The hardest song for any musician to write is always the next one. That’s kind of how I felt after I wrote the first post of this series. There are so many things I love about this industry, but what should I pick next to write about? Blame it on mid-production brain fry or just my naturally fickle nature, but I was getting stuck. Luckily for me though this question was quickly answered by artist, and fellow Hoosier, John Einselen who was gracious enough to take up this challenge of mine and write in something that he loves about our jobs.

“The feeling you get when you’re presented with a seemingly impossible problem, and then you solve it with a completely unrelated solution.”

It’s something I think every artist, but especially CG artists, are very familiar with. That daily struggle between man and machine. It gets so bad sometimes that I’d swear there are gremlins inside of my computer just pulling random wires! A thought most sane people probably wouldn’t automatically jump to, but when you’re in the middle of a show with a deadline looming on the horizon, it’s as good a reason for some of the strange things a render farm will do when your supervisor “needs that shot now!” At least that’s what it feels like in the moment.

WARNING: This is about to get a little techy.

It was a problem I tracked down to how our horizontal and vertical apertures were being calculated. Which was a big headache on the composting side of things. Because without the correct aperture value our backgrounds were prone to “slipping”. And the only way we found to fix them was to go in manually and nudge the values in our cameras inside of Nuke until our skies would stick to the CG plates we rendered.

Not a very efficient way to work, but it was just how it was.

Now we weren’t just settling for this mind you, the problem was that the numbers just weren’t making sense! The .chan file, the format our camera data gets exported out of our 3D software in, had numbers that just were way too low to be correct. I was expecting to see values of 20 or above, just like a normal film camera would have. But instead I was getting ugly little numbers with ugly decimals values like 0.825.

It just didn’t make any sense! So I did what every good nerd does in times like these, and pulled out my calculator and notebook.

I started trying to remember what little I had retained from my Sophomore year High School calculus class and began jotting down conversion equations.

This is the actual page from my notebook

There just had to be a formula out there that I was missing! But hope was starting to fade fast. Much smarter friends of mine from ILM, Sony, Digital Domain each came back to me with a completely different fix each. But none actually worked on my end when it got down to testing the math with our pipeline.  So I decided to take a walk.

Somewhere in between my desk and the soda machine, while I was fishing inside my pocket for a quarter, it just hit me. It was my Jeff Goldblum moment as I like to call it.

I felt smart and dumb all in the same moment. There WAS an equation to solve this problem. And it was one I had learned in third freakin’ grade when learning how to convert inches…to millimeters.

(.825) * 25.4 = 20.955

That’s right. I discovered that day that Maya calculates camera apertures in inches despite the fact that they are always displayed in millimeters everywhere else in the world. Why this is I have no clue. But it probably has something to do with the damn metric system. Which is one more reason for me to hate it! Just kidding…(not really).

Now this is little quirk of Maya’s is probably old news to most of you. But this was a real eureka moment for me! All I had to do now was code that little conversion inside of our camera import tool and Wahla! I now had a camera importer that worked right out of the box. It was like magic. And that’s the point.

That’s one of the great feelings you get when you’re a VFX artist. And it’s probably even a better than the feeling you get when you see your name, or a good friend’s name, up in the credits of a movie you just watched honestly. Because it gives you this fleeting moment where you remember that anything is actually possible, and there isn’t a problem out there that can’t be solved given enough time and mental focus.

But then like everything that moment is gone, and you’ve got another problem on your hands waiting to be figured out. And what a great problem to have.

Until next time…pass it on. It’s great to be a VFX artist!