George Quelch - VFX

A few weeks ago I decided to set myself a personal project after seeing this tutorial  about making snow using Blender. I decided to adapt the tutorial into Maya. I wanted it to be a quick weekend render which I achieved, but I wanted to take it further and render a sequence which was more polished. Here is the final result: I'm pretty happy with the result and the comp process I used, as it let me put into practice some new techniques I had been looking into, such as making use of World Point, Normal and Depth passes more. I also used this project as R&D for Big Top and Dino Diner's use of Renderman, this project highlighted a few issues, mainly with XGen and getting it to batch render. I found using nHair to be quite effective and simple to use however, so I think it is a good alternative. I also wanted to get good file and scene management going on so that its easier when we have to start doing it on a bigger scale. My workflow for this project starte...

Now  that dissertation is finally handed in I have been able to put more time into working on compositing for Dino Diner. After the many tests I did for the original previs model here  I wanted to take what I thought was the best technique and apply it to the new previs model.  From Arnold From Nuke I opted for rendering no volumetric lighting in Arnold and added them using Nuke and the TX_Rays node as with my last previs. I also made use of Normal and Point world passes to add additional lighting to the table and counter behind. I also added floating particles which interact with the light shaft, and a range of camera lens effects, including chromatic aberration, depth of field, blurring and more. This time I kept the additional lighting to a minimum, as in my last test I found it caused issues with matte lines and aliasing around edges with additional lighting. I think this issue could be somewhat resolved by making use of several matte IDs for...