Common sense #1: Investing

Because the investing information market place is dominated by bad actors, which directly or indirectly promote bad investment behavior, I want to do my part by sharing my favorite educational material, which allows anyone to understand the underlying principles and resulting incentives. And as a result see through the noise and not act against their own interest.

Summary

good 

• diversification (total market index funds)
• minimize fees 
• minimize taxes 

mid 

• factor investing 
• leverage

bad 

• trying to beat the stock market 
• actively managed funds 
• stock picking (country picking, sector picking, dividend investing, ..) 
• market timing 

very bad 

• speculating on non productive asset prices (precious metals, crypto/nft)

Sources

Why total market index funds and not trying to beat the stock market: 

• (51 min interview) Jack Bogle on Index Funds, Vanguard, and Investing Advice 
• (Text) Jack Bogle: "The Relentless Rules of Humble Arithmetic" 
• (5 hour audiobook) Jack Bogle - The Little Book of Common Sense Investing 

Once you understand how trying to beat the stock market is a bad idea, you also understand that trying to beat the market of non productive asset pricing is an even worse idea.

Testimony

• (3 min video) Warren Buffett pays tribute to Jack Bogle 
• (6 min video) Warren Buffett - How to Invest in Index Funds 

Advanced

The only reasonable divergence, that I am aware of, to actually increase expected returns, but comes with major increase in risk, volatility and complexity:

• factor investing
• (7 min interview) Eugene Fama - Why Small Caps and Value Stocks Outperform
• (16 min video) Ben Felix - Small Cap and Value Stocks
• leverage: 
• (13 min video) Ben Felix - Investing With Leverage

New job at Reel FX

This week I started at Reel FX Montreal as Senior Rigging Artist and I'm really looking forward to working on their animated features.

When looking for a new job my main goal was to find the most interesting work. After five years in Germany where I had a lot of control on the whole rigging pipeline (I often was the only rigger on the project) and I completed some of my main goals:

• Create a non-destructive rigging pipeline in production: Almost complete freedom in the template and rig-built stage while always being able to undo/redo the rig build
• Improve modeling / topology skills by creating complete characters and topologies based on "The Art of Moving Points"

BabyDragon walkcycle rig breakdown

Baby Dragon walkcycle rig breakdown from Parzival Roethlein on Vimeo.

This is a personal project from early 2013.
When I saw a turntable of the dragon on Vimeo (https://vimeo.com/52581835), I contacted the modeler. And after I was done with the rig a co-worker / fellow student did the animation.

For the neck / spine / tail I used the curve/up-curve setup, described in an older post of mine, with one joint for each spike:
Joint chain rigging techniques

Credits:
Modeller/Surfacing: Angel Navarro angelnavarroart.com/
Character TD: Parzival Roethlein
Animator: Alexander Dietrich cargocollective.com/alexanderdietrich



Unrelated to this post, I recently updated an older post:
Maya naming conventions

My CG experience per subject

This graph shows the amount of time I spent on the different subjects and was made for my graduation presentation at Filmakademie. I found it interesting to give myself an overview of how much time I actually spent on each discipline. The measuring unit is "full time months" (20 days, 7 hours each). And it is normalized, so if I have done multiple disciplines at the same time I had to divide the time for each of them. My resume helped me to get a fairly accurate estimation.
But of course my prior programming knowledge (B.Sc.) helped learning scripting and the Maya API faster. And most scripting was done for rigging, so they are connected quite heavily.

I guess recruiters try to extract this information from resumes, but I think it can be difficult. For example listing disciplines / software / programming language, with the number of years they have been used, is not really useful because it does not actually describe the amount of time and the context (hobby, study, job). Except if it can be matched with job descriptions etc...
Also it may be interesting to know how much time someone spent to get to the work done (productivity / efficiency?) in the demoreel and the time spend to achieve the skill level (talent?). To predict costs and growth of the employer?

Maybe I have recently looked at too many company job pages and other peoples resumes, since I am looking for my first real job after graduation. But I don't understand why students rate their own skills with "expert", "intermediate", "beginner". I personally just keep it neutral in my resume/linkedin with these lines:
Specialities

Primary: Rigging, Scripting

Secondary: R&D, Modeling, Cloth Simulation