That made my day! My cube neighbors think I’ve blown a gasket, though.
Worst Comments 2
bazze
#742
this happened to my girlfriend at her office.
part (1)
An older guy neede help finding a letter he had written. Se walks over to his room and finds out that this guy has no idea how “files” and “folders” work. For 5-6 years this dude has written all his work documents in one huge 600-pages long word document!!!
part (2)
Some week later this dude has learned how to split up his document and have started using folders and several files. He calls her over again needing some help to find a specific document. It turns out that he has named all his folders to stuff like “chair”, “flower”, “car” etc - he had hundreds of files/folders with mumbo-jumbo names that had nothing to do with their content!!!
d_jnaneswar
#745
A guy called me up yesterday and asked me if I could help him learn character animation… I asked him his background and he told me that he did fine arts and worked in bg dept in a 2d company but since the pay is low, he wants to move to 3d and that too into character animation because of the abundance of jobs… I told him to come over so that we can talk.
he comes and says " See, ive been in the animation field for 4 years now… i know what fits in where… i just need to get ahead with the 3d software and that should be fine".
I said “alright, this is maya, this is how you zoom in and zoom out, this is how you set keyframes and this is your character…”
he interrupts and asks “he is standing in mid air… there should be ground underneath him”…
Me : “yeah…” and i create a ground plane…
He : “right, let me animate something”
me : “go ahead, create a bouncing ball… here is the ball rig”
He : “right… where’s the bounce button?”
me : “no, you have to give keyframes just like 2d… then the computer can be made to do the inbetweens”
he : “so you dont have those walk cycles buttons and dialogue animation buttons?”
me : “no”
he : “i thought there would be buttons.”
me : “no”
he : “alright then! thanks! ill stick to 2d”
me : “alright!”
he : “u know, you should use poser more… they use it on all hollywood block busters to create effects”
me : (didnt know what to say) "yeah? ill look into that! thanks!’
Another prospective student came along and said “i did programming for 4 years… I think i can learn animation in 3 days to a week… can you teach me?” I asked “did you have previous animation experience?” he said “no.”
I said “then it would take about 3 months full time to learn the basics”
he said “but that xyz institute is teaching 3d animation in 1 week”
I said “go learn from there… oh… how much do they charge?”
he said “they charge about 2k dollars (100,000 Rs.) They use the latest equipment for animation and the latest software… dont u have them?”
I said “no I can afford to buy them…”
he said “yeah… ill learn from them then”
I said “right, when you finish it, do show me some of your animations”
he never came back.
My cousin saw some of my eariler 3d models and said “say… can you create something exactly like me?”
I wanted to have some fun… so even if I cant, I said “yeah… in about a day i can do something that is realistic and just like you”…
he :Ok… can I have it tomorrow? i want to put it on myspace.
I : ok… tomorrow morning you can have it.
he came back the next morning… looked at this “rendered” image i did and said “not bad… but it doesnt look realistic at all… too many wrinkles in the smile and the eyes look like plastic…”…
I just giggled and said “that is your photo from 2 years ago…I didnt change it a bit, its not 3d”
he couldnt believe that he looked so “unrealistic” in a photo… that was fun.
One last one :
me and my friend were watching the latest pirates flick and davy jones and johny depp are fighting on the mast and below was this vortex… my friend said “good effects!” I said “yeah”… he said “I think they do this in photoshop”… I said “no… they dont… they have a bunch of advanced software to do that”… he said “no! photoshop cs3 came out recently and they did this in CS3… my friend worked on it”… i said “oh yeah? whats his name?” he said “steve jobs”…
I just shut myself up and said “right… great!”
Improv
#746
Ahhh.thanks-I was wondering if he meant group of friends, or what? To me batch processing is a computer term or just means a group.
ChairMushroom
#747
This is a great thread!
Bosses can be unpredictable but unfortunately my family is. It seems like everytime we see some animation or commercial some one will say “HEY YOU SHOULD DO THAT!”
Its especially insulting to me because I bust my butt to learn all of these new skills and suddenly people who aren’t paying me know exactly what I should be doing with them because I am too dumb and uninspired to do anything on my own so I need a live in boss/client. It would be nice if my family just didn’t know what I did but since they’ve all seen Shrek everyone is an industry professional now who wants to talk shop with me.
CSLoomis
#748
Lots of great stuff on here. I was giggling while reading it to myself and my husband askedd what was funny…
I have never realy explained 3d stuff to him, and was going to attempt to explain one of the posts about rendering. I asked him if he knew what rendering was…
His response…“Thats how they take the meat off of bones”…
JaseP
#751
This is one of the stupidest things i’ve been asked to do. I designed a website for an auto company, on the site were instruction manuals on how to install their parts.
Client: “Can we make it so people can’t copy the instructions?”
Me: “We can make them an image or something, but people can still just copy them down on paper anyway.”
Client: thinks for a few seconds “…can we stop them from doing that?”
I looked at him for a couple of seconds and hoped that he realised that i was being asked to disable the viewer’s short-term memory, before changing the subject.
gnarlycranium
#752
It’s called “wetware DRM” and it isn’t quite functional yet. Maybe in a few years. There are a lot of executives eagerly awaiting its arrival.
Or just require all users to have the older and slightly clunkier “lobotomy DRM” installed prior to being given a login to the site. That will ensure they can’t retain a copy of the text in non-volatile memory after logging out.
Or you could just hit them in the face when they pick up a pencil.
There is of course the less violent option of using both the image technique and white-text on white background…
yenvalmar
#753
best comment ever! after 2 weeks and 30 plus rounds of extremely detailed micro-critiques of a single 3d character’s face, which resulted in a final model looking almost nothing like the original concept design aside from having eyes and ears, directed in detail so specific its unbeleivable, (lower the thread count on fabric of the hat to 2/3rds the current amount. a couple less hairs on the left eyebrow. etc) every step of the way by the client…
finally things are approved and i move onto another, much better paying job, with an art director that i even enjoy working with. 2 weeks later i get a message from the Problem Client..
"this is great but when i look at the original concept it makes me smile. the 3d version doesnt make me smile now. see what you can do with it. "
yeah after having to perform some of the most anal work of my life to match your extremely detailed and critical instructions, getting it approved and paid for it already, i can only feel like its not my problem. further, i'm working on another job now. SORRY PAL.
so the dude started stalking me, emailing me 5 times a day and calling me from different phone numbers so i couldnt screen his calls, begging me to “fix it” cause HE had some big deadline. i just sent him his money back in the mail and put his email address in my spam filter.
i’m sure i could have legally kept the money as everything was done via a legit contract, but its like beating up a cripple… i’d rather pretend to let a cripple beat me up, that way we both feel good at the end of the day.
azozel
#754
I was asked to create a 30 min animated pilot kids show by a former co-worker by my self as a side project. Complete with 15 characters, full 3D environments, and have it done in 2 weeks. After I stopped laughing I told him to look at all the incredible DVD features and audio commentaries and then count the animators and set designers and all the various 3d specialists.
He called me back the next day and said " so you can do it in 2 months then?"
Now I know why he was let go. He has no concept of reality.
Er… Yeah buddy let me just hit the create show button in 3ds max and well make a million.
Tagi
#756
Working for a small time multimedia company… with basically designers with SOME coding ability but not much.
Situation 1.
When asked to incorporate some video into a cd-rom multimedia presentatoin we discussed using divx as a compressor which at the time was under legal debate because of the mpeg4 issue… We decided it wasnt appropriate at the time to include the codec…
sales girl: “why don’t you just write a new divx codec”
dev team: “errr…”
Situation 2.
We had developed an isometric simulation to demonstrate hazards in the workplace for an online course. The sales manager comes to me and says “this thing is broken, when i showed the client and pressed up on the arrow keys the character moves left!”
I spend the good part of the morning examining the Flash code and trying to replicate the error. I went to his office and said “I can’t find this bug, show me exactly what you did”… so he starts the interactive up and moves the character around and yells “LOOK it’s doing it again!!”
Upon further examination, he had been demonstrating the exercise on his laptop but was sitting to the side to show the client, and now me… and was LITERALLY pressing the LEFT arrow key instead of the UP key. His hand was 90 degrees on the keyboard.
A good half day wasted! haha… funny stuff.
Situation 3.
We had built an online character to read our course material with professionaly recorded audio. After much discussion it was appparent professionally recorded voice over was expensive.
So the boss wanted another viable and AS GOOD solution to recorded voice…
Boss: “why don’t we just write a text to speech program.”
Me and Team: “errr… they’ve been researching that kind of technology for the last 30 years and you want us to build one in flash? Even the best text to speech out there still sounds computery…”
Boss: “you guys don’t think big enough. it wouldn’t be that hard. you just record all the major words and stitch the speech together”.
Team: “…”
Yorgo12345
#757
I had a client say this to me after I explained the process to her:
“cant we just skip that whole mesh thing and go straight to the render”
but here’s a Real Nightmare I had when I was staring out:
MONDAY: client hires me on to build & rig a character for a ‘short’ he was working on
THURSDAY: I’ve Finished, so I write him to ask how to deliver, and to give him my PayPal. He responds with:
" Oh, yeah, sorry, but I asked one of my other modelers to do it instead. Guess I should have told you huh? …what? no, I’m not going to pay you for something I won’t use!! "
-that’s how I learned my lesson about contracts-
niva
#759
This isn’t really a “worst comment” situation but something which has annoyed me enough to come up with a response which typically (if delivered with a deadpan tone) sends people away without another word.
I spend a lot of my free time sketching at coffee shops and almost always I have some random person who walks up as I’m drawing and asks “Did you draw that?” as I’m friggin penciling!!!
No, I’m just admiring it and thinking what it would be like to draw it.
…