

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That’s all I can think of at the moment, hope it helps anyone who comes across the same problems.

Howard Rheingold talks about how collaboration has changed throughout the ages. He describes the challenges of language, cultural, and technology barriers.

One of the barriers that he talks about is the prisoners dilemma, where two prisoners have a choice to make, but can’t trust each other to make a choice that benefits themselves. With collaboration, they could step outside of the dilemma by interacting with each other to find out the best solution. Howard’s examples include eBay: a service where traders can trust each other based on reputation. More examples of collaborative efforts in technology are open source development, wikis (Wikipedia), Bittorent(file transfer where you upload and download simultaneously), and Folding@Home (a program that runs protein folding calculations). By using the power of many brains, you can end up with a much greater resource than with a individualist approach.

Collaboration definitely plays a huge role in the internet’s popularity. The whole social media phenomenon can only survive with collaboration. I also really like the idea of distributed computing (Folding@Home), because it makes use of the wasted idle time of the millions of computers worldwide to help a cause. Collaboration is also key to a successful large scale project. Having many people who specialize in a certain area pool their resources creates a strong product if the team is managed effectively.

On the bright side, here’s some more renders.

John Maeda is a design philosopher. He distils what simplicity is, and discovers when complexity works better. He admits his tendency is for the complex; he has 5 daughters, and his early design work features complex patterns. Simplicity seems to follow John wherever he goes. On his vacation, he saw a series of companies using “simple” in their slogan. He also contrasts the simplicity with some complex things we love, such as relationships and nature.

I find simplicity is very important to design. We use many aids such as grids, spacing, typography, and icons all to simplify communication to our audience, which creates a greater impact. Even complex design must start with something simple. Its like the Occam’s razor principle: given two solutions to a problem, the simper one is better.  Less work and better results, works for me!

I had to do a bit more concept art since my early stuff wasn’t very detailed. I find it helps a ton having something concrete to work of off, otherwise I just fumble around and can’t gain momentum. Next week will be texturing.

Even with concepts to go from its tough planning out the layout and how things fit together. Making good use of layers at this point.

I’m also experimenting with some audio since its going to be a big part in setting the atmosphere’s tone.  Here’s the main menu music. Low key, ambient type stuff. I’ll make it more dynamic for the game areas.

I appreciate how Milton Glaser is down to earth in this talk. He admits how his ideas take a lot of rethinking and revisions to get somewhere, and sometimes they just don’t work. In the first piece he shows, he suggested using nature as a variation to the theme — meaning using common ideas found in nature to combine with the existing art, hopefully creating something more dynamic. He challenges conventions by introducing ideas used in other areas of life in his posters. In one, he uses isometric perspective often found in architectural drawings, in another he even describes his poster on the poster – something usually done in a rationale. One step further, he shows another revision of the poster with the description. Its challenging what is commonly found in art and kind of humorous.

This talk clearly touches on every kind of design I do. All design involves creative solutions to a problem. Not being afraid of failure is very freeing to the design process. You can try whatever comes to mind, thinking visually opposed to thinking of ideas in your head and shooting them all down before they get a chance to live in the medium.