George Quelch - VFX

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...

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...

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...

Finally ! Renderman 21 for non-commercial is now out, meaning we can move into look development and lighting tests with Renderman for 3rd year films The Big Top and Dino Diner. I have been looking into it this evening, after downloading and installing it as fast as I could. I was pretty happy that old scenes were somewhat compatible. All I have had to change were the lights, but as I am focusing on relighting my kitchen scene anyway that was no problem, all of the shaders I transferred over to the new PxrSurface shdaer, which I am really liking. This version is far more user friendly than the last, but with all the power. I am also noticing a lot of the little things from Arnold which I like having coming across now into Renderman, which is great. The whole settings UI is much improved, now fully integrated into mayas render settings, its just far quicker to use and setup. One thing I am really pleased with are the new lights and lighting tools, I was keen to ...

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.

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 ...