I recall a couple ex-Millers saying they had written various guides and tutorials during their employment, but were hesitant to release those documents to the community for fear that they weren’t the legal owners.
So, is it safe now?
-Ted
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I was looking through a few of the things I wrote and while I’m happy to share them, they are a bit outdated and mostly state stuff that has been stated here on various threads. Two are on stabilization methods, one is on defocusing, one is on adding and subtracting, one or two are on colorspace.
Most of them need at least a brush up, and one of them uses a lot of pictures of Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson and I don’t know if anyone follows the behind the scenes drama in wrestling but it seems like the Rock IRL sucks, so I’d like to replace all those pics with Seth Freakin Rollins, but that’s more time.
Anyways, here’s the end of the bokeh one:
In Summation
- Make a nice bokeh kernel
- Don’t overuse depth maps
- Blur the multiplied fill and matte together and divide afterward
- Anamorphics make tall bokeh shapes
- This article should have only been these four bullet points
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I definitely would like to learn about refocusing in the post-Mill VFX era.
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That was a typo. Sorry. Should have been “defocusing” and is fixed now. That’s the one that summed itself up in the bullet points so I don’t think most people will find it super enlightening.
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Killed my joke so fast, I wonder if Dill is actually short for Dillinger
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There wasn’t really that much helpful stuff on Mill Academy. Plus, the most published author was a bit of a knob. He’s a two trick pony. Smoke hotkey user for sure.
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I’m not much of a fan of the other big author of those things either, even if they do use flame hotkeys.
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At least his articles had clever names.
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Yeah, I would never trust any title-safe tutorials coming out of there . . .
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I’m curious if there will be a significant revenue impact felt by Autodesk M&E (specifically the Flame business unit) by losing The Mill’s licensing revenue and if this may impact flame resources at Autodesk in the future
I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to.
I was in a quantum state of being mad for what likely happened (iphone decided defocus was not a word and swapped it for refocus, helpful little ducker that it is,) and wanting my random note on matters to not promise a holy-grail-type technique like manifesting detail from nothing. Haha.
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Let’s see. 100 Flame licenses, 300-400 Maya licenses, a couple thousand Arnolds…
7 figures USD.
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Your complaint to the Managing Director was for sure the straw that broken the camels back.
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All good here, thanks for asking 
Generally speaking, as we have seen multiple times in the past when studios let go Flame artists, new smaller studios tend to appear, generating new licenses. We even saw that single seat lost often generated multiple new seats, since adding Flame Assist and Flare makes a lot of sense.
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This reminds me very much of the Flame on Mac discussions…
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Large studios have serious amounts of licenses, and negotiate heavily to try to have CapEx and OpEx visibility. From Wacom pens to Eizos to Dell 79whatevers to licenses to toilet paper to EC2 credits, anybody at scale figures out ways to know what things are gonna cost over the next 12 months. And often prepay at discount. You get to do that when you spend more on licenses and support than some studios gross. Probably on token systems, too.
The Mill was a supplier of services to advertisers. Advertisers advertise. The market expands and contracts to the amount of advertising advertisers are willing to advertise. If the market supports it, other vendors rise and scale to pickup the work. None of the Fortune 500s out there saw that The Mill closed and decided to change their marketing spend. They are changing their marketing spend because of 17,475 other reasons out there.
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