Lori's NZ Blog

Working at Weta & horizontal rain

I've spent a couple of days on the job, sorta. I don't have any real projects/tasks at this point - just a bit of self-training. So far, the pipeline seems pretty similar to Imageworks, but there are some major differences. For example, there are far fewer studio tools. At SPI, every last Maya function was wrapped up in an "sp tool." At Weta, there are custom tools to get shots through the pipeline, and of course proprietary rig stuff, but everything else is pretty much plain vanilla Maya. I looked at their code repository and it looked like there were about 100 Mel scripts in total. And very little of it was show-specific. Looks like I'll have to learn Maya after two years of using spMaya. ;)

Today we got a bit of the "horizontal rain" I've heard so much about. It was quite windy, making it difficult to open/close the car door and such. You can feel the wind pushing the car around on the road as you're driving. On the radio, they called it an "Old Man's Southerly." The southerly was angry that day, my friends... like an old man trying to send back soup in a deli. Well, I'm still thankful for a change in the weather. On the radio they were also complaining about the poor air quality in New Zealand.... they have no idea.

posted by Lori @ 7:42 PM