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Vivid Animation Pipeline

It is really hard to make people realize the importance of animation pipeline, especially to whom not in this field. As long as you learnt something CG related and some 3D packages(ex, Maya), you will soon pick "animation pipeline", the industry term, up from somewhere and treat it as a normal process of a group of people.

The following image I borrowed from Computer Graphics Quarterly, Volume 44 is some kinda interesting stuff for you to visually perceive the routine process of lighting. In the right column is a normal lighting pipeline. You can tell it starts from opening a Maya, doing some shader init setup, shader setup, lighting layout, ... rendering and once again, ....

It might be the right time to build a animation pipeline 2.0 through much more strict viewpoint of computer scientists by making use of the present techniques from different fields, like cloud computing, mixing of gpu's real-time rendering and cpu's high-quality rendering, artistic driven modeling/shading/lighting, ...

Don't just rely on what you have from 3D/CG/CV softwares/packages because it starts changing and soon or later, your competitor will work in ten times speed than yours!

學生動畫短片對 Pong 的致敬

One of Animation Mentor's graduates, Gabor Lendvai, created this less than 2 minutes short film which was inspired by one of the most successful early video game, Pong. Enjoy it in this raining day.

銘傳大學資訊傳播系學生來訪

這是小葉學長第三次，帶領他課堂上的學生，遠從銘傳桃園校區北上至太極影音參觀的活動。學生一樣是很有活力，眼睛睜大大的，對於這個夢幻行業充滿好奇與想像，同時充滿疑問，更多的是東方人的害羞。

同時也是我第二次前往課堂，擔任課座講師。說實在的，講師真是辛苦呀，尤其對於我這種沒有什麼經驗的人來說，在得兼顧公司工作進度之餘，還得好好想想，什麼東西才是有趣，有幫助的。又是什麼內容可能已經成了老生長談了，應該換個主題或方式~

不管怎麼說，帶領一群學生認識 CGSociety 上頭的 Lighting Challenges，還讓他們小小玩了一下 Maya Lighting，是件有趣的經驗，不曉得有沒有人投稿就是了 :p

Pixar - A Human Story of Computer Animation

If you do like Computer Graphics very much and wanna find something interesting to practice your English listening, check this out :)

TIFF file handling in PIL

# TIFF is a flexible, if somewhat aged, image file format originally
# defined by Aldus. Although TIFF supports a wide variety of pixel
# layouts and compression methods, the name doesn't really stand for
# "thousands of incompatible file formats," it just feels that way.

thousands of incompatible file formats, 這個的確有挖苦到 TIFF 這個格式 XD

台大計算機中心的「Drupal 6 Views Module系列」

• Drupal是一套內容管理系統，本系列文章將以View模組實際示範網站建置，除展示其驚人的彈性之外，也希望能稍微降低其學習門檻，引領讀者們進入Drupal的世界。
• 我們將在本文中為大家介紹在 Views 中的Arguments，Relationships及Sort Criteria這些強大的功能及使用方式。

上頭這兩篇文章就 Drupal 的 Views 這個模組，做了一個非常有趣的介紹吶~

經 DrupalTaiwan 上頭 charlesc 的介紹：[好文] 使用Drupal 6 Views Module系列，才得以看到這兩篇文章，同時意外看到，以前工讀時，就在計中的熱血工程師許凱平先生，也寫了一篇心得分享：採用開源軟體之個案經驗分享(一) 以開源內容管理平台Drupal開發「國家公園虛擬標本館」專案。

• jesselue 提供了 CCK+Views 的學習建議：[好文] 使用Drupal 6 Views Module系列

Drupal 7 的重要進展

根據官方的說法，Drupal 7 有如下幾點特色：

Revamped User Interface

有了 "Seven" 這個 theme，加上 overlay, dashbard 與 shortcut，整個就很威。其中的 dashboard 與 shortcut 很 web 2.0，你想要怎麼樣的 UI，由你自個兒來決定，完全擺脫了預先設想的 UI，高度自由化。硬要挑剔的話，就是少了幾個 preset。試想，對於一位第一次嘗試 Drupal 的人來說，有預設的親切 Admin dashboard，是會獲得不少喝采的。

另一方面，試了一下 In-place editing，還不賴。有了這個，要砍掉一個 node 也會稍為地快一些。我對於，怎麼加裝想要的功能到那個 drop-down box 這件事，比較感興趣就是了 :p

Quick Taste of Drupal 7 Alpha 1