George Quelch - VFX

After a summer that flew by taking part in the BFX Festival Competition, I'm trying to manically work through my list of saved links and techniques in preparation for 3rd year at Falmouth. I'm hopefully going to be able to talk more about BFX soon, including the film we made and some of the breakdown, and work I put into it, but we are currently waiting for the films to be released online to be able to talk about it. For now I am focusing on getting to grips with Arnold, and Maya 2017 in general. There are lots of little improvements all around, especially with the animation and general interface changes. As part of a continuation of the lighting I was doing before I took the  St anford dragon  into Arnold and lit it with a HDR image. One of the big problems I had with Mental Ray in 2016 was rendering  caustics , this however worked quite nicely in Arnold. I was pretty impressed by the quick results. The glass looks cle...

I have lately been interested in trying to learn more about different effects to add to CG composites in Nuke to give them more real world properties . I rendered all these images in Arnold, using a HDRi and key light, then took that into Nuke, and did a rebuild of the passes to get the beauty. The background was added on using the HDRi mapped onto a sphere in a 3D scene. One thing I was interested in trying was different filters on the ZDefocus node, this can give a little more interesting bokeh, that of you would find with using different physical camera lenses. Here is a short article about it. This is the basic ZDefocus node blur, with no changes to the filter: Different camera lenses can produce differently shaped bokeh, due to the number of  aperture  blades within the lens, for example, 3 blades produces triangle blurred highlights: or 4 blades produces squares: The ZDefocus node has 3 filters; disc, which is most ...