GDC is soon to be upon us, Technical Artist Bootcamp, Animation Bootcamp and many rounds tables are some of the highlights in the TA’s Selection. If you have some session recommends for GDC you feel other TA’s would enjoy please feel free to post them here.

Also as part of the week we will be holding a couple of social nights. So if you are going to be in town and are able to make it please fill in the form as we need numbers to book the venues.

TAO GDC 2013 Real-Life Non-Digital Social Event

Don't forget to wear your TAO shirt to GDC too!

See You There!

More unplanned problems. Basically, vBulletin is awful software and was creating endless temporary files which eventually caused Windows to fall over and die. In fact, I still can't delete the temp folder because Windows chokes on it!

The great news is, our backup system was working just as intended, so nothing should have been lost.

The bad news is, Windows hosting sucks, our Windows host sucks, and PHP sucks even worse than those. Maybe something we can do about that.

See you at GDC!
-Rob

The staff at TAO invites you to comment, vote, and suggest new items on our Trello board: https://trello.com/board/509f9fb64f2b66ea4a01f642

If you're interested in taking any task on, please message one of the administrators so we can give you the required permissions (admin/moderator, server, etc.).

I've also posted this thread to the Q&S forum as a sticky, so you can comment there (or here): http://tech-artists.org/forum/showthread.php?3487

That's right folks we are all setup with the new Tech-Artists.Org G+ Page
Come on over and add the page to your circle so you can get all the updates on Live Hangouts, Presentations, Videos and more.

We are currently hosting Google Hangouts every Monday:

1. GMT Hangout: 7pm GMT
2. PST Hangout: 7pm PST

If we have more interest in other days we will consider adding additional Hangouts.

See you there!

August 4, 2012 Update:
------------------------------------------
Alright sorry for the downtime (again). We should be good now.

Basically, on Wednesday or so, the server became basically unusable- besides just being slow, the host was trying to solve the RAM problems, which meant frequent restarts, which combined with the slowness meant lots of downtime. On top of that, response from their Tech Support was abysmally slow in some instances. So we just kept the server down until we found a solution.

The solution, for now, was creating a new server with the same host, which they finally set up late last night. Dr. Bob and I stayed up into our respective wee hours of the morning setting it up and fixing the issues that came up. Fortunately we had backups of most things, but getting anything off the old server (such as our relatively short backup scripts, which ironically weren't backed up) was a pain.

The site should be working now, with... [Read More]

So recently Autodesk opened a Maya Uservoice/feedback site. http://mayafeedback.autodesk.com/

I've been very critical of Autodesk for their feature choices. They say they develop what they do because it's what people ask for. I've said they have notoriously top-down interaction with the community and they're talking to the wrong people- not enough voices from the ground.

So here's our chance to change it. I want us to unite behind a few proposals and blow them out of the water. And when they announce it as a feature, I want to be able to say, "We made it so!". And when they don't announce it, I want to use it to press them for answers.

So go! Vote! And if you have a good idea, post it, and post back here asking people to vote for it.

One I think we are all in agreement on is, open source FBX. Vote for it! ... [Read More]

So we (mostly) fixed the email problem that we didn't know we had until recently (though we suspected but were a bit too busy to try...).

I've confirmed new users are getting emails. However, that leaves us with a month of signups that got no activation email.

I tried to send out an email to people that signed up after May 1 with the activation link, but I'm not sure it actually went out. If you got an email today, please tell me! Otherwise, I'll send it out tomorrow to make sure people got it (I really don't want to spam, though). The mail server can be of varying speed, which is the reason for the confusion.

One remaining problem is we don't have mailboxes for @tech-artists.org domain, so emails to admin@tech-artists.org and similar are bouncing back. We'll fix this soon but you should be able to Private Message me if you need help.

Thanks for bearing with us while we get all this... [Read More]

Introducing the Company Badge!
Again, but better

After the Great Forum reboot of 2012 we decided that the system for company badges was somewhat manual for the forum moderators. So I've converted the Profile Pictures to Company Badges. For those of you that had Profile Pictures, they have gone to a better place. You can now find the Company Badge settings in the My Settings section, under your avatar.

So! you say, on the old boring forums, I had a Company Badge that I submitted and I don't have it any longer. Fret not, you can find your Company Badge here: http://tech-artists.org/downloads/CompanyBadges/ When you find your badge copy it's web address and pop in the Option 1. Field and Save Changes.

And for those of you that want to upload one, make... [Read More]

Maybe you noticed- TAO has been down the past week. But good news! We're back (almost).



The short version is:

1. Our server was shut down.
2. I was lax and didn't have a backup, which caused a long delay.
3. We decided to switch hosts to a Windows server.
4. I'm taking over sys admin duties going forward.
5. Everything else (wiki, theme) should be back to normal in a couple days.
6. If you want to be a moderator or administrator, or have some cool idea for something with TAO, tell me!

The long version is:

Last week, our host shut down our server because spammers were using it to send email, by exploiting a vulnerability in the VB version we were using. This was unfortunate, because it was something we easily could have dealt with. It was also unfortunate, because we did not have an up to date backup. So our server was... [Read More]

Another year, another amazing GDC and in particular the showing by Tech Art. Here's the rundown on what went down:

2nd Tech Artist Bootcamp
Another wonderful bootcamp with lots of new speakers! We had well over 100 people at any given point during the day. What a great audience!

Below are the slides from all the bootcamp presenters. If you want to see another bootcamp next year, please tell us what you liked and didn't like and what you'd like to see covered. Also if you have any ideas for non-lecture things to do (like the 'lunch with a presenter' we did), I'd like to hear them.

• Adam Pletcher (Volition): Bootcamp Introduction PDF PPT
... [Read More]