May updates

Hey all, I don't use this handy post thing enough, time to dust it off and say hi.

So like everyone it's been interesting dealing with all this covid stuff. Our uni got 1 week warning to take everything online, luckily our IT stuff (all 2 of them!) are amazing, managed to get all 44 students and 8 staff onto Nomachine setups+Zoom, and we adapted pretty quickly.

This all happened just as our students were getting to the busy part of making the short film, so trying to get stuff up to a high quality, then learning about publishing, Shotgun, USD, all that. Considering how tricky all this tech was, it was amazing how much we got through by the end of the semester.

Anyway, due to that push to get into publishing, and a self imposed push to get better at Lops, I've done a lot of Lops of late. Probably not much use to most of you yet, but I think it'll hit most people soon. I've focused on the stuff relevant to us at at the uni, namely layout, publishing, assets, materials. No lighting yet, we'll be using Katana for the foreseeable future, but I'm keen to keep playing, kick the tyres on the lighting side of Lops. Anyway, all my notes are going here:

 http://www.tokeru.com/cgwiki/index.php?title=HoudiniLops 

There's always the usual simmering updates in the rest of the site, you can see what I'm up to by watching recent changes (a lot of them are me posting once, then 5 updates of fixing typos and fighting wiki syntax):

 http://www.tokeru.com/cgwiki/index.php?title=Special:RecentChanges&days=100&from=&limit=500 

Oh speaking of wiki specifics, had a bit of a scare where my hosting provider Dreamhost updated from php5 to php7. I run a pretty old version of Mediawiki, everything instantly broke. They were quick to rollback after I contacted support, but it's a temp fix, php5 is pretty old, they're gonna roll it out permanently in the next month or so. That means I have to get my hands dirty in Mediawiki installs, databases, PHP to upgrade, which I'm dreading as I haven't done that since, well, I first moved to Mediawiki like 5 years ago. Ugh. If anyone has experience with Mediawiki upgrades, please get in touch!

Oh, lastly I'll be part of the Houdini Hive sessions this week. Handily its prerecorded, so I've already sent mine in, but I'll be hanging out in the Youtube chat to answer questions. It's 8am thursday in the US, so 10pm thursday in Sydney, come along if you want to hear my usual panic improvised mayhem. :)

That's all for now, stay safe!

Cheers,

-matt