George Quelch - VFX

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...