Here’s a little tool to create mosaics from video files as a simple way to preview the content as a single image. It offers a number of options, from the size and number of thumbnails to scene detection. You can clone the repository from here:https://github.com/flipswitchingmonkey/MosaicMaker(I’ve also uploaded a packaged binary version for convenience)

Cinema 4D – convert XYZ data to Point Cloud
Here’s a simple little script to turn your XYZ data (that you could get out of Photogrammetry software, for example) into point geometry within Cinema 4D. Since XYZ is a very, very simple format to store data, there’s little in terms of error checking or whatever. It’s just a long list of numbers with one […]

Cinema 4D – Accessing Sound Effector probes with Python
The Sound effector has been a part of Cinema 4D for quite a while. Recently we had a need to use the effector to drive other parts of the scene, but not through other effectors (we needed numeric values etc.). Python to the rescue! Simply add a Python tag to the Sound effector and use […]

SlackFileManager
We at 908 have been using Slack for our internal communication for a while now and we’re pretty happy with it. Except, when it comes to file administration, the tools leave much to be desired. Like, a lot. You can either right click in the client and go through the extremely tedious process of deleting […]
Installing Dell srvadmin-storage on Fedora 29
These are the steps required to manually install srvadmin-storage (the monitoring and administration tools for Dell servers and the PERC RAID controllers) without installing unnecessary cruft. Unfortunately there is no repository for Fedora. There are, however, builds for RHEL7, which work fine. First install the Dell GPG keys: wget -q -O – http://linux.dell.com/repo/hardware/latest/bootstrap.cgi > bootstrap.cgi […]

asciigpu
asciigpu asciigpu is a simple python program that reads the current GPU utilization and temperature (and more details if requested) and displays them in a clear way, using a clean terminal ui. This project came to pass because I ran into the asciimatics terminal GUI libray and wanted to do something with it. At the […]

After Effects playback speed
Here’s the result of some tests I ran a year or so back for a project. I have to admit, I don’t know the exact details any more and I would not consider the test “scientific” by a long shot… but the gist of it is that I wanted to work out how fast certain […]

Cinema 4D R20 – Using a centralized plugin repository
Introduction Maxon has released Release 20 of Cinema 4D and it comes with a bunch of new features (amongst them plugin breaking API changes, which is a bit of a bummer, but it needed to be done…). One of the lesser talked about features is the ability to set up multiple Plugin Search Paths. Previously you […]

Duplicate IPs, ZeroTier and ArpRetryCount
I’ve been experimenting with ZeroTier as a simple to set up VPN alternative and it’s been a relatively smooth experience so far. I won’t go into much detail here, but I can definitely recommend giving it a go for people working remotely. It’s not a complete replacement for VPN of course, but is very easy […]

FontInstallService – installing fonts as a regular user
Windows does not let regular users install fonts. Because, reasons. There is no easy workaround and no permission to be set, apparently dealing with fonts is high level admin work that should be dealt with by you running through the office and manually doing it for every artist. There is a workaround using PortableApps, but […]