George Quelch - VFX

As part of Modeling and Rigging I have been able to talk a lot to my lecturer about scripting in MEL. Now I have more direction with it I feel like I'm making more progress. Currently for Live Brief project we are setting up a scene for rendering in Mental Ray, but if we have time we would like to render in Renderman, although this means the 20+ materials would need to be converted, have the textures re-applied etc; so I am working on a script to help us do this quickly in one go.  So far I have it working to convert the materials to a new set of Mental Ray materials, and apply them to the appropriate objects, I'll convert this over to Renderman when I get to the studio. Currently if it comes across a material with transparency or alpha data plugged in it skips it, I would like to build in a function to plug this in, as well as the colour data. If I can get the script fully working in this way it might serve as a useful tool to convert over any...

My first completed shot for this semesters VFX module. It's nice to get one ticked off early so I can focus on the rest of the VFX work I have at the moment. I think this semesters VFX is going better than last, I know a lot more about Nuke now, but I did run into some issues again. The biggest one here is that Nuke Non Commercial doesn't have 3D tracking, which is what I intended to use so instead settled on a 2D asset, still, the result turned out ok. I have also been plagued by bugs with the Foundry's licensing not letting users load non commercial this weekend, I would have liked to fix the jittering at the end of the clip, but I think the rest of the shot stands up ok, it's just a small issue with the track, I definitely want to get some tracking markers to make this easier in future, although Nuke did do a very good job with the clip considering it totally blurs in the middle. Grading the asset into shot worked much better than last term. I used the...

As part of my Projection Mapping VFX shot I need something flying through the scene for my camera to follow. Partly because of this and partly thinking about the CGI Millennium falcon in Star Wars The Force Awakens I started making this rig: The idea was to create a ship rig that had some finer controls than just position and rotation. The main control allows for basic animation, but the smaller controls up and above allow the animator more control over how the ship moves when it turns around. The ship always points towards the top controller, allowing it to be put at the centre of bends, both of them in conjunction hold the ship between them via a point constraint. This should allow good control over the movement. From the test bit of animation I found this wasn't quite as intuitive as I had hoped. It was difficult keeping the controllers aligned so the ship wasn't bouncing up and down, it might be useful to add a meter detailing how far apart ...

Shadow passes seem to have disappeared in this version of Mental Ray, and today I wanted to find some sort of work around, so here it is: I have got an annoying Matte line around the edge where the plane was removed, this can be fixed by making the plane bigger than the frame in maya, or rotoing it out in nuke.  Here I have rendered the two objects on a plane, then removed the it in Nuke and composited the ambient occlusion pass underneath to two objects, giving them some shadows and giving the render a lot more depth, here's the process. original shadows: Plane removed: replacement background: Added Ambient Occlusion: This worked pretty well for these objects right on top of the plane, however it didn't work for floating objects, and it wont work for any hard, directional shadows either, because that's not what ambient occlusion is for. see here. I think this is a really useful way of giving CG elements nice looking shado...

Today I had another look at render passes and compositing them together. I started out with this just to refresh myself. I used all MILA materials from Mental Ray 2016, I really like using them, they can be versatile and I like the layered setup, and the results are pretty good and render quickly. Recently we learnt a more efficient way of combining the passes, without shuffle nodes which I was using before. I rendered the passes from Maya into an EXR, and composited them in Nuke like so: The only problem I ran into here is the weird blotchy visibility of the lights in the reflection of the sphere. To take this a little further than what I had done before I looked at Matte ID passes. I used them to change the colour of the cube in post, here's it is before the change: (I have re rendered the image with a grey plane in Maya) And here it is graded: Here's the tree: Setting it up was as simple as plugging in the Matte ID pass for...