The VFX Pipeline

Here's my visual interpretation of what a VFX pipeline might look like. This is definately an oversimplification, but it gives you an idea of what goes into one. Click to enlarge.

Flying Robot WIP

Another Update to my Robot Model. I did a rough Zbrush Sculpt this time. Mostly Damien Standard Brush with Lazy Mouse and the HPolish Brush.

New Model WIP

I'm working on a little project for an up and coming lighting class I'm teaching. The goal is to create a simple example scene for people to light and comp into a live action plate.

mia_materal_x maya linear workflow

So I have been doing a bit of research on Maya's "off the shelf" colour management tools. Things have come a long way in the last two versions of maya in this area.

One nice find is that there is now the ability to load display luts in maya's render view window. This makes mental ray fit nicely into our colour pipeline at RSP pretty much out of the box! Of course we are manly a 3delight/Mantra house. But occasionally Mental Ray can be of use too.

Here is a render of a Moom character using the mia_passes_x material. This image is in sRGB colour space to look right in the browser, but maya can output the raw linear image as well for use in composoting packages such as nuke. This image has two Area Lights (Quadratic Falloff) and FG switched on for some secondary bounce lighting.

Sub-Surface Scattering

Some renders of a dragon head I did for a lighting class I taught recently. I was thinking about doing a 3D print of this head, not sure if I would need to make it into seperate parts to maximise the resolution of the print?

2012 Show Reel

I'm mostly a lighter these days but I have been know take on

the role of a generalist from time to time :)

Houdini Controlling Servos!

Who needs Maya when you have Houdini!

I've been wanting to do this for ages but not knowing houdini's api has blocked me. Thanks Alvin for this awesome video! If it works with houdini apprentice, I will be very excited!

2010 Show Reel

Some of my work at Rising Sun Pictures over the last 4 years. Most shots showcase my skills as a Lighting TD. I also contributed to Texturing, Modelling and Rigging in several of these shots. There are other films I have worked on since, but unfortunately due to N.D.A. laws I can not put them on my reel until the DVD is released.

Music is By Coda.

Houdini + Shaders

I'm learning Houdini and loving it! My point of entry to this app is in the context of lighting and shader writing. It's a lot of fun.

APAC Panorama Event = Success!

In the last post I mentioned that I was going on a working holiday to Hong Kong. I was asked by Autodesk to join 3 other industry professionals to be apart of the APAC Panorama event.

My duties were:
- Critique and Mentor the Students to help them polish their films
- Give a 45min talk about Character Development and Animation for Visual Effects
- Be on the panel of judges to select the winners of the competition.

It was a surreal experience. Not only was it a complete culture shock. But the format of the event attracted lots of media. So there was a camera on me pretty much the whole time I was there!

The whole event was also covered be a TV crew from Animax an Asian anime channel. They are planning to do a series of short silhouettes on the event. The First one goes to air on Christmas Day! Unfortunately we do not get the Animax channel in Australia, but if clips end up online I will be sure to post them.

Here is a link to the winning team's film. It's called Tancho and I was lucky enough to be their Mentor as they polished it off in the last remaining days of the event.

You can follow all if the student's adventures throughout the event as they were all given flip cameras for a vBlog competition (Australia Team one this one).

I'll post more photos from the trip when I get time. But all in all it was an experience I'll never forget!

mia_envblur node

Just playing around with the mia_material in mental ray for maya. Reading through some of the docs on the mental images site and found a way to optimize glossy reflections with the mia_envblur node.

First Light (Image Based Lighting Test)

Original Sculpted Maquette

3D Render A/B Composite (no textures)

So I had some time off work and decided to dust off the old film again. This time I did some RND on the Lighting Pipeline. I am using Mental Ray's hidden Production Shader Collection. These shaders are awesome. So far they do everything I need them to do and are fairly quick to render too! It's nice to know that this result can still be acheived with out proprietry tools like the ones I use at work.

This clip has obvious issues with the shadows and depth of field. These problems should go away, once I am able to render into separate passes.

There are still a few tests I need to do such as outputting render passes for comp and how to control specular with the mia materials. But I'm feeling pretty good about it. Once I am confident with the lighting pipeline, I will balance the textures ready for the final renders. Soon I will be able to see more than just grey characters slapped on top of the background footage. Yay!

DIY Motion Control Rig - Design Concepts

I'm currently in collaboration with a couple of chaps from Ohio of all places! I put together this video to explain the origins of my plans to build my own Motion Control Rig. I thought some of you might be interested also as it explains some of the core design concepts in regards to the rig's 6 degrees of freedom.

For an overview of the pipeline visit this post.

Maya To Moco Sneak Peak

A sneak peak at a set of Maya Tools that can control servo and stepper motors. It uses the Arduino platform as a bridge between Maya and the Motors. I will be releasing the tools on the openMoco website soon.

Pay Per View Mocap Test

This was a motion capture test I did back in the film school days. I was learning Motion Builder at the time and wanted to test the motion builder to maya capabilities.

I cringe at the poor anatomy and bad smooth bind. But hey it's still fun to watch a TV Head do karate kicks!

zBrush_Torso_WIP_001

This is my first real attempt at a sculpt in zBrush. I started this sculpt with zSpheres and so far it's been lots of fun. I used this video from Ryan Kingslien as reference. I hope to do this sculpt 3 times before I try a different body part.

More stuff from the First Light Vault

Digging around my old Hard Drive I found these pics.

An unfinished Solem Model.

A model sheet of Solem and RB7

Frankenegger

A Very old Render of the first ever 3D character I modelled. This guy was made in a program called Animation Master. He is the villain from a clay animated short film I worked on years earlier. Here's a link to the film. The Adventures of Egg Cup Boy

First Light Context Cut v010

This is the latest Context Cut for my short film First Light. It's still got a long way to go but it's getting there. This is an assembly of the first 2/3rds of the film.

The miniatures were built at 1:10 scale. The format was HD 1280 x 720. Shot on a Panasonic Varicam using a Genufelx Mark II Motion Control Rig. Lots of Toys!

First Light Previs

This was the previs for my yet to be completed short film school project. The previs was used to pre plot all of the motion control camera setups on the miniature shoot.

This was the only way I could justify 60 odd camera setups using miniature sets on a 3 day shoot. Ahh film school... I was so naive. Amazingly we pulled it off though. The real challenge lay ahead in post production. 60 full blown VFX shots in HD with one Artist on it for a few months. NO CHANCE!

So the film was put on the shelf. Occasionally I will dust it off and do a bit more on it every now and then... Sigh..