TD meeting minutes – 8-10pm April 9, 2002

Render Farm stuff

- Chad gave us an overview of his system from last year. Lots of code, not a lot of documentation. Someone will need to write up docs.

- Dan G. talked about the status of Alfred… he and Stephen are still struggling to get the configuration right.

- Dan G. suggested that we treat last year’s render server as our “Plan A”, since it’s relatively tried and true. We’ll still work on getting Alfred installed, and if we can get it to work it’ll be our “Plan B.”

- Chad copied his latest server code to the _Shared\renderfarm directory on the X: drive.

Line Style stuff

- Eric showed some render tests with a “hidden line” drawing style for paint effects. He’s working on an interface for animating begin/end clips for strokes.

- Barbara wants to see the lines moving on the surface, not just growing and shrinking. But once a stroke is painted, it can’t be moved. You can move curves, of course, but curves can’t be “sketched” as easily.

- Dan remembered the pencil tool. We discover that it is possible to use “make live” on Nurbs with the pencil tool, so actually we can animate the curves after they are drawn.

- (Note: Eric & Dan talked to Dave in the lab the next day, and he pointed out that one drawback is you can’t get a pressure curve when stroking curves, and there’s not as much direct feedback. But we still think some combination of strokes on curves and strokes on surfaces will probably get us where we need to be.)