George Quelch - VFX

Here is my latest showreel, made up from my work at Blue Zoo over  the last year a bit. Software: Nuke, After Effects, Maya, Redshift Hope you like it!

After seeing this  awesome piece of work on Reddit I was inspired to have a go at some of the techniques in that image. Mainly the glass shader, in particular I was keen to try the finger prints and roughened style as its a nice detail. I've rendered out two different variations with slightly different framing and a different focal length. After trying to work procedural for the dirt map then with a photoshop texture I created, this wasn't working either so I ended up creating the dirt map in mudbox using the fingerprint filter and some built in ones to dirty up the glass. This was then blended on top of a glass PxrSufrace very subtly.  The floor was seamless from Textures.com, which I used to generate a bump map. I took some inspiration from this article  about photorealistic lighting and compositing techniques used in The Lego Movie. Because of the focus on the blackness inside the glass I allowed the white floor to be overexposed, through lighti...

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...

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...

A side to looking into Volumetrics in Nuke I have been exploring the Depth to Points node. It's a very clever workflow that only needs a depth and normal pass, which allows you to project your render out into 3D space within Nuke. This process would save having to export geometry and cameras out of Maya, it would all be self contained within the render and the passes, which I thought was really interesting and convenient. To give this technique a test I decided to composite in a sphere into the background of the shot. This is what I was able to produce. Which considering was all done in Nuke without and interaction after render with Maya is pretty cool. I was able to position the sphere within the projection, then by looking in 3D space was able to match where the lights were in order to quickly match the lighting on it. I also tested it with volumetric lighting, although this caused me a lot of trouble with matte lines around the table, I think ...

This week I have been looking into different render solutions for volumetric lighting in 3D. I have been working with Arnold to create some basic lighting with a previs model for the cave created by another student. It was only a quick render, whilst I felt this worked OK the volumetrics were quite noisy and added a lot to render time. I am confident with adding them into 2D space with Nuke but had not added them to 3D successfully yet, so they work with a moving camera, so this is what I wanted to look into doing with Nuke. I found a good toolset with the TX_3DRays gizmo from Nukepedia. This allows quick creation of a light shaft which you can positing within 3D space, by reading in the geometry I could also use it as a holdout so the volumetrics sit properly within the scene. Using two slightly different workflows I created the two images below, which have slightly different looks. I prefer this first image as the result is more subtle, and i...

I and several other students are working on a side project for Cherry Cherry VFX. We are creating a short cinema sting, featuring a photo-real seagull, floating on a lifebuoy in the open ocean, and an clapperboard jumping out above it. There was a lot to figure out with this project, mainly with the ocean as we need it to be simulated to create the splash, we need it to base animate the motion of the life buoy, and also be able to render it as a wide open ocean. My role is mainly to do lighting, rendering and compositing, and have been helping with pipeline, especially on the water simulation. Harry has been working with BOSS and Bifrost to create a workflow in which we can drive the bifrost simulation near the camera using a BOSS ocean, which means we can make the splash. But further away from camera will be a tiled version of the base BOSS ocean, without the simulation. We were struggling with long render times on the ocean as it is simulated and quite dense. We ar...

A big part of the pipeline I designed for The Big Top was using HDRs of the sets for lighting the CG characters. This makes the process of lighting the CG much smoother, and the end result will look better. We shot 9 exposures from 2 angles using a Canon 5D mkiii, and a 300mm lens.  One of the challenges with shooting HDRs for stop motion sets is the size, so we had to find a camera with a short enough focus distance to capture both angles in the small space, but long enough focal length to fill as much of the frame as possible. Once we had the images I used Photoshop's HDR Pro function to merge them into one single image which I exported out as an EXR. I then took this into Nuke, to do the unwrapping process, I did this  with the spherical transform node, which worked well. Obviously there is massive distortion to the left of the image, and to the right you can see where we were taking the photos, this is where the second image is needed. ...

After finishing some very basic materials for the lighting challenge scene file I went back in to relight the scene from my first version. This time with a warmer, more daytime feel to it. This is the 2nd version of this lighting setup, which I am more happy with, I changed how the outside lighting came through the window, tweaked the indoor lighting and added volumetrics. All done with Renderman for Maya and composited with Nuke. I used a EnvDayLight for the lighting coming through the window, this really boosted my render times over the HDR in my first lighting setup, so I will focus more on using a collection of HDRs for different times of day rather than the dayLight. I'm pleased with the lighting and feel but the textures are letting it down somewhat, so I think I will take them out, or at least the ones I definitely don't need, so I can focus more on lighting. I based this render off of this image , using it as an indication for the feel of the look I wan...

In order to practice more lighting I am trying to do more of the lighting challenges . I want to focus more on the lighting than the texturing and shading, I put some simple materials onto this scene but I may remove some of the weaker ones and focus more on lighting. I am quite pleased with this, I want to create more emotion and feeling in the lighting, so more of a mood comes across when you look at the image. I'll be updating with different styles for this image now it is completed and I want to try and push myself with what I create.

For R&D on The Big Top I have been looking into different ways to create crying in 3D. The first way I tried was hand animating a single tear, or several if needed, and creating the streak effect left by a tear within Nuke. It's a simple way of working but the technique worked. It also allows us to control exactly where the tear flows down as it is hand animated, rather than a simulated effect. I rendered the Face, the face with a high specular override, and the tear as 3 separate render layers from Arnold, using Maya's new powerful render layer setup. Once I had these I took them into Nuke. I fiddled with Time Offset, Time Blur and Time echo before deciding the latter did what I wanted. This let me make the streak which the tear leaves, I graded and blured this before merging the original tear back on top. I then used the resulting alpha to merge over the specular pass of the face, giving what would be the water left by the tear some reflection, I think this real...

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.

The past few weeks I have been looking into XGen for maya properly. As my past experiences with it have either been brief or it's been a nightmare to work with. This is partly to help with look Dev, and being able to take shaders a little bit further with some hair, and the 3rd year project Dino Diner, which may need fur simulations. I've made good progress with this tutorial . I now feel like I have a good understanding of the grooming tools, and the extra detail that can be added via modifiers, how the groom controls the primitives, and how these get be rendered with custom shaders.  It was complicated at first getting my head around the texture maps to Ptex conversions but was more simple once I understood what was actually going on and what XGen was actually doing. I'm pretty happy with the result, I would definitely spend more time on the groom if I were doing this for a project, to get all the hair flowing properly. This was rendered ...

Finally with the film released I can talk about my part in creating a 30 second short film for the charity Create, as part of Bournemouth's  BFX competition. Here is the final film my team made: Alongside 4 other team members, who I had not met before, two from Bournemouth University animation, one from Arts University Bournemouth and a Falmouth Graduate. Over the course of 7 weeks we created a 30 second short for the charity Create. We had to take the film from the pre-production and initial animatic stage, through to final product. The design style was abstract, and mixed media. Bringing together a real life set, 2D animated characters, several 3D animated characters and props in a 2D render style, and 3D simulated paint. My role on the project was look development, compositing and rendering. I also assisted generally with pipeline, and with operation of cameras. Getting the look of the concept art was very important, so developing the 2D render style was one ...

Having completed my game of life script I wanted to get a nice render of it, which I've finally gotten around too. I wanted to make a grid of marbles, each different colours, however having around 2000 in total in the scene that was not gonna happen by assigning them manually. After a lot of trial and error I found a way to get what I wanted. First I created a procedural texture of squares, each different colours from the 6 base colours I chose. I then positioned this under the spheres. I gave every sphere a completely see through glass material, and disabled primary viability of the plane. This meant the refracted colour of the plane could be seen in the marbles but not the marbles themselves. I think this worked pretty well, definitely more efficient than  assigning  all the objects a material.

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 ...