#409 - Just Another Monday

It was tough getting out of bed after only getting about five hours of sleep.

I had a new painter starting today and I was responsible for his on boarding. The first day back is mostly filled with HR videos and getting things set up with IT. This painter had worked with me here at this company before, so it wasn’t all knew for him. But I still needed to be around and make first contact.

He had a bunch of meetings in the early morning, so I told him to message me when he was done with all of that.

My eleven o’clock meeting was cancelled, and that was fine with me.

I had an ongoing list of minor items that needed to be taken care of before I take over the team of painters officially. We use Adobe’s Creative Cloud to store and easily retrieve assets. It means we don’t have to keep multiple large library files open all the time when painting. We have a tree file and rocks, etc. These are duplicated as separate assets in the CC Library and don’t take any memory. You just drag them out on two your page and use them. No opening of any other cumbersome files.

The problem was that the library was built by a colleague that is shifting over to another show. Once she was gone, it might have been hard to make additions or changes to the library. I got her to add me as an owner today and was able to scratch that off my list.

One of the issues with losing this library is that the assets get dragged on the paint canvas as a contained asset. Like all the layers that make up, say, a tree, are contained in one library vessel. We can revert the vessel back into its constituent layers, but it loses and transformations that were made to the vessel.

In other words, we drag the tree onto the page, scale it to size and tilt it a little to the left. If we revert it to layers now, it goes back to its original size and shape. Imagine a painting with hundreds of these library assets. Anytime you need to convert them back to layers it becomes a logistical pain in the arse.

Low and behold, one of our new artists had an action script that did the very thing we wanted. It converts the library asset into layers and keeps all the transformation information intact. So, it ends up looking exactly the same as before, but now we can easily edit the layers.

And since this was something we were trying to get our technical directors to write for us, it saves all that time and energy.

Monday was starting to look up.

By noon, I was starting to feel the effects of lack of sleep. I took a short nap for about half an hour to get me through the rest of the afternoon. I spent the rest of the day doing approvals, and at the very end most of the show we had been working on was approved by the art director.

I switched gears around four thirty and started updating the tracker and rendering the painted files for our scene setup team. I was happy to see that the render farm we use was now up from one working machine to three working machines .

With three machines, the files rendered almost as quickly as I could get them into the farm. It felt like a treat to have that much processing power again.

Robyn and the kiddo came home from school and immediately headed back out to drivv to the lakeside to take a walk. I was fully enjoying a restful evening and had no plans to go anywhere. I found myself in bed watching tv. I put on a new show supposedly shot on the east coast. It follows a small fishing village in Canada that is being attacked by a giant squid.

The show is called Below, and even though it sounds like a silly premise, it was a better show than I expected. I got a couple of episodes into it and then watched some YouTube.

The kiddo returned early from the walk, but Robyn didn’t. An hour or so later I learned that she had forgotten that she had an hour of work from seven to eight. She had to rush back, drop of the kid and speed over to the man’s house she takes care of.

She returned a little after eight, and we settled down to watch two episodes of Nocturne on Netflix. Stephen Graham stars as a psychopath on a high security mental facility. It also stars Liv Schrieber and Rory Culkin. The rest of the casting is excellent as well. Graham is putting in a great performance and should win some awards for his portrayal.

A little after nine thirty the two of us were ready for bed.

I was a bit shocked at how tired I was, but then remembered I went to bed after three AM.

Going straight to sleep would have been just fine with me, but I decided to listen to Children of Dune for an hour. I think I made it for half an hour before packing it all in for the night.

Until tomorrow.