Worst Comments 2

#1022

Wow what an awesome thread - none of my tales of woe compare to KOL, he’s GOLD

   I do have one or two small things that come to mind however, this first is a couple of years back studying "multimedia" at this dodgy little tafe (Holmesglen moorabin if theres anyone from Melbourne reading this).
   
   So picture this: I've just finished school and my experience with 3d consists of having a bit of a dabble with maya ple and playing around with a copy of cinema 4d at school. I just manage to get into this course, and Im naively hopeful its everything I want a learning institution to be.
   
   The first warning sign should have been when we learned that for the 10 odd subjects were doing (as its multimedia were doing 3d, video, html, 2d animation, director lingo programming, flash actionscripting etc) we had two teachers. Thats right, we had an old fart who felt painting shitty vases in photoshop creative, and a stoner who...I really dont remember him teaching anything. For the one weekly 3d class we had they had contracted a guy from a studio to come in and teach us 3ds max. 

One of the first projects was to animate the good old bouncing ball and then morph it to a ufo that flies away. Me being creative wanted to change the color as it morphed so that it would go from a rubber ball to a shiny meltal saucer. My experince with cinema 4d told me this should be easy - it was something I could do with two clicks of the mouse, but being unfamilar with 3ds max I couldnt find it so I went to the teacher to get some help. The conversation went like this:
   
   Me: blah blah...so in addition to it morphing i want to animate the colors to change as well.
   
   teacher: 3d max cant do that.
   
   me: what do you mean? thats pretty basic and 3d max is like one of the biggest 3d packages out there.
   
   teacher: nope. it quite definatly doesnt let animate the diffuse setting.
   
   Me: but I can do it in cinema 4d in two seconds. its so basic. I just dont know where to find it in max.
   
   teacher: ive never heard of a 3d program doing that (im paraphrasing this a bit as its been about 4 years)
   
   me: well if I wanted to animate the color, how would YOU go about doing that?
   
   teacher: id render out two seperate passes, one with one material and one with the other. and then comp them in final cut.
   
   me: your really think that thats the best way to animate the color *groans inwardly*
   
   Another time I came in about 10 minutes late to class as I had to travel about an hour and a half to get there and my train was late. He had started the class, written up on the board the project brief and as I came in (apologising) he was wiping it off the board. So after I got a seat and put my bag down I went over to get the brief.
   
   me: sorry i was late, my train was cancelled and I had to catch the next one. can I get a copy of the project brief?
   
   teacher: nope
   
   me: no?
   
   teacher: no.
   
   me: you're kidding me right?
   
   teacher: no Im not. you were here late, its not my fault you didnt get to write down the brief. (he didnt have anything typed up, he just wrote all the notes tutorials etc on the whiteboard and we had to copy them down)
   
   me: the train was late. cant you just tell me what the brief is?
   
   teacher: no. go ask one of your classmates. maybe one of them will be kind enough to share their notes with you.
   
   me: *flabbergasted*
   
   More recently I did a freelance job for a workmate who wanted this dazzling intro for his fashion show at some swanky club. We worked out what he wanted, how long I had to do it and how much he was going to pay me. 
   
   The job consisted of a three or four minute video clip collage style showing the adventures of this character who travels on this journey to find the opening of the show (his idea not mine). It was to be done in 3d which would be done in cinema 4d and 2d done in after effects. He emailed me a bunch of product shots and photos of one of his friends (this absolute douchebag of a guy he told me was a model) who was to be the main character. 
  
  Fast forward to the day before the show and its 11pm and ive just finished probably 40 or so hours on this project but its just about done. I email a test to the client who approves it (actually he really loves it) and i sigh with releif. it takes another two hours to render out in after effects (my slow slow comp) and then another hour and a half to convert it to dvd format. so eventually I burn two copies onto dvd and go next morning to drop them off at the club where the show is. I go home, its my day off and ive just made $350 bux. 
  
  Anyway after about two hour i get a call from a number i dont know. 
  
  Me: hello?
  
  dude: hi my names blah blah im the event coordinator for tonight for this show blah blah.
  
  Me: ok sure whats up did you like the video?
  
  dude: yeah its fantastic. but theres one bit we want you to change.
  
  me: *becomes extremely apprehensive* oh?
  
  dude: yeah its just the characters face. we want to change it.
  
  me: whats wrong with it? (my job was finished and approved by the client. the characters face is in nearly every shot so id have to render the whole thing out again. I wanted to know they had a good reason to want me to change it)
  
 dude: here just hang on a tic (i can hear him talking to someone else in the background)
  
  some other dude: hey bro my names pross (seriously that was his name) its my picture in the video there.
  
  me: cool. how do you like the video?
  
  some other dude: its really great but i want to change my face, i dont want to be in it.
  
  me: so i gather. but you knew you were going to be in the video and my jobs done. why do you want to change the face?
  
  some other dude: well, it make me look kinda dumb and theres going to be all these international models there so id prefer them not to see it.
 
 me: well i cant do it. its gonna take too long.
 
 some other dude: cant you just paste another face over the one thats there?
 
 me: *slightly shocked he would think Id be able to just "paste" another face over something on a dvd* its about five hours to the show, and taking into account the amount of time to render out the video again and then convert to dvd i would finish the changes and have them ready for you sometime after the show. 
 
 some other dude: hmmm... *you can hear him coming up with a genious solution* do you have a mac??
 
 me: do i have a mac? how would that help?
 
 some other dude: theyre good for graphics and stuff i thought
 
 me: :banghead:

it seems he thought if i had access to a mac i would magically be able to fix the issue. goddam idiots.

#1023 
  Bwhahahaha! :scream:

Dude, those are classics I tell you. I’ve heard them pretty much before too!

#1024

  • Oh, ok. Do you own a Jack Welch though?

  • I’m sorry?

  • Oh nothing, they’re good for Business and stuff, I thought.

#1025

WOW! Amazing! The other ones about Lightwave are great (and that one about the cow-in-the-wall is awesome!), but this one about doing all the actions on every image is the best!

#1026

Yeah,
I’ve recently dealt with the whole “Your teacher kinda sucks” situation. I was recently hired by a sign design company creating animations for electronic displays and billboards. Coincidentally the company’s in the same town where my former professor got his bachelors, and while teaching us at another school, his masters. The other three guys working with me essentially went to school with this guy, and dropped in on my hiring interview and basically railed on him the whole time. Keep in mind I was getting the explanation:

“Yeah, did you see his Master’s thesis?”
“The one with the horses?”
“Yeah, it sucked didn’t it?”
“Huh?”
“The only way he graduated was having to change the animation like, ten times until the Dean was happy with it. And it still looked bad.”
“What problems was it giving him?” (And I’m thinking it would have to be something EXTREMELY minor, and the Dean was really nitpicky)
“He couldn’t figure out the IK system so he ended up fudging it with FK. So all the early animatics had these magnificent shots of flaming horses, ground to head, running around stepping on people. He didn’t know how to do Full Body IK, and couldn’t do a quadruped from scratch, so on his first pass (which he ultimately rendered) he did it with the back legs regular IK and the front legs FK. Problem was the front legs ran a little faster than the back ones, and constantly intersected with the ground. The second time he created scratch IK leg systems for the front and back legs and made a hopping horse. (I guess you could make it work if you worked at it for a while) Finally he just decided to use a locator/parent constraint system, which ultimately looked good in a walk cycle, until he loaded it onto the school’s render farm. Something was lost in the ascii, and if you looked really closely you could count the frames where it skipped constraints. By this time he didn’t have time to try a new rig, so he decided to do all the running shots of the head, bouncing up and down, and you would only see the full horse when it was standing still. Then when time came to composite everything he put the horse on top of actual video he filmed at Bryce Canyon. But it didn’t look convincing, so every time he showed it to the Dean he would hear “Make it Darker! Make it Darker!” He couldn’t figure out how to make flame effects so he decided to change it from flame to light, and only coming out of their eyes and mouth, and being pressed for time he didn’t re render the horse, he just used lens flares! Everywhere! So in the end you had an incredibly dark animation with a bouncing horse head with default lens flares coming out of it’s face. He got his Master’s because he was really good buddy’s with the Dean, who was probably tired of seeing the same horse animation day in and day out.”

#1027

Must… click… Jumping… out… at… me…

#1028

I’m starting to think they should go into the wiki.

#1029

that would be cool, or as people said before it should be some kind of web comic character or even a mascot :smiley:
"things you shoudn’t do" (and all those others people mentioned)

Sultan of softimage
Master of modo
Marmaduke of maya
Cecil of c4d
Sir Zedric of zbrush

etc…

#1030

Pross sounds like a made up model name. I bet it’s pretty hard not to look dumb when you say dumb things. He deserves to have his face on there, dumb and douchebaggy as ever.

#1031

cant you just paste another face over the one thats there?

In my experience the phrase, “can’t you just…” is usually followed by a ridiculous statement of ignorance and douchebagery. It gives me the creepy crawlies whenever I hear it starting to come out of someone’s mouth.

#1032

HAHA, we used to have an internal joke that whenever we heard that phrase the price went up another few hundred dollars. More if it was my boss at the time.

#1033

I finally have one to add. This just last night.

One of my best friends has written a feature script (which is actually quite good) and is trying to pitch it to investors. As part of it he’s filmed some select scenes from the script, one of which is a car chase. Being unable to block off streets or freeway areas, or otherwise spend any money on it at all, he shot it on greenscreen.

Not being an FX artist himself, he consulted me regarding how to shoot it, but I couldn’t be on the set the whole day while he was shooting it. We shot outside in the sun so the lighting would be accurate to the comps, which is well and good except in exposing for the actors inside the shade of the cars, the greenscreen being lit by the sun was blown out. And scenes outside the car, where they are supposed to “ram” each other, have the cars reflecting the crew, the equipment, and in some cases greenscreen so hot it’s near impossible to tell where the car ends and the screen begins.

Between each other we’ve got several projects that are unfinished and he’s been pushing to get them out the door (which is good, because I’m fundamentally lazy), and we wrapped up the other projects, so the time had come for this one. At around midnight he was up in the other room mixing sound on another project of ours, and I grabbed the first shot in the sequence.

The first shot is one where one car is supposed to ram the other. Both cars were expensive and borrowed, so not only was the greenscreen totally blown out on both of them, and the crew totally visible in reflections, but the “ramming” car was moving at about 1 inch per minute so as not to accidently even nudge the other. Oh, and it was handheld with no track markers.

So I rotoscoped both cars, got a stabilizing track working, sped up the ramming car to actually look like it was moving at ramming speed, replaced the green spill and unwanted reflections with plates that we had gone out and shot on the freeway, including animated warping as it moved across the body of the car, put another freeway plate in the background, and color matched it.

When it was done, at around 4:00 AM, I have to say I stunned myself with how well it turned out. Looking at the plate I had not expected it to be a shot that we would get away with. Now, besides the fact that the perspective of the background plate isn’t quite right, it’s actually a shot that works, and quite astonishingly given what I had to work with. I was proud as hell and I called him in to check it out.

His comment: “WOW! How’d you make the background?”

Me: “Uh, it’s an actual shot of the freeway. Remember we spent an afternoon driving and shooting?”

Him: “Ohh, right.”

Me: waits patiently for validation

Him: “Man, that background is good.”

Me: can’t wait any longer “Yeah, but that was the easiest part. I also [I list it off].”

Him: “Really?”

Me: shows him the original plate

Him: “Huh. I didn’t notice.”

I suppose I should take it as a compliment that my FX work seemed so effortless and “correct” that he didn’t notice. And as I said, he’s a good friend so I know he actually does appreciate the work I’m doing.

But still – the best part is THE BACKGROUND PLATE?! :scream:

#1034

I’ve been a teacher. I’m kind of on the teacher’s side on that one.

Consider you’ve got a class with 30 students that may meet 30 times over the duration of the quarter. If each student is late just once that means almost every class is going to be disrupted. And it is disrupted. Everyone’s attention is diverted and you have to wait for the kid to find a seat, plop down, dig his stuff out (none of this done silently), and explain why it absolutely was not his fault he was late. Amazing fact: Only unavoidable circumstances cause students to be late.

And now this student who’s ruined your presentation wants a special favor just for him.

I’m sure every one reading this knows there’s more to know about any CG topic than can be covered in a class. But here you’ve got a kid who wants you to cover even less by giving up time to re-cover stuff you already covered for the rest of the class before he got there.

Do it for you after class? That’s bleeding time from something else the teacher needs to do.

Print out the class notes so the students never have to write anything down? That takes time too. It ain’t cheap either.

Teaching takes an enormous amount of time beyond the time you see the teacher in class. There’s never enough time to get it done as well as you would like.

#1035

Things change a bit when the student is paying for his or her classes. It gets even worse when tuition is so high that the student has to work and study. That doesn’t make it right, but it is worth understanding their point of view as well.

#1036

What students are not paying for their classes?

#1037

The ones whose parents are paying for it?

#1038

High school. :stuck_out_tongue:

You are being paid to teach them. That makes them customers in a sense. Yes, they need to meet you half-way. No, you still have to meet them half-way, too. From your own example, it sounds like a simple email would have been ideal.

#1039

It sounds like the lecturers where you come from a realy nice, if i was late for a lecture i couldnt even attend becuse the door would be locked :frowning: . You had to wait for the tea break to sneak in and copy notes of a mate.

That said the place i went to collage was **** the course I did isnt even run anymore.

I remember that i used a piece of softwear that had 2 hours a week clases for the hole year, but I was the only one who was using that peice of softwear and so was the only one who would turn up for the classes. in the end the lecturer gave me a photocopy of his note book and said “Just come find me in my office if you have any problems”, he didnt have a cluee how to use it anyway so it wasnt as if i lost much but i got stuck once and went to his office he siad.
“Can you please come find me during classe time im bussy”
i mean WTF i was paying for the lecter he wasnt giving and all i want is a bit of help during the time he was meant to teach us!

#1040

teacher: id render out two seperate passes, one with one material and one with the other. and then comp them in final cut.

Im sure you can animate the diffuse in 3ds MAX, as its just simple keyframing…Ive not used it in years though so I may be wrong.

The point is, hes right. What if you animate the colour changing and thats all you have in 1 render. Then you send the image sequence off to be composited, and the client or art director wants to change the length of the blend, or any number of things with regards to how it changes. Youd be stuck, and would need to go back and re-render till he was happy.

Learning to do 3d properly for a studio/production environment is all about learning how to minimise potential stumbling blocks later in the production.

#1041

The point is that the teachers said “it’s not possible”, which is wrong.

What if you animate the colour changing and thats all you have in 1 render. Then you send the image sequence off to be composited, and the client or art director wants to change the length of the blend, or any number of things with regards to how it changes. Youd be stuck, and would need to go back and re-render till he was happy.

Sure, it can happen. Than what you do if they want to change the texture? Or part of a texture?
You think everything should be separated to the MCD?

Learning to do 3d properly for a studio/production environment is all about learning how to minimise potential stumbling blocks later in the production.

No, it absolutely is not.
Efficiency means finding the best balance between things that can potentially get changed and a certain amount of aggregation, it’s not about being able to change every single bit at every possible moment in comp, because that would take a longer setup time for a lot of stuff that would never be changed, effectively killing the ROI of rendering in passes.
All of this without mentioning that not every production is comp heavy, plenty places re-commit the early balance comps back to the shader and output frames for level comping and not for CGtweaking comping.

There is no excuse for a teacher saying “it’s not possible” because they don’t want to admit “they don’t know”, because if the student believes him they have effectively done damage, if they don’t they lost the respect and faith of a student. It’s exactly the wrong mix of ignorance and pride that should get somebody kicked from a teacher position instantly :slight_smile: