George Quelch - VFX

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...

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...

To build upon what I am able to do in compositing I am starting to learn about Nuke's particle systems. I started with  this tutorial to get a basic grasp on how it works. I have always liked creating FX but never wanted to work solely as an FX artist so being able to include some basic FX in Nuke is good. It was a good introduction and I think I now have some basic knowledge to apply to some R&D for the 3rd year project The Big Top. One of the main things I want to be able to do well is add volumetrics and dust effects in a comp in a 3D space, its very quick and powerful to do with a static camera in 2D space, but the effect falls down quickly when the camera is moving. The tutorial went through creating falling dust particles within 3D very quickly and the result was effective so I'm already looking to include this in my future work.

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...

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 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...

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 ...

In my attempt to have a bit more practice at showing characters weight I have gone back to the Body Mech Rigs . I just did two simple bits of animation to have a bit of practice. I think  this has helped a bit but really I need to be working on longer pieces of animation I think. One other thing I would like to practice more is the performance of the characters. I might try and get back into the habit of doing 11 second club monthly challenges, but trying to think more outside of the box.

I was shown a free downloadable model of a BB-8  from the 7th Star Wars film. There is a script here  that gets it to roll properly, but it has no animation controls. So one evening I took to rigging it! ...aaaand the next few days making that rig better. I'm pretty happy with how it turned out. This is a quick animation I did with it, after Harry used it for a bit I think I might change how the head works to make it a bit more simple to animate but it's just a minor change. Just like how Karen Halliwell taught us, and the same as I rigged the Behemoth for Drone, I used offset groups to align the curves. I made sure the outliner was neat and made sense, and that did really help when I had to troubleshoot some issues, in my first result the head was stuck to the ball, so span round and round and round, funny, but not really what I was going for. In the end I got it working with no constraints, just connections in the node editor, as this is ...

Here's my latest side project! In order to keep up with practicing my animation and incorporating my drawing more with my work I took up this posing exercise project. I wanted to get to grips with blocking more and really nailing the initial poses. But also to get more comfortable working in the graph editor, and splining animation. I'm quite pleased with the result. I have been watching a lot of tutorials and guides on splining better; things to look for in the graph editor, how to quickly use it to edit poses. Just generally trying to get more comfortable with it. But none of that is useful unless I can block well. I feel like blocking is the most important step but also a big balance. I know that in that stage I shouldn't be touching the graph editor. But the more key frames I add in the better the movement gets, but then changing timing gets trickier, its definitely a balance. In terms of just this animation, the last pose could ...

I watched a tutorial today on Digital Tutors about animating workflows. I learnt a lot about different ways to animate, good uses for motion trails, using selection sets and just tips for using the interface better. I rendered the animation this time too, I want to get more practice and rendering and lighting so I'm going back to animating a scene then lighting and rendering it. I'm quite pleased with this all except for the left arm, when it hits the ground. The process I learned was much quicker, I now know a few techniques to save some time. Considering this is only about an 2 hours work, I am pleased with it.

Just a quick bit of animation here. I'm not pleased with the turn, I didn't think about the inbetweens as much as I should have so the spin looks kinda odd. I'm more happy with the actual run though.

Final Update And finally here is the finished render! I'm quite pleased with how this turned out, its not my best animation, but I definitely learnt a lot about posing from the progression I had. I need to spend more time in the drawing page getting some really interesting ideas down, not necessarily perfect poses but just interesting shapes to start from in Maya. The render itself is slightly odd, I render it in Mental Ray but the characters turned out surprisingly shiny. ---------------- I've (quite late on) decided to do this months 11 Second Club. The clip is from Hot Fuzz. I think I'll be able to get it done over the next two weeks when we have far fewer lectures. I'll be updating this post with work in progress as I go, I'll also eventually post it on the 11 Second Club Forums for feedback on there. And now here is the 11 Second Club post! W.I.P. #1 W.I.P. #2 W.I.P. #3 Got the basic lip sync in now, I've focused on...

I think today I've started a new little project for myself, to work through as many emotions as I have time for with a short little animation. I'll probably work through them all with rigs I'm familiar with, possibly I'll try some new ones, although I am now pretty familiar and do like using the Max rig,  found here . Anyway here is a work in progress for surprised! I'll be posting follow ups on this via updates to this blog post (rather than a new one every time) W.I.P #1

This semester we are working on another group project. Using audio clips from the BBC's listening project. The group I am in all like working in 3D or after effects, so I think we could produce a really good looking result by the end of the project. We have chosen an audio clip to work from which is of a man talking to his daughter about the Piper Alpha oil accident. Out idea for the animation to go along with this clip involves 3D typography. Above is some of the testing work I have put in to the project. We are still working to pick a style but I think a full 3D model will be the way forward, rather than the 2D style I tested. Alongside these animation tests I have been working on a script to streamline text creation in Maya. The default tool gives you a lot of control over the font, but becomes a hassle to use over and over, I am hoping to make it a quicker process to add text to our Maya scene when it comes to that time. I am hoping for th...

Here is the first blockthrough and the follow up based on what I thought and some feedback I got from the forums. Trying to really get the framing down now and all the poses before I get to into splining it. I'm also posting on the 11 Second Club forum for feedback on these update videos, check that out here: 11 Second Club Forum Post Update #5 This is my final update now as it's the end of the month, as I got further on and other Uni work this project kinda got pushed aside, it could use some work and I'll probably tweak the animation more before I render it, but here is the version I'm submitting Update #4 Getting there with the lip sync now but it does still need some refining, 10 days left! Update #3 Blockthrough #2 Blockthrough #1

A quick bit of animation, I forgot I was going to aim to do this months 11 second club! oops! so that's starting from today and I'll post updates as I go here and on the 11 second club website. This was just a little bit of work I did from the animation practice list on the 11 second club forum. Not perfect but I really want to get focused on the 11 second club monthly now.

Just a quick update with a piece of animation I've done recently! I had quite a bit of trouble with the render for this one, different problems with different parts and rigs that were for older versions of Maya causing crashes ect. So I'm leaving it here and moving on!

And it's finally done! I'm not sure how long the whole thing took but it was around a month, although we started late so I never planned on uploading this to the 11 Second competition, I will try the November competition when I get back from Reading week. I'm pretty pleased with this overall, I think the actions might have been a little to big for the dialogue in the end but I am pleased with the animation and lighting. I really like doing this project, it was nice to animate to something a little different. This made me think a lot more about the actual performance and interaction between 2 characters, as it was the first thing I animated that had 2 characters actually speaking to each other.

Here is my close to final version of my 11 Second club work, using the sound clip from September 2015. The clip is from Back to the Future as I said in my last post about this task. I got a lot of really useful feedback from different lectures that have helped me get to this point. Its changed a lot from the original but the main actions remain the same, with some more added. I didn't do any video reference for this but watching it now, I feel like they are over acting, there is a lot of movement when the characters are speaking and I feel like it would look better if the bigger actions happened when they weren't talking. I still feel like I did quite well, but I think the big actions during the speaking make it feel like the characters aren't actually doing the talking, because they don't seem to be focused on the talking, but on the actions. This is definitely something I'll bare in mind as I go forward, as well as better plann...