Some tests

splash test

foam test

Personal Project

me and a friend of mine from school are working on a personal project of ours, we are trying to flood the vfs hallway, it’s been about a week or so, what we have done so far is couple of perliminary simulation tests done in realflow.

what we are currently working on is the shader for the water and scripts for creating foam and splashes. i have wiritten the scripts to do both, but haven’t been “production proven” just yet well i need to run some large sims using those scripts and also hopefully creating a UI for the scripts to make it easy to use, so my buddy who haven’t learned a lot about python and realflow scripting can use it easily.

i will upload some test sims as soon as they are done and i am happy enough with it to upload it.

stay tuned for more :)

Making Of “Blade Disintegration”

this is going to be a break down of the blade disintegration i did, so i’m just going to take one frame, let’s take frame #53, just because i think it’s a good example to show off all the effects.

here’s the final frame.

let’s start with an overview of the whole shot, i rendered everything in passes, particles are rendered in default scanline in 3ds max, and the illumination is rendered with Vray, lights are casted by particles. and layer adjustments are not shown here, all shown passes has aready been adjusted.

now, let’s get started with the passes.

the very first pass, it’s the background plate.

then we drop in the skeleton.

the we drop in the shadow.

then we can drop in the mesh of the person, although you can’t see it very clearly in the fram, but it is there

the drop in the guy’s shadow.

then we drop in the soot as the first layer of the particles

now we are going to drop in the particle fire.

the we are going to layer the ember on top of the fire, not a huge difference, but enough to make it look better

now we can drop in the sparks.

now we put in the particle ash.

by bluring the particle fire we get a nice glow for the particle fire,

now we add in the illumination for the guy skin geo, rendered in Vray with GI.

now the illumination from for the skeleton

now we add the illumation for the ground plane,

then i took the same ground illumation and blured it again, and layer it on top of the previous ground illumation to make it brighter and bigger.

okay, so now we have all the passes, components from 3ds max has been composited,
and the reason why i rendred everything in layers is that it’s really flexible, say if i want to go back to adjust the illuminations of the particles, i just go back, adjust whatever i need to and then render that pass again, and i don’t have to do anything, fusion will pull in the new frames and my new stuff is loaded. also it gives me a lot more control over each effect, i can make it brighter, lighter, draker more saturated, less saturated, and i can control how each effect affect the effect previous to it, just easier in general, but complicates the compositing process somewhat, but the control and flexibility it gives you is just un-comparable.

okay, enough about that, now let’s finish the compositing, so now we’ve layered all the effects, and we can do some overall adjustments.

here’s the brightness-contrast adjustment for all the effect.

then i added a soft glow to the overall effect, just to make it smoother and give the fire a little more glare.

and that’s our final frame.

here’s the compositing free in fusion, not very complicated, i have a few masks going on in there, not a lot of fancy stuff, but i think the shot turns out pretty alright.

so that’s the whole process of making this shot, all effects done in 3ds max 8, with thinking particles and Vray, all passes render at 512X218, in png file sequence, with alpha. all compositing done in Eyeon Fusion, no plugins in fusion.

so hopefully this “breakdown” or “making of”, has given you an insight to this shot, and the basic to render in passes and some intro to compositing.

final video

stay tuned for more

posted a follow up recently, read it here: http://michaelvfx.wordpress.com/2008/08/05/follow-up-on-%e2%80%9cblade-disintegration%e2%80%9d/

Vampire

so, these shots are orginally for a contest at the CG society forum, got rushed, didn’t do that great a job, so i’m coming back to it and making it better.

this first shot, is done a long time ago, no compositing at all, no bones, just a guy leaping off the roof and disintegrates

this shot is pretty cool, done recently, all effects are composited, i rendered everything in layers and composited them all together, to give me more control over the way i want the effect to look.

this one is pretty much the final shot, adjusted the color, changed the way bones disintegrate, and added the illumination from the firy particles, again, everything rendered in layers, and composted together in eyeon Fusion.

that’s bascially a introduction to the shots, i’m gonna do a detailed breakdown of the finaly shot later.

Ubisoft presentation at school

(This is an old post, just grabbed this from my virb)

Ben Mattes, Producer for Prince of Persia 3 and another upcoming exciting but secret Ubisoft title will be doing a presentation about the design process (Ubisoft Pipeline) for all projects along with answering questions about his projects, Ubisoft, their studio, the Too Much Imagination Game Design Challenge (recruitment campaign) and what Ubisoft looks for in a demo reel or portfolio.

well, i just copy and pasted that excerpt from my school mail, well as it says, ben mattes, he was here for a presentation, mostly about how ubisoft works, what is’ like to create a game at the ubisoft studio.

now, i have to say, i was not interested in games at all before the presentation, i only wanted to do films, movies and stuff, never really interested in games or cinematics, and by no means i don’t wanna work on films and movies or anything, but it just opened my eyes to antoher career path for me, and i learned so much more about the production pipeline of a game.

it was really fun, i mean Ben, he’s really a geek and a gamer, and i’ve always loved games, been playing games ever since i touched a computer. and it’s funny because i never really thought of games as something i would even remotely relate to with visual effects and stuff that i’m interested in, but during the presentation, Ben was telling us about the how games are created at the ubisoft studios, and the conception, pre-production and production phase of games and they use 3ds max, WOOOOHOOO!!!!!!!! anyway, back to topic, it was really cool, the team work, and the whole creative process was really cool, not that creative process for movies and such is not cool or anything, just it’s more interesting as i thought.

and at the end, he took a lot of questions about how to apply for ubisoft, and what is required for a demo reel. and he said there will be about 1300 jobs opening in the next 2 years, and they have a CG art department which does hi-res cinematics, trailers, promo video, demo videos, and they work just like a film post production department, they use maya as well in the CG department rather than 3ds max in the game production studio. and apparently Montreal is a really low cost city which i have to say is very cool cause right now i’m living in Vancouver and Vancouver is a really expensive city.

and ben was talking about jobs at ubisoft, he said they are interested in long term relationships, so most of the time they won’t do much contractial work like in the film industry, but long term full time employments, which is cool to me as well, but that kinda kills the chance of going to europe or asia or wherever to explore and stuff, which is cool. but i’m just saying, there’s another place i’m going to apply to after i graduate, just another option, it’s always good to have options and there’s a job in the game production pipeline as well, called Special Effects Specialist which after reading the discription of the job sounds like a perfect job for me, woohoo, and i can also try to apply for the CG art department, more option the better right? don’t put all your eggs in one basket.

it was really cool 3 hours, great presentation, learned a lot, and i got myself a T-shirt, a sticker, a strap and a ipod cover which is cool, free stuff is always cool oh and one more reason to go to ubisoft, they have jade raymonds she’s cute, yeah, you know you like her anyway it was really fun and interesting, better than i expected and learned a lot as well, and i’m really excited too.

have a good one, more to come later