So this last weekend I received an excellent question on creative crash. In fact, any question would have been a great question since it was my first response to Good Parenting at all! But this actually was a good question! Why use buffers and when to use them? Oh man, I had to answer this question! So I fired up my trusty webspace to upload some nice picture explanations and get the show on the ro– Ack! I couldn’t log in.

It turns out that my lovely webspace had been infected by some sort of adware javascript virus, which had inserted itself on every single php page in my site. Long story short, I didn’t have enough time or energy to really devote myself to the problem and asked the wonderful people at my hosting, bravenet, to sort it out for me. And they were wonderful, sorting it out with some fancy shell scripting within a day or two. And then a day later I got an actual virus on my computer. Oh the joy of the internet!

As to why I was too busy to try to sort this out myself, it’s because I’m working at Rhythm & Hues again! And I have been since August. How the time flies when you’re on a production. I think I blinked after I last posted on here and and now it’s December. My funemployment before now was quite enjoyable, but it’s nice to work on a movie again! And get paid!

And on to the “other fun things,” rigging! So I highly recommend anyone who enjoys rigging check out the video’s that are starting to appear on the Rigging Dojo. I sat down the other day to watch the video of Raf Anzovin, the creator of The Setup Machine, not expecting much if anything. Boy was I blown away. Raf went over some neat tricks that TSM uses now, along with a few tricks TSM will use in the future. And most of them I never thought of before. I can’t wait to go put them into a rig! Well, the ones I understand at least =] And now I’m really stoked about these new rigging tools their studio plans to bring out “eventually.” I think they’ll open up a whole lot of possibilities if they’re done right.

Anyway, so Raf brought up polar coordinates in his talk. That was like a kick to some dusty corner of my noggin. The next morning I jolted out of deep sleep with a great big lightbulb over my head. (Alright, alright, I may have had one eye closed, taken a shower, and gotten nearly half way to work before I had the lightbulb, but by god, I had a lightbulb). Ages and ages ago, I wanted to know what Maya was using for weighted tangents, since it obviously wasn’t cartesian coordinates. Turns out, Maya uses polar coordinates and I just never thought about it. Another Maya Mystery solved.