JDosX

Tutorial: 2D Motion Tracking in After Effects

This week on Mini Tut Monday I'll show you how to do 2D Motion Tracking in After Effects. To reduce tracking drift it's always good to make both selection boxes in each tracking point as large as possible, larger than what the video shows. It should deliver a great result with a minimum of effort!

How to Make Render Previews in 3ds max

How to Use Volume Fog in 3ds max

How to Make Fast Rendering Blurry Reflections in 3ds max

I do a tutorial series!

Every Monday I upload a short(ish) tutorial to my YouTube channel (http://youtube.com/jdosx) as part of my "Mini Tut Monday" tutorial series that covers a single issue in a program of my choice. Most of the time I record 3ds max tutorials, but there are a few for After Effects in there.

There's no lying that the MBPr is a beautiful machine. It's extremely thin, light, and powerful enough to tackle almost anything you can throw at it. However the one drawback is the price tag and associated drive space. The "baseline" model ships with a 256GB drive, upgradable to 512GB for an extra $700. The bulk of this extra cost coming from the fact that the MBPr uses a Solid State Drive. If it prolongs the life of the machine and you have the dough then this might be justification enough, but if you're like me and need that money for things like food, there are some things you can do. Continue to my four helpful tips to increasing your drive space on the Macbook Pro with Retina Display:

1) Pay for the extra storage: If you're reading this blog post then this probably isn't an option for you. Nor should it be, $700 is a lot of money. However after dishing out this extra cash you also get an extra 8GB or RAM fitted into your machine, and a 300MHz faster clock speed on your CPU. As the RAM is soldered onto the logic board then this costly upgrade is the only way to get all 16GB into your machine ever. But if this extra RAM and drive space prolongs the life of your machine then this might be the option for you. Continue to option two!

2) The RAM Might be soldered in, but the Drive isn't:

That's right, the SSD is on a separate daughter card and an after-market upgrade is yours for the taking if you can find it. As it turns out, you can! Other World Computing are releasing a 480GB SSD for your MBPr which you can upgrade after the fact thanks to the installation tools bundled with the drive. This price for such an upgrade is $579, which is not only cheaper than Apple's offerings but also theoretically promises slightly faster read speeds. Go check the gear out here: http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/SSD/OWC/Aura_Pro_Retina_2012/

Whilst this is the first third party drive we have seen, it's hopefully a sign of more to come! As SSD technology matures, we shall see this option becoming more affordable (which means that Apple's purchase prices should drop as well). However in the mean time SSDs are still phenomenally expensive, so this option is probably one to keep in the back of your head until prices peter out a bit.

Also keep in mind that this probably won't play nicely with your warranty.

Still too expensive? I agree, let's move on.

3) Is that an SDXC slot I see?

Why yes it is! Such a thing may be perfect as a secondary hard drive! SDXC cards are becoming ridiculously massive, with SanDisk offering a 128GB card for $399. Ouch, that's a lot of money. It's also slower than an SSD, offering approximately 10% of the read/write speed. However this does have the benefit that slotting one in will not void your warranty, unlike a DIY SSD upgrade. As with the previous option, this is probably something to keep in the back of your head until they get bigger, faster, and cheaper. But it's there, and it has the other advantage of being able to transfer devices between computers. But if that's what you want to do then you will probably go with the option number 4:

4) The external HardDrive:

What?! A HardDrive?! But buying this beautiful machine was meant to do away with such a dastardly thing! Whilst dangling a block off your MBPr might not make you cheerful, it's actually the best solution. If you're buying an MBPr then it's most likely it won't be a $2.5k Facebook machine. If you're doing any sort of content creation then it's almost a given that you'll be working on more than one machine. For that you need an external drive to transport the files. And you can still get those SSD speeds, with External Solid State drives available for purchase. Failing that, you can get 1TB portable HDDs for around the $100 mark, which should quell your storage desires for even the biggest projects. This is the solution most people will probably take, and for what you get this really isn't that bad of a compromise.

So there you have it! If you're feeling the storage woes hopefully this has helped you reach a decision on exactly what to do. In the meantime, make sure you enjoy your SSD, they are blindingly fast.

Happy computing!

Sometimes when you're working on a project it's hard to see the good things you've done. I know I've done it, often I become so entrenched I only see the flaws. Flaws that you scrutinise, overcomplicate and can eventually lead to you undermining your work. There are a few reasons this is bad, but the most critical ones in my mind are:

1) You should be proud of what you've done, whatever it is.

2) It probably isn't that big of a deal.

3) Scrutinising over what may be a tiny flaw will lead to spending hours trying to fix what isn't broken.

Whilst the first two are psychological, avoiding  no. 3 will be a huge time saver. When I'm becoming stuck in this sort of rut nowadays I usually take my project to my friends and family. If they don't notice the "problem" chances are it isn't actually a problem at all. It's also important to be able to sit back once in a while, look at what you've accomplished and say "You know what, this is actually pretty awesome."

If you're ever feeling a little (or very) frustrated with a project you're working on and need a little motivation, remeber these three things:

1) Everything's a learning process, look at what you know now and imagine all the great things you would have missed out on if you never started.

2) Do something else if it gets too intense, you can't continue the learning if you're over-saturated.

2) Go from micro to macro. Look at the big picture and see what you've really accomplished. And feel good about it.

So the next time you're not quite so happy with something you're working on: stop, stand back and look at what you've achieved, because you really should be proud of what you've done.

Stay awesome.

Thought this was something important to share, it's really impressive and could lead us to space travel where we do away with solar panels, or rocket engines, or both.

http://www.fastcompany.com/1837966/mustafas-space-drive-an-egyptian-students-quantum-physics-invention

Try to Catch Out Your Errors Instead of Using a try/catch Block

Right now I seem to be fixated with a desire to learn a thing or two about shaders, and since I currently know next to nothing of HLSL (hopefully this will change in a few days) I'm familiarising myself with pixel shaders by writing algorithms which run on the CPU. In the past I wrote one which emulated a displacement shader, which I tested by comparing my results with the equivalent effect in After Effects. It worked pretty well.

Today I decided to dabble with gaussian blurring! It's loads of fun, and I've learnt some really interesting things about the properties of blurring, but one thing I found very interesting was the speed of try/catch blocks. My algorithm was slow... abominably slow. One hour to execute slow. And it was all due to my try/catch blocks. Here's what happens:

To perform a gaussian blur, you basically examine each pixel, shave off some of its colour, and add to it bits of colour from the surrounding pixels. The result is a "smoothing" which we see as a blur. To figure out how much of each surrounding pixel you should take you use the Gaussian Function. The slight problem with this is that when you try to blur the borders of your image, you can end up trying to access pixels which are outside your image, so it causes everything to crash unless you detect the error.

I used try/catch blocks. I was wrong.

Turns out that when an error is caught, the exception takes a very long time to generate. I ended up with situations which could generate a good few hundred thousand per loop. Whoops doesn't cut it. I replaced my try/catch with a few if statements and my code's execution time went from hours to less than a tenth of a second.

It was a noob mistake, so let this be a warning to all those forthcoming to herein blog! Avoid try/catch as often as possible, use a condition instead!

Programming isn't the only thing I do :P

This (incomplete) model is my tribute to what I feel is one of the greatest spaceships of all time. Whilst a slight miscalculation has made applying materials to the hull a little difficult, I should have her donning her Cerberus and Alliance colours very soon.

Whilst I've tried to stay as true to the actual Normandy SR2 as possible, I've managed to cut down modelling time by not being so OCD with positioning my vertices. Turns out it has worked pretty well

Hello tumblr-er-ers...?

This is my first post ever tumblr. Or to a blog. I bought a manly journal (not a diary, those are girly) once, but I never wrote in it, so this is probably the first form or record keeping I've ever done for my life. An I'm putting it on the internet for everyone, including future employers to see ... oh dear ... QUICK HISTORY OF ME KGO!

I love computers! Absolutely and unequivocally adore them. I do programming, video FX, little bits of audio work, Photoshop and Flash.

If you want to see what I do, go here, it should sum it up for you: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vqx2lWqqD5Q

So I guess that means you can call me a nerd. Go on, I'm not ashamed ;)