George Quelch - VFX

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.

So after taking part in the BFX competition this summer I was able to attend the festival in October, which is comprised of 4 days of insightful talks, the BFX awards, and a day of networking and talking to recruiters. Thursday evening was the awards for the BFX competition and I'm so happy for our team to have won the award for best FX and Simulation. We put a lot of time into simulating the paint and getting it nicely rendered so its great to have won that! Awards Night with the Art Express! Our Final Film for Create! Monday to Thursday was talks from the likes of ILM, Framestore, Disney, Pixar, Blue Zoo, The Mill and many, many more, as well as games companies including Playground Games and Frontier Developments.  Topics ranged from production, to concept design, pipeline, fx. It was a really great opportunity  to see how different companies manage different parts of their workflow. ILM delivering their talk on Star Wars 7 ...