George Quelch - VFX

As part of my ongoing compositing development for Big Top and Dino Diner I have compacted the lens effects node tree I made before Christmas into a Gizmo. The fundamentals of each different lens effect come from this tutorial  which I have modified, below I've got a screenshot of it being used for a character AOV test in The Big Top. The effects the gizmo is currently capable of are: - Depth Of Field - Vignette - Filter Flare - Lens Distortion - Field Curvature (Edge defocus) - Lens Flares - Glow - Chromatic Abberation (Axial and Traversal) - Grain The user is able to work their way down the list of lens effects enabling or disabling them, and tweaking as they see fit. The aim being to allow people to more easily add real world lens effects to the perfect CG renders. This was roughly the node tree I started with, I ended up leaving out Astigmatism as I think the effect had to much of a dramatic impact o...

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...

Towards the start of 3rd year Cherry Cherry VFX provided us with the oppertunity to work on an outside brief. I worked as part of a small group of students over the course of Semester 1. My roles were lighting, rendering and compositing. We had to come up with an idea for a popup cinema sting, a student put an idea through and after some deliberation with the client w e were given a brief to create a seagull floating on a life buoy in the open ocean, and a clapperboard jumping over, in full un-stylized CG. Starting the project we knew we were going to have to blend together simulated water in the foreground and an un-simulated background water, which we could stretch out into this distance. Also creating a good bird rig was going to be a challenge, as well as achieving a photoreal or close to final result. We ran into a few issues with this project, in several different areas that had to be overcome, for me these were mainly to do with the rendering of the wat...

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...

Now  that dissertation is finally handed in I have been able to put more time into working on compositing for Dino Diner. After the many tests I did for the original previs model here  I wanted to take what I thought was the best technique and apply it to the new previs model.  From Arnold From Nuke I opted for rendering no volumetric lighting in Arnold and added them using Nuke and the TX_Rays node as with my last previs. I also made use of Normal and Point world passes to add additional lighting to the table and counter behind. I also added floating particles which interact with the light shaft, and a range of camera lens effects, including chromatic aberration, depth of field, blurring and more. This time I kept the additional lighting to a minimum, as in my last test I found it caused issues with matte lines and aliasing around edges with additional lighting. I think this issue could be somewhat resolved by making use of several matte IDs for...

A side to looking into Volumetrics in Nuke I have been exploring the Depth to Points node. It's a very clever workflow that only needs a depth and normal pass, which allows you to project your render out into 3D space within Nuke. This process would save having to export geometry and cameras out of Maya, it would all be self contained within the render and the passes, which I thought was really interesting and convenient. To give this technique a test I decided to composite in a sphere into the background of the shot. This is what I was able to produce. Which considering was all done in Nuke without and interaction after render with Maya is pretty cool. I was able to position the sphere within the projection, then by looking in 3D space was able to match where the lights were in order to quickly match the lighting on it. I also tested it with volumetric lighting, although this caused me a lot of trouble with matte lines around the table, I think ...

This week I have been looking into different render solutions for volumetric lighting in 3D. I have been working with Arnold to create some basic lighting with a previs model for the cave created by another student. It was only a quick render, whilst I felt this worked OK the volumetrics were quite noisy and added a lot to render time. I am confident with adding them into 2D space with Nuke but had not added them to 3D successfully yet, so they work with a moving camera, so this is what I wanted to look into doing with Nuke. I found a good toolset with the TX_3DRays gizmo from Nukepedia. This allows quick creation of a light shaft which you can positing within 3D space, by reading in the geometry I could also use it as a holdout so the volumetrics sit properly within the scene. Using two slightly different workflows I created the two images below, which have slightly different looks. I prefer this first image as the result is more subtle, and i...