George Quelch - VFX

After a summer that flew by taking part in the BFX Festival Competition, I'm trying to manically work through my list of saved links and techniques in preparation for 3rd year at Falmouth. I'm hopefully going to be able to talk more about BFX soon, including the film we made and some of the breakdown, and work I put into it, but we are currently waiting for the films to be released online to be able to talk about it. For now I am focusing on getting to grips with Arnold, and Maya 2017 in general. There are lots of little improvements all around, especially with the animation and general interface changes. As part of a continuation of the lighting I was doing before I took the  St anford dragon  into Arnold and lit it with a HDR image. One of the big problems I had with Mental Ray in 2016 was rendering  caustics , this however worked quite nicely in Arnold. I was pretty impressed by the quick results. The glass looks cle...

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 ...

It finally happened! Definable number of lives, can easily scale or shrink and the edges are fully wrapped around. Here I've got a grid of 14*14, looping 100 times, which is why it cuts off towards the end. After thinking through and working out on paper how to wrap the edges, the easiest way I found was to create a buffer edge around the matrix, which is never displayed in 3D, and copy values from the edge of the 3D matrix into the buffer, this allowed all the code I had written before to still work, and I just had to work in the new parts to get it wrapping round. So happy with the result! I want to work now on rendering it nicely, changing the cubes for something else perhaps, and getting something lit and rendered to have a nice version to show, coding wise in future I may look into creating starting cubes, to define certain patterns that will create specific results, such as this from the wiki page.

I have revisited making XGen Topology the last two days, I had always intended too, now that I know much more about compositing CG scenes together. Here's the work from before . And here is the new image, with some more compositing involved, including depth of field, added grain, and some mist effects, as well as general adjusting of passes. I think the result is quite nice, although the composition is letting it down slightly, it's definitely something I overlook from time to time even though it has a massive effect on the image. Composition and cinematography is something I want to look at more, I know some of if from Uni seminars, and from photography knowledge, but want to apply that more in Maya, using camera rigs and setups to help create nice shots, and thinking more about how I am framing what I make.

This past week I have focused on a tutorial from issue 210 of 3D world Magazine, looking at skin shaders in V-Ray, following on from the dragon practice, now onto the actual resources. Not having access to V-Ray, and with Renderman not currently working in Maya 2016 extension 2, I looked through the article and took tips and parts of using sub surface scattering shaders, and applied them to mental rays shaders. Pretty happy with the result here, I think it could have come out looking nicer in Renderman or V-Ray, I didn't find the MILA skin shader very intuitive to use, I have also gotten a lot more used to lighting in engines like renderman. First attempt was not successful, but spending longer lighting the model on the 2nd attempt, definitely improved the result. One thing I don't like here is that the skin is just a little too shiny or has a bit to much specular in a few areas. Comped together in Nuke as usual, The render straight out of Maya...

After some more experimenting with Mental Ray I have tinkered with 2 glass shaders, created with the Mental Ray Mia X material. This gave some quite nice results but I still ran into the shadow problem, and trying to enable caustics, which are now a legacy option, and light photons, did not produce any improved results so far. Both are nice, but the shadows let them down again, the light is not being affected as it should as it passes through t he glass. I also began to experiment with Sub Surface Scattering shaders, after atempting a tutopia in 3D world magazing on SSS i wanted abetter understanding. I focused on 2 ways of doing it with the MILA material, here is the result: The first uses a basic one layer scatter material, which works ok but still looks very solid. This 2nd one uses a layered shader, with the scattering on top of diffuse, then two different subtle glossy layers on top, it definitely produced a result with a more depth and d...

This week in preparation for BFX I am going to be focusing on Lighting and Shading, primarily in Mental Ray, as I have had no luck with Renderman for Maya 2016 Ext 2. I'm starting off with some models from The Stanford 3D Scanning Repository . These are pretty well known models and are used a lot for lighting and shading experiments. There are a lot of really interesting examples of rendering out there, two I liked were here  (glass) and here  (subsurface) I'm starting out basic with these but this week I'm planning to  look into reference images, and creating similar results, making use of HDRIs, and include some nuke compositing techniques to add to final look of what I'm making. I like to do these horrible colours from lights to initially set up the strength and where exactly the lights are focused. Here I've got some basic materials set up and have started tweaking the lights. I did some experimenting with Mental Rays glass mater...