George Quelch - VFX

I've finally got out with the camera for my VFX work! Using a BlackMagic pocket to film my backplates, such a good little video camera, definitely packs a lot more than it looks. I will eventually post up all of my VFX work but a lot of it is very work in progress mockups and my ideas have been changing around a lot, I think now I have got the backplates filmed I'll be able to jump straight into Nuke and get this figured out!

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

After the session we had on camera tracking we tried to do 3D camera tracking, which is used to take footage, in Nuke, and create 3D data from it, which then can be used in Maya. This turned out to be a really finicky task, it wasn't working for anyone and took a bit of tweaking to finally figure out. Eventually got it working and imported into Maya as an FBX file. It turned out that the track itself wasn't the best quality. This could be improved by upping the settings in Nuke, or by deleting and refining the points it makes. But I was happy to finally get the data in and know how to do it. Next step is to figure out the best way to line up the perspective on the image so it is easy to start creating Maya work that matches exactly with the video. I'm thinking I might use this process in one of my 3 VFX shots to create a 3D toy soldier in the Falmouth high street.

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!

This is probably the last few pieces of destruction/physics-ey things I'll do for a while. The first video is an attempt at a tutorial but it hasn't turned out all that well.  The second was more to combine what I had been doing with the smoke effects and the destruction effects. I'm actually quite pleased with how this one turned out, it took a lot of tweaking to get the smoke to rise from the building how I wanted it. I wasn't as pleased with this one above, all the pieces just go way to far, I think because nothing is stuck down every object flies in different directions at different speeds and it just looks a bit odd. This is is definitely the better example, and probably the best destruction destruction work I've done so far. I experimented a lot with only having the certain parts of the building fall down. It was definitely a good final piece to leave off with (for now) because it tied a lot of different things together from the other tests...

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.