July 19 2006

Adobe Lightroom Beta Mini-Review

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Ever since Adobe announced their new photo man­age­ment soft­ware Light­room, I’ve been look­ing for­ward to play­ing with it. Now I’m by no means a pro­fes­sional pho­tog­ra­pher, but I do enjoy tak­ing pho­tos here and there and espe­cially edit­ing them after­wards. For cat­a­loging I’ve used Google’s free Picasa until now — Picasa is also what I use to man­age my gar­gan­tuan tex­ture library and I’ll be try­ing Light­room from the same angle as well.
So here’s a mini-​​review of Light­room from the per­spec­tive of a CG Artist.

The first thing I noticed after installing and launch­ing the soft­ware is that it sports a pretty slick new look — which, unfor­tu­nately, and not unlike Adobe’s other offer­ings of late (CS2 suite, I’m look­ing at you), feels extremely slug­gish to use and lags quite a bit. The soft­ware takes sev­eral sec­onds to react to any user input, even the sil­li­est things like select­ing images or open­ing menus lag notice­ably and come with an insane amount of HD rat­tling. Odd. For some rea­son, scrolling pan­els using the mouse wheel doesn’t work either. The soft­ware is marked as beta, so I’ll give them the ben­e­fit of doubt, hop­ing they might fix these issues before final release.

On to test­ing the fea­tures: Light­room is split into 4 mod­ules: Library, Develop, Slideshow and Print. Of these, only the Library and Develop are impor­tant to me, so I’m leav­ing the oth­ers out of this review.

My first step then was to import my library of around 5000 pho­tos and just as many tex­tures in Lightroom’s library. The import pro­ce­dure is pain­less and quick, even let­ting you use the main inter­face in the mean­time to fol­low the progress made.
After a few min­utes of pro­cess­ing, the disk finally stopped rat­tling and it was safe to assume the soft­ware had com­pleted import­ing my images. It turned out that Light­room choked mid­way on some extra large tex­tures, but then con­tin­ued pro­cess­ing with­out user intervention.

The left pane on the screen had now filled with my albums con­tain­ing pho­tos and tex­tures. Select­ing an album brings for­ward a thumb­nail view in the main part of the screen as well as a “Film strip” view of the same images in the bot­tom area. View­ing and select­ing images is straight­for­ward and adding them to a “Quick Col­lec­tion” for later use is very intu­itive — unlike Picasa, Light­room can also remem­ber selec­tions of images from mul­ti­ple albums, which makes the fea­ture much more intuitive.

A fea­ture I use often is tag­ging tex­tures with key­words, so that I must only enter “Peb­ble Stones from Gobi desert” when look­ing for that spe­cific type of tex­ture to have the selec­tion nar­rowed down to all tex­tures pre­vi­ously tagged with that key­word. Tag­ging mul­ti­ple images is sim­ple enough, as is find­ing the tagged images either through the Search fea­ture or the vir­tual albums that are auto­mat­i­cally cre­ated for each key­word — very nice!
View­ing the images can be done either one by one or in a “Com­pare” mode where selected images a aligned in a grid on screen to facil­i­tate the selec­tion of the best. This too strikes me as very useful.

Now it’s time to test the image edit­ing fea­tures by switch­ing to the Develop mod­ule. The right side of this screen fea­tures a vast array of com­mands to adjust color, lens and cam­era cal­i­bra­tion via a plethora of slid­ers and but­tons.
The Before/​After view is immensely use­ful and very clever: The orig­i­nal image is dis­played next to the adjusted one, so the user always knows exactly what he’s doing and can fine-​​tune any adjustments.

This is clearly more than Picasa’s sim­ple pre­sets and the clumsy “I’m feel­ing lucky” but­ton have to offer and the amount of con­trol you get is very sat­is­fy­ing. Less sat­is­fy­ing is the notice­able lag when mov­ing the slid­ers around: Any changes made take a while to process, the end of which is made known by the dis­ap­pear­ing of the “Work­ing” notice atop of the pho­to­graph.
One might argue that my PC is not the newest, but then again any changes made to the very same images in Picasa or Pho­to­shop 7 appear instan­ta­neously, so my age-​​ridden com­puter is not the only one to blame here.

While all of these adjust­ments work very well and the qual­ity leaves noth­ing to be desired, my biggest gripe with the Develop mod­ule is that there is no con­trol over the area of the adjust­ments made. Where in Pho­to­shop you could use masks or selec­tions to spec­ify areas to fil­ter, in Light­room it’s all or noth­ing.
In most cases if you’re doing advanced edit­ing you’ll be doing it in Pho­to­shop any­way, so I’m not quite sure why Adobe chose to offer all of these adjust­ment com­mands if there’s no way to con­trol them properly.

All in all I think Adobe is on the right track. If they can some­how get the inter­face respon­sive­ness up to par with their older soft­ware or even Picasa, Light­room will prob­a­bly become my photo/​texture man­ager of choice. That is, if the price is right — you can’t beat free, after all.

For now, I’m stick­ing with Picasa, though.

July 13 2006

Choosing a CMS

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When I first began cre­at­ing the web­site for minning.de in 2001, I was work­ing for a small web design com­pany as a code mon­key pro­duc­ing PHP scripts. Nat­u­rally, I wanted to employ all that nifty cod­ing for my per­sonal site as well, so the site started out on a cus­tom con­tent man­age­ment sys­tem dubbed Mirai. Mirai was PHP and XML-​​based, cludgy, and didn’t scale very well. Still it was pretty lean and didn’t suf­fer from any kind of bloat, as it was custom-​​tailored to my per­sonal needs.

These days, I don’t have the moti­va­tion to write a cus­tom CMS for my lit­tle per­sonal port­fo­lio web­site, which is the rea­son why I am cur­rently using Word­Press. How­ever I always like to play with new toys; since I’m already plan­ning a new design for the site, I’m cur­rently eval­u­at­ing sev­eral dif­fer­ent open source alter­na­tives to power minning.de.
Most of those trendy blog­ging and com­plex CMS fea­tures I couldn’t care less about. What I want is a sim­ple sys­tem that lets me post notes to my jour­nal, present my port­fo­lio in an aes­thet­i­cally pleas­ing fash­ion and stays out of my way the rest of the time. Few things irri­tate me more than soft­ware that’s in your face. Espe­cially the hip AJAXy kind…

Dru­pal

For my com­pany web­site The Plau­si­ble Impos­si­ble I chose to use Dru­pal. This sys­tem, while a lit­tle intim­i­dat­ing at first, is quite flex­i­ble and offers a plethora of mod­ules for any con­ceiv­able pur­pose. The main things I dis­like about Dru­pal are that it doesn’t offer a totally sep­a­rate Admin area and that most of its fea­tures are geared towards a multi-​​user envi­ron­ment. I can see how that might be use­ful for large com­mu­nity dri­ven sites, but for a per­sonal port­fo­lio web­site like mine it’s just overkill.
The Acid­free media man­age­ment sys­tem was eas­ily the best solu­tion I found for a gallery, though. It’s sim­ple and doesn’t make any pre­sump­tions as to the look of your gallery. Def­i­nitely a plus!

Joomla/​Mambo

Stu­pid name jokes aside, my test of Joomla didn’t last very long. The default Admin area’s style reminded me way too much of the abom­i­na­tion that is the Win­dows Luna theme, com­plete with cutesy candy coated icons and col­or­ful text. Don’t get me wrong, I do like col­ors — but in a user inter­face I pre­fer sooth­ing greys and other non-​​intrusive colors…

TextPat­tern

The install was sim­ple enough and the sim­plic­ity of the default admin­is­tra­tion area is a joy to behold, at least com­pared to the ugli­ness of the afore­men­tioned Joomla.
The Textpat­tern web site itself is well designed and they seem to have a pretty active user com­mu­nity. In terms of fea­tures it appears to have every­thing I need, expect for a decent gallery sys­tem.

Word­Press

Word­Press is prob­a­bly the most sim­ple to use of the scripts I tested — then again, it’s not a full fea­tured CMS but just a blog­ging sys­tem with some extras that can be “mis­used” in a CMS-​​like man­ner.
But that sim­plic­ity is what I most enjoy about it… strip­ping out fea­tures such as the cal­en­dar or the ridicu­lous META area in the theme is sim­ple enough and adding fea­tures is even eas­ier through their clever plug-​​in sys­tem. The admin area is neat and well orga­nized.
Not much to dis­like here, and con­sid­er­ing that the site is already run­ning on Word­Press 2 right now, I might as well just stick with it — unless I find some­thing much bet­ter very soon.

Unfor­tu­nately, all the gallery sys­tems I tried were either too com­plex or oth­er­wise not quite what I was look­ing for. The gallery is how­ever the main rea­son this web­site exists, so I will need to come up with a cus­tom solu­tion, no mat­ter which CMS I choose even­tu­ally. Sys­tems like Cop­per­mine or Gallery 2 are huge and have more fea­tures than I’d ever use, so they are out of the question.

December 12 2004

Incredible!

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Over the past week I was ill and spent a lot more time in bed than out, hence I didn’t have the time (much less the power) to con­tinue work­ing on Sleep­ing Dragon. Today I feel much bet­ter, so I hope to be able to make some progress in the fol­low­ing days.

I did, how­ever, go out to see Pixar’s “The Incred­i­bles” in a cin­ema at the Pots­damer Platz on fri­day night, where it was shown in Eng­lish, fortunately.

Con­grat­u­la­tions to Brad Bird and the team and Pixar, the film was won­der­ful — very, very inspiring!

The plot and sto­ry­telling was bril­liant as expected, and once again they’ve out­done them­selves when it comes to rais­ing the bar for ani­mated film. The ani­ma­tion, the move­ment of the char­ac­ters, their emo­tions were tru­ely stun­ning and I’ll try to “bor­row” a few tricks here and there for use in my own short film!
It’s great to see some­one actu­ally car­ing about story and not just about throw­ing spe­cial effects at the audi­ence. Also, though it may sound strange, I feel that the Incred­i­bles actu­ally have some­thing that their real-​​life coun­ter­parts are severely lack­ing these days: Life…

November 26 2004

Free character rigging tools

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Ok, so I’ll admit it: I’m not a very good char­ac­ter rig­ger. Sure, I know the basics, but the process of set­ting up a char­ac­ter for ani­ma­tion just isn’t one of the things I enjoy doing… too much trial and error for my taste.
Set­ting up Bagel 2 wasn’t much of a chal­lenge and so I got away with a sim­ple sys­tem so clumsy it would prob­a­bly bring tears to the eyes of an expe­ri­enced rig­ger… and set­ting up a dragon is a whole dif­fer­ent beast altogether!

But since my main char­ac­ter model, the dragon Tatsu, is almost fin­ished, I was look­ing for (prefer­ably free!) tools to assist me in rig­ging the lit­tle guy. My quest on CGTalk and High­End 3D yielded results fairly quickly — here’s what I’ve been able to dig up, so far:

  • Crea­ture Tools
    Crea­ture Tools is a free tool new to me, but nonethe­less very inter­est­ing. The intu­itive ani­ma­tion sys­tem and some of the other bonus fea­tures look useful!
  • Final­Rig
    This one I’ve had the plea­sure of using before, and I remem­ber hav­ing a lot of fun play­ing with the “stretchy IK” fea­tures, allow­ing for a very toony style of ani­ma­tion. Seems tech­ni­cally mature and quite sta­ble. A bonus is the out-​​of-​​the-​​box sup­port for a tail (and wings), which could save me a lot of time. Plus, it’s free!
  • ani­Man
    Here’s another free rig­ging tool, but unfor­tu­nately the producer’s site hasn’t been acces­si­ble for what seems like for­ever. The sys­tem itself feels solid enough and the feature-​​set is impressive!
  • Char­ac­ter Stu­dio for Maya
    This one looks like a Chi­nese hack to bring 3ds max Char­ac­ter Stu­dio–like fea­tures to Maya. Appar­ently there’s no offi­cial home­page or any­thing of the sort and the whole thing feels a bit flaky… I’m stay­ing away from this one!
  • The Setup Machine
    The Setup Machine is the first non-​​free solu­tion I tried. Its fea­tures include builtin sup­port for quadrupeds, cen­taurs (!) and ten­ta­cles… noth­ing I’d par­tic­u­larly require. Still, sup­port for long necks and tails could come in handy. The boxy char­ac­ter con­trols were a bit lack­ing, in my opinion.
  • AdvancedSkele­ton
    Ani­ma­tion Stu­dios of Syd­ney, Aus­tralia, offer a trial ver­sion of their rel­a­tively expen­sive rig­ging solu­tion, AdvancedSkele­ton. Play­ing with the eval­u­a­tion ver­sion, I must say that of all the sys­tems I tested, this is the one I liked least. It sports a vast feature-​​set, but over­all it actu­ally felt less sophis­ti­cated than some of the free alternatives.

Then of course there are inde­pen­dent prod­ucts such as Motion­builder or messiah:animate, which are both out of the ques­tion at the moment due to their pric­ing.
So right now I’m lean­ing towards Final­Rig 1.2, mainly because of the inte­grated tail and also because I’ve used it in the past and am hence famil­iar with some of its quirks and their workarounds.

Should you have any other sug­ges­tions, I’d be happy to hear them!

October 16 2004

Inkulator 9000

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This morn­ing I read on slash­dot about an open source project called the “Inku­la­tor 9000″, which seems to do a pretty good job at out­line ren­der­ing of 3D poly­gon objects.
Although I’ve devel­oped my own lit­tle method of ren­der­ing toon out­lines in Ren­der­Man, I’m always open towards new tech­niques and will surely give this soft­ware a try when I have the time.

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