Ask the mods anything

Derpy Whooves
Preenhub - We all know what you were up to this evening~
Artist -
My Little Pony - 1992 Edition
Artistic Detective - For awesome dedication to sleuthing out and maintaining artist tags and links
Economist -
Not a Llama - Happy April Fools Day!

Looking For My Doctor
@Sparx  
Which holiday? If you mean Mabon, then yes - it’s apple season and I’ve got a special brew in in the fermenter that should be ready just in time ^__^
Cosmas-the-Explorer
Solar Supporter - Fought against the New Lunar Republic rebellion on the side of the Solar Deity (April Fools 2023).
Non-Fungible Trixie -
Notoriously Divine Tagger - Consistently uploads images above and beyond the minimum tag requirements. And/or additionally, bringing over the original description from the source if the image has one. Does NOT apply to the uploader adding several to a dozen tags after originally uploading with minimum to bare tagging.

Explorer in Training
Many would ask if you watch anime. But I have a feeling that like me, you are partly a weeb. But I would like to ask if any of you never watched anime before?
ArmadilloEater

Administrator
French Taunter
@Cosmas-the-Explorer  
I used to watch anime back in the days, like Saint Seiya or DBZ or the Captain Tsubasa… but nowadays anime just drives me insane. I dunno why Japan collectively decided that all females would be voiced by chipmunks high on helium, but most generic anime girl voices make me want to rip out my ears. I only like very few modern animes, like Death Note, Aggretsuko… and that’s it really. I prefer to read the manga.  
%Toradora is a guild pleasure of mine, but don’t tell anymone!%
Derpy Whooves
Preenhub - We all know what you were up to this evening~
Artist -
My Little Pony - 1992 Edition
Artistic Detective - For awesome dedication to sleuthing out and maintaining artist tags and links
Economist -
Not a Llama - Happy April Fools Day!

Looking For My Doctor
@ArmadilloEater & @Mildgyth  
I’m quite the opposite. Not only did I watch anime, I got to help with translation for some Japanese anime games and was able to see my company’s name in stars with some movies that I still really love and am very proud to have been a part of.
 
full
 
To everyone who saw it in theatres or bought a copy, thank you for your support.
 
I’m going back through all my old favorites this week, starting with the ultimate ‘fluid gender and sexuality’ romp, El Hazard.
 
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Feels good to be settling back into some awesome anime. If you haven’t seen El Hazard, it’s basically this.
Derpy Whooves
Preenhub - We all know what you were up to this evening~
Artist -
My Little Pony - 1992 Edition
Artistic Detective - For awesome dedication to sleuthing out and maintaining artist tags and links
Economist -
Not a Llama - Happy April Fools Day!

Looking For My Doctor
all females would be voiced by chipmunks high on helium
 
Funny story.
 
One of my Japanese co-workers learned English in the UK (basically, Bournemouth, where apparently else on the planet goes to in order to learn English). So, anyway, in my US office I have a bunch of engineers and developers standing by to help with a technical glitch in Tokyo, and she answers the speaker phone in exactly the voice you are describing. 100% perfect Tokyo greeter-lady cant and pitch. She and I talk for a second in Japanese and everyone in the room now knows what they are in for.
 
Then she switches to English, and out of the speaker comes the deepest, most sultry and alto English voice with a deep British accent you can imagine, and every engineer in the room came in their pants. You could see their faces contort with joy and confusion as their brains exploded in a sea of hormones and bewilderment.
 
Male or female, there wasn’t a dry pair of pants in the room.
 
It was glorious.
Cosmas-the-Explorer
Solar Supporter - Fought against the New Lunar Republic rebellion on the side of the Solar Deity (April Fools 2023).
Non-Fungible Trixie -
Notoriously Divine Tagger - Consistently uploads images above and beyond the minimum tag requirements. And/or additionally, bringing over the original description from the source if the image has one. Does NOT apply to the uploader adding several to a dozen tags after originally uploading with minimum to bare tagging.

Explorer in Training
@Derpy Whooves  
Wow what a life. I didn’t think someone with your connections would be on this website.
 
What did you think of that Spirits Within movie? I heard it was quite the phenomenon.
 
Are you still in the translation buisness or have you moved on?
ArmadilloEater

Administrator
French Taunter
What’s Saint Seiya
 
And you call yourself “partly a weeb”, how dare you D:<
 
More seriously “Saint Seiya” is one of the best anime ever IMO, though I might have huge nostalgia goggles. Here is the opening, do have a look!
 
As for Toradora I don’t know what you’re talking about, never mentioned that love-story anime, full of teen angst and silly situations, I’d never watch something as fluffy and cute, no sir.
Derpy Whooves
Preenhub - We all know what you were up to this evening~
Artist -
My Little Pony - 1992 Edition
Artistic Detective - For awesome dedication to sleuthing out and maintaining artist tags and links
Economist -
Not a Llama - Happy April Fools Day!

Looking For My Doctor
@moonchosen  
I’m in love with almost all of my co-workers, and I take them all out, for whatever fun we can have, all night long.
 
full
 
If you get a chance to get into “the biz”, do it. Get touched by it. Breath deep the buzz. Press the button to begin. It’s an amazing way to spend an alternative timeline.
 
smart people are sexy
Derpy Whooves
Preenhub - We all know what you were up to this evening~
Artist -
My Little Pony - 1992 Edition
Artistic Detective - For awesome dedication to sleuthing out and maintaining artist tags and links
Economist -
Not a Llama - Happy April Fools Day!

Looking For My Doctor
@Cosmas-the-Explorer  
HA ha ha … yeah, thanks, but - Honestly, if it weren’t for my connections I would not be ON this site. I love the industry, I love the franchise, I love the creator, the people working on it, the paper they use to print their boxes is my obsession, the tools they use to pass notes or comment on their scripts is my bread and butter. Honestly, I’m here because I don’t have to do this for pay any more so now I’m doing it because all of this is fun and some of the people involved are my favorite thing in life.
 
Also you’d be surprised who got what job in the 90’s. I used to carry a little separate wallet of business cards depending on whom I had to talk to, and most of my coworkers did, too.
 
What did you think of that Spirits Within movie?
 
Rendering it was SAVAGE. My company carried the Sydney 2000 Olympic Games which were in the fall of 2000, and we had to sign a 3 year contract to secure the trans-Pacific bandwidth to carry it back to LA and then to New York for broadcast in the US. Basically Southern Cross wasn’t operational until November but the Olympics were done in October, so we had a fat pipe that no one else wanted because of the juicy new fiber.
 
I think that was Global Crossing’s PC-1. Like, it might have just become available at exactly the time we needed it.
 
But that was no help because we couldn’t get from Tokyo to Hawaii, and going from Tokyo to Sidney was just as bad. And even with the fat pipe from Hawaii to the states the job required more than three times all the bandwidth we could beg, borrow, or steal. So … we did what any rational person would do.
 
We stuffed some Origin 2000s and Onyx’s into their original boxes, and then because THAT wouldn’t come CLOSE to doing the job we wrapped 170 rackmount Octanes in bubble wrap (if it helps, imagine rolling out fifty feet of 3’ wide bubble-wrap on a server room floor, and then setting approximately a 8” tall 19” wide 3’ deep computer on it and rolling it over and over until it has enough bubblewrap on it that it feels ‘safe’), then stuffed all of them into the ass of a shipping container and put them and a couple engineers who had earned some time someplace nice onto a plane and flew them to Hawaii where Square built a studio at the half-way point so we could get the job done.
 
I think only 3 of the machines didn’t make the cross-Pacific journey … so … bubble-wrap: it’s good stuff.
 
What that farm couldn’t handle we shipped across the Hawaii-MPLS link and processed it at the main facility in Silicon Prairie, Minneapolis, and … it worked!
 
Fortunately, everything else going on that season was between LA and other places in the US or Canada and England for The Mill and companies like that, so the Pacific bandwidth being maxed out didn’t show up on anyone’s radar, and we got away with it! ^__^
 
Everything was in Maya and Renderman, and there was a bunch of … Pipeline? Is that the right word? That might have been Harry Potter or StarTrek or X-Men … hard to keep them straight sometimes. I just remember X-Men had the breasts with the flipping scales, and Harry Potter had the moon lighting tied to the candles (whoops) so in some of the hallway scenes if you can see the moon AND a candle, the moon is flickering, too. Ha ha ha but no one will ever notice something like that. Ha ha ha no. They noticed the very night the movie went public.
 
During the rendering of the movie, individual frames came off about once every hour and a half, but we had enough concurrency that we were seeing one new frame about every 6 minutes, and you would watch a frame come off, make sure it was … right … as if you had ANY IDEA what you were expecting to see, and then it would get shunted to the queue for delivery and the next frame would load in the farm.
 
Because of the all the traffic, watching an individual frame load in the main office in Minnesota took almost 2 minutes. It was unbelievably painful to watch in real time. I mean, this was the turn of the century electronics, HDTV was still $80,000 just for the CABLE for the TV studio, and the individual frames were gihugic.
 
It actually went a lot better than any other movie we’d rendered so far, and Square Enix was on top of all of it, so once things hit the farm they were pretty much done.
 
But sometimes one of the character’s hair would get mathematically “stuck” on a door frame, and as the frames were coming off the farm you’d see the figure walking forward but their head would have a triangle coming off of it stuck to the door frame, and you’d have to call Square and let them know and they’d send a new sequence.
 
Basically, it wasn’t until Pixar created the new hair algorithms for for the feathers on the owls in Harry Potter, Renderman did what it could, and the artists creating The Spirits Within did some super amazing stuff in Maya to get it looking as good as it did.
 
But - my favorite part was and remains the little exposed frame cars in the movie.
 
Those were, like, the perfect balance of metal and rubber and it was 100% exactly what Maya and Renderman were designed for. They looked and moved … perfect.
 

 
All in all, the whole job felt super fast. It feels like it was just a couple months. Like, we started in late 2000, and the movie was out in July the next summer. By comparison, Gladiator was a fucking slog. Every single night was an all nighter just trying to keep the dailies on time.
 
Then, when post was done, and the movie shipped, we all went out to see it the day it came out - first showing - giant screen with awesome sound - and when our credits rolled at the end and we fucking lost it!
 
Most of the movies we rendered or provided similar services for never even mentioned us, but there we were - in letters 10 feet tall. No one had told us we were going to get a credit, but … yeah. There it was.
 
We fucking lost it.
 
Everyone else in the theatre was all, like, ‘why are you freaking out over the credits?’.
 
But … worth it. Totally worth it.
 
By the time the movie was done, the SGI rendering farm was worthless. Simple PCs were so much cheeper and faster that we literally didn’t ship a single piece of equipment home, because it wasn’t even worth its weight in scrap at that point. In fact during the rendering of the movie we migrated to something like 1,500 or almost 2K regular PCs and even though they were slower we could buy SO MANY of them for the same price it didn’t matter.
 
I remember, a couple months later, watching an Origin 2000 bouncing around in the back of someone’s pickup driving out the front gate of the facilities, and security asked if we cared, but everyone just shrugged … it literally would have cost us more to dispose of it than it was worth.
 
It’s a much cooler modern world now that a laptop basically can kick the ass of any random 1990’s SGI, but I do miss all that old purple iron.
 
Are you still in the translation buisness or have you moved on?
 
Not any more. Encodings make more sense now and translation is built into the creation of projects instead of being shoe-horned at the end.
 
So, basically I sit around and wait for something we did in the 90’s to break. Like, last fall Google fucked up Japanese/Chinese/Korean text input, and that resulted in a couple months of “Ok, there’s only a dozen people left on the planet who worked on this, so fix it” style work. Those are actually fascinating puzzles when the happen - watching the videos of people encountering the bug Google introduced was kind of creepy: when the error happened people would literally jerk their hands from the keyboards and shake them like there was something sticking to their fingers.
 
Then I figured out how to replicate the bug, and I did the exact same thing.
 
It was like watching it happen to someone else, but it was me, but I did it anyway because I couldn’t not be creeped out by what happened.
 
Totally cool.
 
Derpy Whooves
Preenhub - We all know what you were up to this evening~
Artist -
My Little Pony - 1992 Edition
Artistic Detective - For awesome dedication to sleuthing out and maintaining artist tags and links
Economist -
Not a Llama - Happy April Fools Day!

Looking For My Doctor
Saint Seiya
 
OH MY GOD! That was one of the Karaoke songs that everyone was doing when I was in Tokyo ^_^
 
I can’t even remember the words any more, but man - that was like one of the big “OK, Let’s DO THIS!” songs that would get broken out when everyone’d had, like, six margaritas and wasn’t feeling any pain.
 
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ArmadilloEater

Administrator
French Taunter
@Panko Pai  
Look at how many frames per second you’re getting. If you’re below 60, your system isn’t good enough to handle the game properly, consider lowering the most demanding graphical options (shadows and particules for example) or upgrade your rig.
Background Pony #502A
Which thread is the best place to give art suggestions and ideas even though I’m not an artist myself?
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