Lauren Brady, Author at REALTIME

Top Tip: The Art of Listening

Bhavini our awesome Production Manager, graces us with this weeks Top Tip on the art of listening!

She has some great advice for when it comes to dealing with frustrating situations, and her personal discovery of the the art of listening…

Do not listen to reply, but to understand.
Evaluate and then respond.

There are often times when we are frustrated with a team member, client or situation, and as human beings we have the tendency to have an outburst. Unfortunately, this isn’t the most constructive way to respond to a situation, and it usually comes along with some unfavourable consequences.

None of us are perfect, I’m certainly not, and there isn’t a magical fix to the art of frustration… but I am trying to master the art of listening.

Just by listening to others, I have gradually seen myself becoming less impatient and impulsive over the years… so something must be working!

But alongside the listening, I have two other tricks to disperse the frustration:

Type everything out that is running through your mind, either on a notepad or an email- just make sure you don’t send it to anyone!
“Idiots react”- so avoid saying something that you’d know that you would regret later. It’s a phrase a former boss of mine once used, and he has been a great mentor for me over the years.

So there you have it, who’d have thought the art of listening would be so important.
There’s lots of books on the subject why not swot up!

Top Tip: Hair & Fur

This weeks Ornatrix Top Tip comes from our Lead Artist, Scene Dev Tom!

He’s here to share with you some interesting information about Ornatrix that could help you out when it comes to perfecting hair and fur…

You can use multiple stacked OX_surface_comb modifiers masked by the region you want to apply to. There is a tick box for use shape and for use direction. Using several of these modifiers with direction turned off but shape on allows you to assign different hair curves (flat, tufty, etc) to different areas. Finally put an OX_surface_comb modifier at the top with only direction ticked to use the sinks to comb the direction of your hair.

Note: The shape graphs on the comb modifier are additive, so if you overlap them they will flatten hair more.

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Top Tip: Houdini Fracturing

This week’s Top Tip comes from one of our Lead Artists, Graham Collier!Here are a few methods that we use for pre-fracturing geometry before a rigid body simulation. I have included the Houdini scene file to help you get started, and you can also download the latest non-commercial edition of Houdini from here.

The simplest method of fracturing geometry is to scatter points on the surface of your geometry and then plug these points into a Voronoi fracture node.
A better method, if you want nicer internal fracturing, is to use an ISOoffset node to convert your geometry into a volume and then you can scatter your points into this volume. You can then plug these points into your Voronoi fracture node.
If you want to create long fragments like wood splinters you can do this by simply adding a scale node before the fracture and then shrink the geometry along one axis. Then you invert this transformation afterwards.
If you want more interesting fractures then use the Voronoi fracture points node. This lets you create controlled areas of detailed fractures. Each point going into the node will create multiple points within a fracture radius. Switch on Visualise Points to see the point clusters before you fracture the geometry.
Adding displacement to your geometry before fracturing will help break up the straight lines that Voronoi makes. You can use a rest node to save the original point positions and then add noise with a pointvop or mountain node. After the fracturing you can move the points back to their original non displaced positions by binding the rest Attribute back to the position in a pointVOP.
Use interior detail on the Voronio fracture node to create more interesting internal detail to your fractured geometry.

And here’s a video showing you the fracturing in action:

Dinowood Studios: Jess’ October Blog

So, it’s time for my monthly blog post – ‘A witty illumination into the life of a Marketing Assistant at RealtimeUK’ …hopefully it’s just as bright as the snazzy ones down the road in Blackpool.

October has seen me turn my marketing desk into a mini production studio; as I geared up to get creative for our sponsoring of this year’s TIGA awards; whilst I also tried my best not to drown in Lego.

I thought it would be a fun idea to pretend to be one of the talented artists at our studio, and give you a behind the scenes step-by-step look, into what went into making one of our hilarious dinosaur videos…

Step One: Fall Down The Idea Hole

It could be described as one of the most creative phases, and I guess it was. Much like Alice, my mind fell down the rabbit hole; as lots of mad ideas popped into my head about what our Dinos could get up to. (Sadly, yet more rationally) the pages of ideas were cut down to a clear and concise bullet list that we felt hit the ‘simple, fun and humorous’ angle that we wanted to achieve.

Step Two: Storyboard This Creative Wave

With our ideas down, it was time to start bringing them to life. I rested on my -not so terrible- art skills to draw a selection of storyboards. Each board depicted how I would like the scene to play out, what sort of shots I wanted, and which Dinos needed to be there. Below is the storyboard for the FIFA tableau.

Step Three: Lights, Camera, Dino

After I was happy with the storyboard and sure of what shots I needed to gather, I grabbed the camera and channelled my inner Tim Burton to direct the stop motion video. A tedious process yes, and it didn’t help that Jeff (the t-rex) is a total diva to work with, but once I had a steady rhythm the production of the video seemed to be in full swing.

Step Four: Bringing The Dinos To Life

Post production is where things started to come together. Going back into artist mode, I had my best go at messing around with photoshop to bring the RealtimeUK Dinos to life. I added their lovely expressions, and even mocked up their troublesome FIFA game.

Step Five: Editing

Once each of the frames had been perfected, I handed them over to Zoe so she could work her editorial magic on the shots and pull together a finished video.

Step Six: Football Dino Mania

*Drum roll* and we have the finished product! Ready to go out over our social media channels, so you guys can enjoy our Dinos in action.

And that’s my October… that and drinking coffee. If you want to find out more about our TIGA Awards campaign you can head over to my other fabulous blogpost here; it explains our involvement with TIGA and introduces you to Darius, Jeff, Susie and Greg (The RealtimeUK Dinos).

Jess

TIGA Awards: Meet the Dinos

You may have previously heard that we’re going to be sponsoring this year’s TIGA Awards. If you have, you’ll probably know that we’re pretty excited to be doing so. And that’s partly to do with the amazing, super awesome, brick-tastic idea that we have been creatively brewing for our table gifts (which we hope that you’re excited to be receiving too).

You’re probably thinking… ‘But Jess, what is this amazing, super awesome, brick-tastic idea that you are talking about?’ Well I’ll take you all the way back to the beginning…

Once upon a time, at the start of September… The RealtimeUK Marketing Department congregated around the ‘great boardroom table’ to try and come up with the ultimate award evening table gift. It was much like the meeting of ‘The Fellowship’, but with less people.

We debated what makes a great gift; practicality, shininess, collectability… but one word kept coming to mind- fun. And from fun we found colourful blocks of joy… Lego.

But Lego alone wasn’t enough. We felt like we needed the statement scarf to match our already chic outfit. Fortuitously, it was at that moment that we found out about the success of our Jurassic World Evolution trailer – Dinosaurs!

The RealtimeUK Lego Challenge was born.

On the night of the TIGA Awards we’ll be placing a giant brick on each of your tables. Much like a Russian nesting doll, the giant brick will be filled with lots of regular sized bricks. And this is where you’ll come in.

We’re challenging you to get creative, to let your imaginations run wild; by creating the greatest Lego dinosaur known to man, and reptile alike.

It’s a big ask, I know. And that’s why we have been busy making these informative yet cute videos of the RealtimeUK Dinos being built. Let me introduce you to our resident Dinos;

Meet Darius: The dotty Diplodocus. He is a keen train spotter, loves drinking hazelnut lattes and wearing odd socks.

Meet Jeff: The short tempered but warm hearted T-Rex. Jeff loves reading Nordic spy novels, doing some *rad* stunts on his skateboard, but he also knows how important it is to relax with a Bublé Bath.

Meet Susie: The cheerful Triceratops. She likes laughing, watching Criminal Minds and participating in bi-monthly tug of war contests.

Meet Greg: The chill Stegosaurus. He’s a big fan of David Attenborough, a proud Ravenclaw, and he is also a strong believer in the theory that Keanu Reeves is an immortal.

They’re going to be up to quite a lot over the next week; meeting Stormtroopers, going on hobbit like adventures and even playing a bit of FIFA. You can follow their adventures over on our Twitter page.

You can build one of the RealtimeUK Dinos or you can go off-piste and do your own thing. Either works for us.

But whatever you do, we want to see your masterpieces! You can do that by tagging the pictures with our marvellous hashtag #RTUKLegoChallege over social media platforms, where we’ll be eagerly awaiting to see what you have created.

Not attending the awards? Don’t worry. Gather together your own brick supplies and make some fabulous dinosaurs, and send them to us with the hashtag. The more Dinos the better.

TIGA Awards here we come!