George Quelch - VFX

This came out of my experimentation with Maya Extension 2 and the new MASH tool, which I am enjoying using so far.  I rendered using Mental Ray, and composited in Nuke 10 (the non commercial version) I'm quite happy with this, the text was a solid mesh which was "voxelized" using MASH, this didn't work perfectly as there are some floating cubes around the edges. I also had a little play at voxelizing an animated torus object, and using the streaks node to join the MASH objects, which also creates some cool effects. I think that might be something I'll look into more as well. I'm really pleased with the floating effect, and the way you are able to manipulate it, I want to look into more of what MASH can do over summer, through some tutorials and lots of experimenting. After watching this video  I also created the result below, this was before the version above. It's a cool effect, although not amazingly unique, but all of this...

This week I have been trying to keep on top of making progress in MEL. I have gone back and made some improvements to my constraining tool, adding the aim constraint. And I created a tool to more easily playblast work. Most of the new progress I made was with creating window UI, I found a better way to create windows, having them within strings, and was shown by more lecturer a more reliable way to delete any existing copies when creating a new one. Here are the additions I made to the  constraining tool : (previous version here) I have also converted this over to the string way of creating windows. Here is my new playblast tool: I noticed every time I playblast work I turn on and off the nurbs curves. So to speed up that process this turns them off, playblasts the window, and turns them back on. This will save time not having to navigate menus.   If I find I need it, I can give the tool more controls for quality...

Having finished this years uni work I have updated to Maya 2016 extension 2, now safe that I wont have any compatibility issues with our studio version. There are a lot of new features, the one I am most keen to learn more about is MASH, a procedural motion graphics tool. From my short use I already love it, and can't wait to get into it more. The speed at which you can get something cool going on is amazing, and its very intuitive to use. I've followed some tutorials already which I'm waiting to render out, but I am really looking forward to trying the audio node, using music to drive animation is something I was interested in even before Uni, and all of the many others there are to explore.  From the start its very easy to get in and start throwing things together and you start to get ideas for more complicated things to try out, here are just some simple little things with a noise and random modifier.

I have gradually been building up my material converter script, I have re-written lots of it over the past week, changing elements and making it work better. In it's current state it detects the type of material and assigns a similar type of Renderman Material, currently this only works for lambert and blinn, so I need to add some 'else' statements to include the other types of material. I also added, and then removed connecting transparency, because Renderman doesn't have it in the same way Mental ray does, I did try plugging the transparency into Rendermans presence, but this was not reliable depending on how the mental ray material was set up. I have also added in the ability to copy over diffuse colour values to materials without textures, so it is more of a complete conversion. It needs more work, but it is coming along nicely.

I chose to do a camera projection for my 2nd VFX shot this semester, because this technique is used a lot in industry. I built the projection in Maya, and composited it in Nuke. I took around 50 photos of Falmouth, this was my 2nd shoot, on the first I took more photos but many of them were not suitable for camera projection. I'm pleased with the result, I used an updated version of the spaceship rig for this shot, I managed to make it much more usable that the first version and I think it was quite effective. One thing I could improve in this shot is the fact that there are no  little object details, chairs, litter etc. I think this would make it feel more realistic. Here is the breakdown. I rendered the scene out of Maya using Mental Ray, with MILA materials so I could use render passes. I made sure to get all the basic passes, diffuse, indirect diffuse and glossy/reflection, but also rendered Matte ID passes. This was helpful as I was able to change the colou...