santaclaus

> its a cool Visual FX studio not a technology company..

Weta develops metric tones of tech internally, including employing some of the top graphics researchers at various points in their careers. There is tons of tech talent in VFX and animation shops. Hell, I work with libraries open sourced by Pixar as part of my day job at a FAANG.

I used to follow your Rust work and had no idea you are yinzer! Mineo’s or Aiello’s? :)

It’s certainly not East Coast, but it’s very North East - the rust belt spans well beyond the Midwest. Even culturally Pittsburgh feels like it has more in common with, say, Buffalo or other North Eastern rust belt cities than Wisconsin or Minnesota.

> There are plenty FAANG engineers minted from the top Midwestern schools - think CMU and other state schools - even if they rank behind the top schools on the coasts.

CMU is a private school, ranked number 1 in CS, and is not in a Midwestern state! That said, there are lots of top CS programs in the Midwest.

University of Illinois Urbana Champagne, University of Michigan, university of Wisconsin Madison, and Purdue are all top 20 in CS.

Very cool! Just the other day I was trying to set Blender’s camera based on a standard 3x4 computer vision KRT matrix, and it is surprisingly a pain in the ass —- I wish more of these graphics CAD packages (Blender, Houdini, Maya) made it easier to deal with vision data.

Very cool! Glad to see Nucleus still getting some love, Jos would be happy — I was talking to a Pixar effects fellow at SIGGRAPH and was under the impression that Houdini’s constraint solver thing had spread like wildfire in that department.

Maya is still used in Pixar’s characters department for modeling, I believe, and maybe a few shading-related (UV layout?) tasks here or there.

Autodesk is doubling down on CAD and engineering (their leadership has even said so publicly) — VFX and animation is just a much smaller market. I personally think this is very short sighted.

Autodesk laid off the entire R&D staff of Maya (outside of Bifrost, which was an acquisition a few years ago and is now a one person show, mainly) and transferred ownership to their maintenance engineering division, if that isn’t life support I don’t know what is.

> Autodesk tools (especially Maya) are way too expensive in what they deliver. I'm glad many big studios realized this in that they either build their own tools (Pixar/Dreamworks) or they adapt Open Source (Blender) and help improving it.

Cost isn’t the issue, it’s mainly the fact that Autodesk effectively put Maya on life support. Pixar is paying hundreds of software engineers in the Bay to develop their proprietary animation tools, which is most definitely not cheaper than a few hundred Maya seats per show.

> I was interested to find out which steel mill, since they are almost non-existent in Pittsburgh these days

As evidenced by the smell of sulphur yesterday morning the coke plants down in Clairton are still alive and well!