I have much time on my hands in Berlin now so I’ve been to the movies. I watched two classics in a charming little theater in the Kastanienallee, Delicatessen and Taxi Driver and two current Hollywood blockbusters in the UCI Colosseum multiplex theater, WALL·E and Burn After Reading. I will not talk so much about the films themselves because that has already been done by people way more proficient than me. No, I will focus on my experiences around and inspired by the movies. With no spoilers, as usual.

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Today I was eager for a new Pixar poster. Who would’ve thought that I spent nearly one and half hour talking with the guys and gals from Pixar?

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Recruiting day for me! Yesterday I was too tired and lacked of motivation getting some of my demo reels to the important representatives of Some Great Company. And I even shook hands with one of the people who got me into VFX at all.

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At 4:30am my cell phone tried to wake me, without success, but it succeeded ten minutes later shortly before I stuffed in some clothes, my ten portfolio DVDs and my bag of hygiene products. Then I tried giving Martina, who was one of my two passengers, the ordered wake-up call, unanswered twice. The third time she picked it up and sounded not even as sleepy as me. Donsch, my other passenger, was waiting outside the campus building patiently for me to arrive, 18 minutes late for I forgot to print out the addresses of the convention center and my hotel which really saved my ass.

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Currently the fmx, the Conference on Animation, Effects, Games and Digital Media, resides for the 13th time in Stuttgart. Big woo because this year I’m among the participants. But my trip actually started on Sunday when I was getting ready, also mentally, for my upcoming days of celebrated geekdom.

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I am more of a satisfyzer (yes, just I made that word up) than a maximizer but I am not up for any compromises when it comes to t-shirts: If I have an idea about a certain print I want then I won’t settle for anything less than exactly that. Yes, I was looking for that perfect, one and only DeLorean-logo shirt!

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I love Valve’s Steam network. No wait — I hate it! I feel like ranting: The last three hours I was working hard to get a Maya model exported, textured and imported into the game. And figuring out how the exporter handles textures was nearly half the deal.

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Today I was somewhat grouchy: I wanted to continue my works from the day before on my notebook but couldn’t open the Maya 8.5 ASCII files in Maya 8.0 on my ACER portable. I was so annoyed by that fact that I started to code a little application that turns any Maya ASCII-file into a Maya 8.0 compatible ASCII.

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…but not in real life. Clipping errors for example. I guess everybody of you has seen them by now. Imagine the first Playstation games that came in 3D, especially the buggy ones where solid objects began overlapping each other. In fact it happens so often when working in 3D that even Pixar’s A Bug’s Life had some clipping errors going on in the grass now and then. It’s so ridiculously easy in the computer to do the impossible in the real world.

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When working 9 to 14 hours a day with Autodesk Maya 8.0 you soon encounter the strangest problems. In my opinioin the most annoying problem is Maya eating up my PNG files and then produce a pnglib Error in an infite loop while rendering. First I thought it happened because I use a SanDisk 4 GB USB-stick for working (!) but it even happened with an external USB diskdrive and even when saved local. And it doesn’t happen right away.

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