George Quelch - VFX

Something I have learnt whilst studying and working is the importance lens and film stock choice affects the overall look and feel of your image, and I think its really important to carry this over into fully digital work, or matching it to backplates. A big part of my learning more about this was my LensFX gizmo . I improved it a lot during the last few months of uni to get it to a place I was really happy with. Adding features to add lens dust and focus breathing. Below is a test I did in Arnold, playing with some displacement, trying to emulate the features/effects of a real lens with focus breathing. I added a focus pull, lens breathing, a lens flare, lens dust, filter flares and subtle glows. To make it feel more cinematic, I worked at 1920*800 widescreen resolution and created anamorphic style bokeh. I think it makes the image feel a lot more dynamic that if it was a simple focus pull, with no breathing or refocusing.  Best to watch this video in fullscreen at 1080p ...

I wrote this script a while ago whilst I was still at University. It was basically to help us reference assets into our shot files. Our structure was: Maya Project  -> Assets -> Props -> PROP NAME FOLDER -> PROP.ma So the script would read all .ma files in the "prop name folders" and give you a list of all the props in the folder, you could then select as many as you needed and reference them all in. Made the whole process a bit more simple, although Maya does have more advanced scene setup tools which would have been more effective in the long run, if we put the time into learning them.

After seeing this  awesome piece of work on Reddit I was inspired to have a go at some of the techniques in that image. Mainly the glass shader, in particular I was keen to try the finger prints and roughened style as its a nice detail. I've rendered out two different variations with slightly different framing and a different focal length. After trying to work procedural for the dirt map then with a photoshop texture I created, this wasn't working either so I ended up creating the dirt map in mudbox using the fingerprint filter and some built in ones to dirty up the glass. This was then blended on top of a glass PxrSufrace very subtly.  The floor was seamless from Textures.com, which I used to generate a bump map. I took some inspiration from this article  about photorealistic lighting and compositing techniques used in The Lego Movie. Because of the focus on the blackness inside the glass I allowed the white floor to be overexposed, through lighti...

As part of my ongoing compositing development for Big Top and Dino Diner I have compacted the lens effects node tree I made before Christmas into a Gizmo. The fundamentals of each different lens effect come from this tutorial  which I have modified, below I've got a screenshot of it being used for a character AOV test in The Big Top. The effects the gizmo is currently capable of are: - Depth Of Field - Vignette - Filter Flare - Lens Distortion - Field Curvature (Edge defocus) - Lens Flares - Glow - Chromatic Abberation (Axial and Traversal) - Grain The user is able to work their way down the list of lens effects enabling or disabling them, and tweaking as they see fit. The aim being to allow people to more easily add real world lens effects to the perfect CG renders. This was roughly the node tree I started with, I ended up leaving out Astigmatism as I think the effect had to much of a dramatic impact o...

Attribute controlled Shading In order to further my rendering and shading technical knowledge I have been exploring Primitive Variables (Renderman) and UserData (Arnold) attributes in order to set up more efficient Maya scene files. The goal here is to cut down on the number of shaders used in a scene by having only one across multiple objects, but still having variation via custom attributes on each objects shape node. A very basic example: you have 3 spheres, a red, a green and a blue. In a simple setup each might have its own shader, with it's specific colours.  However using PrimVars, you can have one shader for the spheres, and each sphere would contain an attribute with its own colour value. At render the shader gets the colour value from each object, and produces exactly the same result, but all from one shader. Learn more about UserData here This is gonna solve optimization problems on Dino Diner, where we may have 10 tables in a scene, eac...

Towards the start of 3rd year Cherry Cherry VFX provided us with the oppertunity to work on an outside brief. I worked as part of a small group of students over the course of Semester 1. My roles were lighting, rendering and compositing. We had to come up with an idea for a popup cinema sting, a student put an idea through and after some deliberation with the client w e were given a brief to create a seagull floating on a life buoy in the open ocean, and a clapperboard jumping over, in full un-stylized CG. Starting the project we knew we were going to have to blend together simulated water in the foreground and an un-simulated background water, which we could stretch out into this distance. Also creating a good bird rig was going to be a challenge, as well as achieving a photoreal or close to final result. We ran into a few issues with this project, in several different areas that had to be overcome, for me these were mainly to do with the rendering of the wat...