George Quelch - VFX

Today was the first big day of testing for mine and Tim's  3rd year film project! The project is going to be stop motion, which is something I'm really happy about because I love watching stop motion, and I do enjoy animating in stop motion when I get the chance. The main centre point that sets this apart is  us incorporating 360 ° video into the project. This is a pretty big thing, and definitely something that hasn't been done in previous years at Falmouth. Being a post production student I am mainly concerning myself with pipeline, which at out first thought of the idea seemed very complicated to figure out. But as the weeks have gone on we solved more problems and now after this test we are confident that this project is really feasible! From the get go I said that compositing in Nuke was gonna be the best way to go about working the pipeline, so we aimed to test that today! This is the image we got straight from the camera: After animating the s...

Harry  from our live brief group has looked at oceans in Modo and we have decided to press ahead with that workflow. I did still see it as an opportunity and potentially contingency to look into mayas Ocean shaders. I was suprised at how simple they were to set up and tweak. It was quite easy to work with and the results in these stills are ok for some quick work. I started to notice the flaws when I rendered the ocean shader, though. It doesn't look to bad but  it's just too repetitive off into the distance, the peaks of the waves are to similar and too neatly aligned. I imagine there are ways to negate this, and I would like to come back to ocean shaders when I have more time but for now I have to focus on other parts of the proejct.

Once again, inspired by the work of Lee Griggs. I think the 2nd image here is the my favorite, I tried to go for a few different looks. All of the images were created using photos from the Hubble telescope, found here . I'm now gonna give this a bit of a break whilst I focus on the piling up University work, but I want to come back to this and explore the technique a bit more. What I plan on looking into soon is more interesting  materials and  shading, tilt shift post effects, different types of starting images and, potentially, this technique working with image sequences.

One of the big parts of the listening project I am working on is smoke simulations for oil fires and ashes. I started out with the ashes, I wanted to create something that looked like it has some weight to it. I set the buoyancy  of the fluid so that it would fall instead of rise and dissipate quite quickly. whether this is the effect we will go for or we will opt for a bigger, more dusty look still needs to be decided. The next 5 images are my progression through rendering fire to full smoke columns in Maya. These aren't full quality renders but they are high enough to tell a good amount of detail. This first one is quite basic, not a fluid effect but some simple built in Maya fire, it looks nice but isn't really the smoke fire we are looking for. This was quite an interesting result that I am quite fond of myself, although its more of a small scale fire, so I moved on with my testing. This test was getting more into smoke simulations that a...

After looking at work by Lee Griggs I took a look into creating the effect myself.  I watched as many tutorials as I could find to create the effect with Mental Ray, but spent a good few hours trying to get around problems caused by Mental Ray no longer bundled with Maya in 2016. Getting the image to drive the height of the cubes is relatively simple, you convert the image to black and white, altering the balance as you need, and plug this into an XGen expression. The main problem I was trying to get past was getting the image to drive the colour of the cubes in the render. Firstly  I had to use XGen in a roundabout way to convert my original texture into a Ptex file, but applying this the normal way still wouldn't render. One of my lecturers pointed me towards some new nodes in Mental Ray 2016 that allow you to manually load the Ptex file XGen creates, and then I had to plug it into the right node. All of the effort was definitely worth it because now I know the ...

In preparation for presenting our VFX work to Fashion Photography and 2nd year Film students I want to build up my portfolio with some more abstract rendering. I was researching and came across Lee Griggs blog, I was really amazed by some of the work he's done. One of the things I was really interested in was these   XGen Cubes .  I've seen images like this before and I just love them, they are so detailed and textured and the fact that you can create them from basically any image and see a representation of it like this is so interesting. Its like looking at an image from a perspective that doesn't exist in the real world, that you couldn't picture. http://www.leegriggs.com/ The images can be created from any base picture. Some of them you can look at and guess what they are made from, I think some of Lee's are made from biology pictures, or satellite photos. I really love the style of the...

Everyone talks about render passes. So I figured with the live brief project getting quite big, as well as the composting of the smoke effect and oil rig it's time to learn about them. In Maya 2016 Mental Ray is no longer bundled with the programme. This meant there was a big change to how render passes work. Mental Ray passes now all work from a new MILA shader. This shader is layered so instead of picking a standard shader that allows reflection, or no reflection for example, you always pick the MILA material and add reflection if you need it. I set up a simple scene with some reflection and specular, based off a tutorial and lit it with the Sun and Sky lighting in Mental Ray. To use the new render passes you need to use the MILA material on the objects in the scene. After playing around with the material I created a quick scene with reflections, added some passes and added them into Nuke. I rendered out EXRs so that all the passes were combined...