Matt Chandlers' Blog

Leon Kowalski

2012-02-19T11:26:00.000-08:00

Leon Kowalski. If you dont know who that is and you consider yourself a scifi fan, you should probably go sit down and watch your scifi collection again.
Blade Runner was a seminal movie in my life - having first seen it at around the age of 12 or 13 when I was watching SKY tv at someone elses house. We never had SKY at home and i still dont have it actually. Hundreds of channels of crap.
For months afterwards I was drawing and painting cityscapes with flying vehicles and started to become obsessed with models and minature FX. Of course I eventually went to University and became a Modelmaker - making props and minatures before I started to realise I could make stuff in computers AND do the camera AND do the lights AND not inhale paint fumes or MDF dust!

Following that epic and arguably unrivaled opening sequence in BladeRunner was the introduction of Leon Kowalski and his parental troubles....
Perhaps for me one of the most tense opening sequences in film, Brion James plays the mysterious and dangerous Leon - framed and lit via the awesome collabortion of Jordan Cronenweth and Ridley Scott.
A favorite film character of mine, I have begun a challenging character project of sorts that Im hoping to utilise alot of my tools and new processes on - creating Leon Kowalski.
I managed to get hold of a makeup/production casting of the actor Brion James which had some excellent surface details and mould quality.
Im also using a combination of Photoscan and some home laser scanning (courtesy of the excellent and versitle DAVIDscan) to build a digital double/version of Leon.

A blogzilla!

2012-02-13T04:25:00.000-08:00

A couple years ago.....(already!) - i got in touch with a number of fellow 3dsmax and Brazil RS users to come work with me at Jellyfish Pictures on a large dinosaur themed BBC show.
Many events transpired with the undertaking of that particular project - including myself deciding to leave the studio after a fruitful 5 years.
Simone Nastasi was one of the artists who quit his job in Italy to come join the team and see his shots and sequences through!
Heres some information on himself and the project.

http://jamiesjewels.typepad.com/jamies_jewels/2012/02/a-3ds-max-blogzilla-of-an-article.html

BT Vision ident

2012-01-30T09:50:00.000-08:00

We collaborated with ManvsMachine again to make an addition to their BT Vision ident package.
Under their direction myself and co-director Mike Merron setup studio lit panels of glass that shattered sequentially. I used rayfire and pflow and baked out the heavy particle data to disk with SuperMesher.

Rendered with Vray with DOF in camera due to the transparencies and reflections.

Latest Commercial

2012-01-12T12:41:00.000-08:00

Heres the commercial the studio completed just before Christmas for the O2 January sales.
Completed in two weeks from almost scratch, as almost all the footage and plates shot on location in Athens proved useless. The opening shot was composited together from about 5 different takes and elements. The lanterns were modeled up from reference photographs of the designed lanterns and we kept the textures floating point so we had alot of control within the material editor to ramp and mix lighting and shaders.

Click here to watch

Pointcache

2012-01-10T08:35:00.000-08:00

Pointcache is an old and essential, bullet proof method of getting what you expect out of a render.
Everything is 'baked' - plotted down and everyframe of movement and deformation is recorded. Its a great way of passing shots/elements along to the next artist without the fear of an accidently movement or delete of something essential in the scene or character rig.

This little script caught my eye recently. There are options out there already - SuperMesher from Boomerlabs and more recently Xmesh. Both of these feature advanced cache options (such as baking changing topology, but for a freebie script - this one is pretty damn good.

http://www.scriptspot.com/3ds-max/scripts/rs-pointcache-merger

New year - more new RayFire

2012-01-05T03:12:00.000-08:00

Mir Vadim, the developer of one of my favorite FX tools RAYFIRE - has posted a demonstration of his latest and possibly greatest addition to the plugin called 'dead objects'.

The simple examples he examples speak for themselves.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8S3gi6zagpU

Quantum Powers!

2011-12-13T09:07:00.000-08:00

The developer and programmer Ole Lemming over at IoSim along with Ian Clemmer has been hard at work (or having fun as he told me) over the past year developing what is shaping up to be a 'do cool shit' daemon for Realflow. Quantum Force looks like a sort of uber modifier that combines all the best bits of all the Daemons...and some new ones.
Il be adding it to my toolset soon no doubt and its already giving me alot of creative ideas and opening up lots of new doors regarding the control of fluid behaviors.

Japan Part Two

2011-12-11T11:54:00.000-08:00

Editing this stuff suddenly turned into alot of fun. Maybe it was because the MP4 files handle much better than the old system I had 3 years ago.

Part 2 features some exploring, recieving an award at the National Arts Centre, Tokyo - finding a weird pet shop where animals are on display as if they were toys, toys of naked 5 year old Hentai girls and other weird and wonderful stuff from the other side of the world.

Click here - or watch below

JAPAN

2011-12-05T03:45:00.000-08:00

Its taken me near three years to get around to it, but Part One is complete and online.

In Febuary 2009, Fabio Zaveti and myself traveled out to Tokyo to attend the Media Arts Festival and we filmed everything and anything every hour for the duration.

Part 2 is coming soon. I think there will be 4 parts in total.

Click HERE - or watch below.

Mercury part 2

2011-12-01T05:28:00.000-08:00

The Nike Lunar commercial 'Ungrounded Obsession' was recently released.
Here it is on youtube.
It was a brief vfx shot that turns up at the 40 second mark - but looks slick cut in with the rest of the stylish, near monochrome visuals.
I created 300fps fluid droplet sims individually, utilising the great Viscous Drop plugin from WETWORK, and arranged them around the Lunar.
Nike supplied the actual shoe used in the shoot to us and I used Photofly to extract an accurate build of the shoe - projecting the RED cam plate back onto the geometry.
This enabled the droplets to reflect accurately and sit more realistically within the scene.

Telstra

2011-11-28T08:55:00.000-08:00

Heres a recent piece of work we did the 3D and FX for at Analog Pixel.
Director Roman Ruetten sat in house with us to get the shots he wanted and I kinda enjoyed developing the subtle paper shaders to work in the classic all white-void environment.

All 3D with a sprinkling of particles and i used my old paper crumple technique (tutorial here) on the wrapping and animated objects.

Mercury

2011-11-14T03:51:00.000-08:00

Just finished a nice, short VFX piece for a new Nike Lunar commercial.
Nike approached the studio and asked us to add some blobby heavy metal droplets/mercury impacting the shoe and surface at 300fps...in reverse.

I photoscanned the Lunar shoe and projected a frame from the RED shot source footage back onto the model so the droplets would reflect shoe surface.

Heres a still from the shot.

XMESH

2011-10-29T02:30:00.000-07:00

The guys at ThinkBox Software have all sorts of cool shit in development. Im still waiting for their ocean suite 'Bermuda' since being on beta for almost a year...but in the mean time...this new piece of kit looks pretty cool.

Xmesh is looking like a super charged pointcache solution for pretty much anything, doing anything..including embedded data channels. Caching and baking stuff is an essential process for stability, predictability and avoiding weird scene problems.
This one looks like the ultimate option so far.

http://www.thinkboxsoftware.com/news/2011/10/24/xmesh-introduction-video.html

GoPro HDHERO2

2011-10-26T06:03:00.001-07:00

I neglected GoPro cameras for a while. It didnt seem to offer me anything unless I was jumping out of a plane or surfing in Hawaii. I recently got to play with one and get footage into a vfx pipeline and considering its size and that you can strap it to pretty much anything - the quality of the results is actually now quite usable. The footage is still in a damned H264 codec and in an MP4 wrapper - but if you plan carefully enough and know what you are shooting - the footage can be used effectively in postproduction.

The target audience is of course the enthusiast/consumer who wants to show their mates how cool they look jumping off a cliff or something - but after tethering it to external capture devices and mounting it in creative places - there are some great POV potentials from this camera to intergrate into VFX driven sequences.

Il surely be posting some of the sequences ive done with it here soon.

http://gopro.com/hd-hero2-cameras/

Hair farm to Softimage

2011-10-24T09:40:00.000-07:00

Lee P Smith has posted some interesting details about exporting hair setups from hairfarm over into Softimage. At first glance, this sounds a completly crazy idea - but its to be rendered with Arnold....so its not such a crazy idea after all.
Having used Softimage for over 6 years in VFX production, I feel qualified to say that its a pile of shit when it comes to rendering and 'getting stuff out'. Remember - the client doesnt care how cool your ICE tree is - if it looks like shit coming out the render/you have difficulty rendering all your data....thats what the client cares about!

Arnold is STILL in beta and covered with NDA and I lost interest in it about a year ago when i found out miltiple UV sets were not yet supported. I heard Platige is coding a port to 3Dsmax - and Maya support is coming along too.

Arnold and perhaps 3Delight are the only options when it comes to getting decent and reliable renderdata out of Softimage - though it will always depend on your personal tastes and skill set on what renderer you wish to use.
The only advantage to getting the Hair data into Arnold would be that Arnold can handle it...and render it with GI. OK - thats technically interesting, but hair has been renderer via scattering and domelights for years now at a completly photorealistic quality - so it seems to be just another step in a pipeline for now. The results are cool so far though. Good stuff Lee.

http://www.ir-ltd.net/hair-farm-hair-into-softimage

Nuke inside 3DSmax

2011-10-19T07:09:00.001-07:00

This plugin/script is looking interesting. No idea on any release date - but il surely be using it to good use rather than flicking back and forth. Shame 3Dsmax is STILL not out on Linux though. So looks like this is only a Windows thing.

http://www.aespid.com/aespid/scripts/3ds-max/93.html

Visual effects magic and ILM

2011-10-07T02:42:00.000-07:00

Theres a fear inside of me that the origins of visual effects and what they mean/how they work will one day be forgotten. CGI revolutionised visual effects and opened a whole new corridor of doors to open and discover, but near 30 year old techniques still hold up, fascinate and inspire you with the imagery that was created. 75 layers of film that gets layered up photochemically to create a composite puts into perspective just how easy we digital guys have it these days.
I vow to not complain as much about my failed render passes....

ILM & VFX part 1

ILM & VFX part 2

ILM & VFX part 3

ILM & VFX part 4

Making of O2 commercial

2011-10-01T10:32:00.001-07:00

I put together a brief making of/breakdown video of the O2 commercial completed at my studio Analog-Pixel after a few requests and interest since broadcast.

VRAY public beta for Softimage

2011-09-28T03:58:00.001-07:00

Yes - Vray is lurking around the Softimage platform and the last time I looked at it, it was around Siggraph 2008 at the Chaos Group stand in secretive whispers.

So a public beta has just been announced and im taking it more serioulsy than usual - as Vray is already a very well established renderer, plus it means you might be able to get a decent render out of Softimage. It always took 10 times as long to get something good out of Softimage in my working experience, having worked with it for 5 years at a previous employer.

Fellow 3D artist Simon Reeves has already embraced the implementation and done some encouraging imagery - so when i can find a spare few minutes, i think i'll join in the public beta and see what comes out the other end....

Your rights as a VFX artist

2011-09-22T07:47:00.001-07:00

Its been long discussed, considered and demanded by visual effects artists and facilities the world over. The visual effects industry as it currently stands is a relatively young industry - with most of todays artists still single, staying up all night and eating pot noodles (come on...admit it).

Therefore - what can only be described as abuse is what has occured upon countless occasions. Minimum 18 hour days, no overtime and the fear of losing work or position - all whilst looking into the glowing monitor screen and literally watching your skin turn an abnormal colour.
And all so that toilet bleach advert can be on television. Or maybe its so that guy who is always on holiday and having drinks parties and calls himself the director can say he did it all. It was his vision. Well - to bad he had to get you to visualise it.....

The VES (Visual Effects Society...I advise you to become a member) has drawn up a bill of rights. A document of do's, do nots and your legal right to say ' what the fuck are you talking about!? Thats not even remotely possible to do you dick....' (though in a more polite manner).

I have to say its a more than welcome posting that secures peace of mind, health and confidence to us all within this industry. Im sometimes annoyed by the lack of understanding of just how much time and effort many of us commit to producing this kind of work.

Im also very interested to see if this shifts the industry practices in some way and if we may even see some facilities completly fail, unable to accomodate these regulations whilst demanding the bastard child of Avatar and Harrypotter movies combined be produced entirely in CGI, in a low rent production studio....on the moon...with no oxygen...in 2 months.

Im looking forward to saying...'not this time'.

http://www.animationmagazine.net/vfx/ves-issues-industry-bill-of-rights/

Animation book

2011-09-13T09:09:00.000-07:00

I met with established and experienced animator Stephen Cavalier about a year ago whilst I was still CG supervisor at Jellyfish Pictures.
I hired him to come in and work with me again at my new VFX studio earlier this year whilst doing a commercial that required some character animation work.
And now he has written a book on the worldwide history of animation, featuring key personal working across Europe, North America, and Asia.
Be sure to check it out:

http://www.subtitledonline.com/special-features/the-world-history-of-animation

3D scans and why you should/can do it yourself

2011-09-03T06:06:00.000-07:00

Ive fiddled with so many ways of getting 3D data of heads, faces and bodies whilst on various projects that Ive come to realise there is no 'better' way of aquiring the data you need. It depends entirely upon what the project is, how long there is to do it, the screen time of the VFX data and cross referencing all this to figure out a cost.

Cost is always the main factor when considering using 3D scan data - whether it laser, structured light, photogrammetry, stereo extraction or otherwise. There is always clean up, transfer and the actual time it takes to get the scan done in the first place.
Laser scanning techniques are becoming more and more obsolete everyday - with equally good results coming from affordable (and even free) software solutions. I also believe the industry and commerce built around providing a scanning service is also diminishing - with costs for 3d scan data not really anymore affordable than they were 15 years ago.

I recall a project where we paid £500 for a head scan about 8 years ago - the raw data along with some retopology (which we didnt use as it wasnt to our pipeline specs). The same service today will cost you around the same amount - mainly because the technology and apparatus used is also still insanely expensive. Expect to pay from 10k and upwards for a pretty basic system that may give you unpredictable results in terms of quality.

Freebie solutions such as Autodesk's Photofly and even Photosynth will get you equally good data, with the forms and landmarks you need to retopologise and reshape according to your needs.
ScannerKiller is a recent freebie solution based on stereo pairs of photographs. The results are again of excellent quality and the fact that its a free online service again damages any business model setup around providing 3d scan services.
Afterall, most 3D artists want/need to use the data themselves and work with the scan data.

Ive been using Agisoft Photoscan for just over a year now also (mainly for sets and environments) - though recent updates to Photofly have seen vast improvments to the mesh accuracy.
Ive purposefully fed the system less than ideal images - with varied lighting and resolution. The results have been excellent, easy and fast to obtain.
Take anywhere from 8 - 8000 pictures of someone (i wouldnt recommend thousands of pics) - upload them into Photosfly/scene editor and wait a little while. Voila - you have a decent model which looks good and equals that of a 3-4 figure scan system. You can have a workable result within 30 mins - from taking your photos and saving out your mesh. Im a big fan of keeping costs low.
Even the excellent, free scannerkiller service isnt the most affordable solution - as it requires you have two identical DSLR's with matching lenses. OK - this isnt a bank breaker - but your looking at spending a few hundred bucks before you can actually use the software and get the expected results. Or just make friends with some one who has the same camera as you.

Heres a quick model generated in PhotoFly in 3 minutes with just 8 photos. A couple small spikes and blobby areas - but over all a pretty decent result. The original photographs were taken using cross polorisation so we have a nice flat diffuse colour map. Ive then quickly made a spec map in photoshop and added some surface detail in Zbrush from the original photos and some custom brushes. A more accurate way to do this would be to extract some normals and displacement information from a seperate set of photographs lit in an XYZ pattern - though this can be somewhat overkill and not needed 99 percent of the time.
Lit with a single Vray light and an HDRI and using VraySSS2. The skin details work nicely - and after retopology, addition of 3D eyeballs, control maps and what will turn into weeks and weeks of rigging - maybe we can give him 1.4 seconds of screen time...out of focus...in the background.

Gelsight

2011-09-03T04:05:00.000-07:00

If your obsessed with accuracy - this new piece of kit could come in handy - though personally - i never notice if a texture map pore isnt exactly in the same place as a particular pore on a real persons face. Obviously this device is more appropriate for scientific purposes and for study/analyis - but it would be interesting to run it over someones face a few times.

GelSight is a new device created by MIT researchers to capture high-resolution surface topography. It's capable of measuring surface features as small as 2 microns spatially with submicron depth resolution.

really?

2011-09-01T05:42:00.000-07:00

Theres enough bitching, complaining and 'trolling' going on already on the web, so ive never felt bothered or compelled to make any/many additions, but some work collegues all had such a jolly good laugh at a certain 3d 'training-site' the other morning - I felt compelled to point out how stupid it is. Not to mention how poor the content is anyway. I think i bought something from there about 8 years ago when I was obsessed with robots and instantly regretted it. Yup - I was a sucker. I think a few of us did - so kudos to the site for being around for so long. Im not going to name drop at the risk of opening up a nasty wound for them and get spammed for the rest of my life. Maybe i shouldnt post this....ah, what the hell....ive typed lots of stuff now.

So for just £20 pounds you can become a member...for just one month! Pretty steep. But its ok - you get 50% off one of the DVD downloads on how to make a robot or spaceship that doesnt subdivide very well. These usually cost about 30-35 quid.

Wow so i can buy it for £17.50 - plus a membership fee of £20.
Erm....thats more than if you just buy it. Oh wait - you get extra stuff...like free HDR's (generally useless) and other things like priority access to see what is coming up next and how much it will cost you.

Good way to make some money though.
Dont forget to donate aswell.

The Pilot

2011-08-31T14:10:00.000-07:00

Another project that has been in what could be called 'development hell' for a few years is a short film myself and fellow film maker Alex Burton devised a few years ago with a working title of 'The Pilot'. A kind of double meaning title - being about a pilot and perhaps itself being somewhat a pilot episode that could lead to more...

Being personally financed has meant super long pre-production times while I gathered props/costume components and did some modelmaking work on them - adding electronics, lights and so on.

Without giving too much away - it will be a dizzying, seamless camera move that travels with our protagonist on a less that ideal scenario.

Cross Polorisation

2011-08-30T07:23:00.000-07:00

This quite common and frequently used technique to photograph subjects with and without specular/reflectivity turned up on a couple websites recently, with discussion seemingly focused on how new, useful and technically challenging it could be. Its not complicated or hard at all and so i thought id do a brief blog posting rather than confront the boastful, misguided egos that populate forums!
The technique of cross polorisation has been around for probably longer than 20 years or so - used alot by wildlife photographers/general photographers to minimise the reflectivity elements in scenes caused by flash photography or just highly relfective surfaces in general...such as wet or shiny things. Its also a common technique to analyse surface defects and so on in more scientific based cases.
I first used it about 15 years ago when doing photography (old skool chemicals style) at college to do closeup portraits whilst minimising the greasyness of the skin (particularly cos we were all teenagers at the time). People generally think it just makes things look weird. Well yes - it can do with general photography - as it can remove the specular highlights and visual cues you expect to see in pictures and how you see things in the real world.
It has a great use in CGI however and is used by pretty much every VFX house going - particularly for digital-double work. I recall reading about it in one of Paul Debevecs papers about the reflectivity of the human face from 2000 and have used it ever since to do texture photography (when possible). A progression of this work from 2000 was released in 2007 and demonstrates further relatively simple ways of abstracted data from arrayed/controlled photographs.

On page 7 of the paper - some images and figures briefly describe how to seperate the diffuse and specular components of the skin.
Cross polorisation means there is both a poloriser filter on both the camera and the light sources. If you take a picture of the face with the filter on the camera perpedicular to that of the light sources - you will recover a diffuse only element. A second picture with all filters parralell will yield a picture with reduced diffuse and no include specular components.

A simple photoshop operation of difference between the two will recover the specular component - which is a great start to having a detailed reflection/specular map. These two maps alone will get you more than half way - the flat diffuse and reflectivity.

But wait a sec....so how do we take these pics?! Thats the part people neglect to mention like its some secrest knowledge or something. Well - you will need a polorisation filter for your camera...available in any camera shop anywhere pretty much...or online of course.
You will also need some polorisation film - which can be bought in various sizes/gages from optical companies pretty cheaply. You just cut a piece off and tape it over your camera flashes (with the correct/matching orientation) and your all set. Uh oh - i may of intentionally upset some people now by mentioning how simple it is.....nevermind - do a quick google for cross polorisation and you will find some other pages/blogs talking about it from about 5 years ago. Plus its mentioned in numerous Cinefex issues throughout the past decade.

Heres a quick example of what you end up with. Now this isnt an ideal lighting setup ive used here - and there is some spill from a lightsouce elsewhere in the room that isnt polorised...but as you can see - its a great base for the colour/diffuse map and spec maps.

BRAZIL 3

2011-08-14T04:36:00.000-07:00

And so its back. Well, it never actually went away...it was just neglected and forgotten for a few years. The Brazil rendering engine is a tool I have used on almost all my work for the past 8 years and Brazil 2 64bit is (although not developed for the past 4 years) is still a fast, rock solid rendering solution that can still compete with current solutions.....just ask Runne Spanns....or me :)

So Brazil is back and appeared at Siggraph this year. Too bad I didnt go to ask them why it took so damn long. Its been overhauled to become a kinda hybrid between a cinematic production quality tool and a realtime raytracer. Its also now got an SDK so the potential for pumping your own shaders into it is a mouthwatering possibility.

Im looking forward to getting my hands on it.

http://www.imgtec.com/News/Release/index.asp?NewsID=639

Capsized!

2011-07-30T02:54:00.000-07:00

Not since Machinarium have i seen or played a game with such rich visuals, playability and rich soundtrack (courtesy of Solar Fields). Im really enjoying the emergence of small games like these that explore what many would consider to be an older form of game play.
Games like this put the fun back into playing games....not the need for the latest hardware, lighting reflexes and an itchy trigger finger.

Capsized is a wonderful game. Now il get even less work done.

Camera Raw

2011-07-29T10:27:00.000-07:00

I was pleasantly suprised to see & stumble across this.
At last - perhaps some kind of unity and compatibility that brings back the good ol' ability to click on things and open them....

http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=26829

Realflow 2012

2011-07-27T16:41:00.000-07:00

Damn it.
Im just getting to a somewhat expert level at using Realflow 5 and another damned update is released.

But its ok - its a worthy one.

RealFlow 2012 (no, Autodesk hasnt bought it) has just been released and its been further enhanced to make large scale fluid sims...well....larger! More control over particles per voxel rather than resolution dependency and even a direct to Krakatoa PRT exporter! Foam and splash has been further refined for even more detail and control.

http://www.realflow.com/2012/index_rf2012.php

O2 commercial

2011-07-27T11:36:00.000-07:00

Another commercial recently completed at Analog Pixel Studio.
Pretty basic, standard visual effects for this one - involving full phone/handset replacement, shading, lighting and the objects coming out of the phones of course.
More time was spent painting out the terrible weather from the shoot and even stabilising the pizza topping (which was blowing around in the wind) than the 3D - and compositor Alex Webb dived fearlessly into one of the most challenging and ridiculous paint/repair jobs Ive come across to date.....wires, things hanging from the wires....the wires actually being pointless....all moving in and out of focus, with heavy motion blur, occluding objects and people walking in and out of frame.
Pizza is always a saviour in such scenarios.

The stuff of sci-fi films

2011-07-22T04:36:00.000-07:00

An unrelated visual effects posting for once - the last ever Space Shuttle mission came to and end recently of course - and it was also the most heavily documented and observed.

As a result - some of the most stunning, breathtaking and tear generating footage i have ever seen was captured of its launch and flight into space....there was even a camera attached to one of the booster rockets, filming all the way down to its ocean splash down. 11.55 mins in - that shuttle seperation shot is awe-inspiring.

Amazing. Absoutely amazing.

Cuda gone even faster

2011-07-15T14:17:00.001-07:00

So recently i've began to take GPU rendering more seriously. Its been around for years already - but lets be honest...it was shit. More of a show off thing really for trade shows and basic reflections on models of cars....and you needed a video card more expensive than your entire computer to get something out of it in a reasonable time frame.

Octane caught my attention recently and has come on in leaps and bounds since i last looked at it. The interface is still kinda child like and the process of getting animation into it is so horrible that I began to wonder why I didnt just render my scene in the original application I made it in.
But its still a Beta, its only 99 euros and i dont think its intended to be a serious render pipeline competitor anytime soon.

Its pretty damn cool though - and once i stuck a low-mid range video card into my machine, its speed and quality blew me away. Being able to rotate around and render a fully GI, un-biased frame with 8 ray bounces and lots of other cool crap in around 3 minutes was certainly impressive.

Another thing i realised when i opened my machine to add an additional Cuda graphics card was how tiny my old one was in comparison. This new one (a GTX 460 2gb) demands two slots at the back to fit in and wants 12 pins of power channeled into it.
Certainly makes a huge difference for the speed of GPU rendering though.

I recommend two cards if doing GPU rendering - as otherwise your system becomes rather unresponsive and sluggish because all the display drivers power is beign used to render! So having two - you can assign one to render and have the remaining one run your display and still be able to move around easily.

4 years

2011-06-25T03:36:00.000-07:00

Its been 4 whole years since I began working on a now reknowned piece of work called 'carbon footprint'. I was reminded of this work again after channel hopping the other day and seeing it eating up 2 whole minutes of air time between shows on Discovery Science channel.....still on after 4 years!

Even though it was a tiny project and tiny crew compared to most visual effects undertaking ( 2 artists), Im proud to see it still getting postive thought, feedback and air time all these years later.
Ive also grown to appreciate it more after all this time, as you tend to get sick of seeing your own work after working on it for weeks and getting little sleep.
Its become a well known and enduring piece of CGI/VFX work globally - and I would like to thank & celebrate with my team mates this 4 year anniversary of sorts. Thanks to compositor Fabio Zaveti, producer Stefano Salvini and director Matt Lambert for collaborating on a landmark on our VFX careers.

New tutorial - paper balls

2011-06-25T01:55:00.001-07:00

Balls. Paper balls actually. Since posting this up online Ive gotten hundreds of emails and positive feedback so I figured it was worth mentioning here aswell.
Something as simple sounding as a paperball is actually quite a complex and challenging 3D model to create realistically and convincingly. So I made a tutorial.

Film work

2011-06-14T15:52:00.000-07:00

A few months back I was approached by Pixomondo UK to work with them on developing some visual effects for 'Dark Tide'. I worked a number of evenings on some large under water blood simulations with FumeFX. Developing fluid sims that were almost full frame 2K cinema scope format was kinda fun - with the longer shots taking a maximum of 40 - 60 minutes after optimising and a little scripting. Some fx elements are here

Nuke Artist wanted for O2 & Audi commericials

2011-06-08T05:56:00.000-07:00

Yep, im looking for some Nuke artists....like every other studio out there at the moment it appears.
Note I also prefer the term 'Nuke Artist'....not 'operator'.
I want artists not operators. And then it became clear to me why they are so much in demand at the moment.

In my opinion, the best Nuke artists are artists themselves, either ex or practicing 3D artists aswell - therefore having a thorough grasp of 3d, lighting and plate intergration and 'what looks right'!
Only about 5 - 10 percent of Nuke 'operators' appear to be artists and actually any good at it. And thats why they are in demand. We dont all want just Nuke guys....we want GOOD Nuke guys....which are extremely scarce.

Perhaps i should rephrase all this entirely......

We all want good compositors with an eye for details and er....composition. Ive met and worked with many Nuke compositors over the past few years. I can honestly say that only about 6 out of 50 were good, and of those - only 2 were REALLY good. And those guys are fulltime at major facilities.....because they are REALLY good.

So before you apply and send me reels - if all you have done for 4 years is paint out rigs, touch up greenscreen or degrain plates - your not a Nuke artist/compositor....your the digital equivalant of cucumber sandwich filling pipeline supervisor.

Hows that for motivation.

Sexy bunny suit

2011-04-27T11:03:00.000-07:00

The hair groom for the bunny costume is going well....no, im not talking about anything exciting or sexually tantalising....a squirrel will be dressed up as a bunny for some random reason. Other than the nightmare of fur upon fur collisions - its going alright.

Ice shader

2011-04-22T04:07:00.000-07:00

I worked up a reasonable ice shader/model for 3 secs of air time on the Nike Lunar project. Alot of the 3D details created for visual fx are only glimpsed for a few seconds or even frames in the end, but that detail still needs to be there to sell the illusion/effect. Here are some development stills i found on my desktop.

No no no

2011-04-22T03:51:00.000-07:00

This is the funniest video ive seen in a long time. The smirks on Camerons face are priceless as George waffles on about 'learning 3D' and the talent required to do it.
Er....you mean 2000 roto artists being paid fuck-all out in India then....
The mystery around 3D wont last long....its so, so ridiculously easy to make....the tricky part is to not make people vomit and avoid the cliche of things jumping out of the screen. I dont envy PrimeFocus getting that job....i think its more accurate to say that no one else wanted to go anywhere near 12 months of roto and paint.
3D conversion is nothing new.....i recall attending a lecture by ILM on their 3D conversion of Nightmare before Christmas. They didnt really have anything positive to say about it - other than it was a painfully long and laborious project doen by lots of underpaid graduates....and that was 6-7 years ago.

A desperate attempt at justifying the pointless conversion of StarWars to 3D. The question on everyones lips must of been....why....and why dont you just make another movie in 3D? That would be crazy.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6jFWgbF-pFM&feature=related

Lunar online

2011-04-20T09:18:00.000-07:00

The spot for Nike is now online. First project by our new studio/joint setup as 1stavemachine UK visual effects boutique with Stink.

http://www.1stavemachine.com/#/projects/nike

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=giec1F1tDf8

Give me some head

2011-04-17T05:42:00.000-07:00

No....not that kind of head....your forgetting im a VFX nerd and want a 3D version of it....noooo!!...not that either....your actual head....and some tree.
Like in this video i recently posted on Vimeo!

oh go on then...if you insist.....

Grooming for render love

2011-04-15T11:05:00.000-07:00

Straight of the back of the successful Nike Lunar - its headfirst into another HUGE commercial with some challenging creature work...feaaturing full fur and hair interaction. Fur on fur action to be precise....as its going to be a squirrel dressed as a floppy eared bunny no less. Weird. So if the one creature wasnt challenging enough - its one dressed as the other - and both furry. But its alright - I can take it....even if it means im constantly inspecting everything and anything with hair on it. Director Vinny is on site with us for a few weeks to aid with direction and shot preparation before heading back to NY after a shoot in Lisbon where some great plates were obtained. Im working almost solely on the creature and groom for 5 weeks in what is again a tight schedule for the ambitous ideas featured in this spot. I learnt a few good workflow tips from using MPC's custom, in-house 'Furtility' tool last year - which im implementing on this creature workflow. The hair is progressing well and i think will be ready and looking stunning in a couple more weeks of careful detailing grooming and client feedback.

Just lots of the finer details and randomisation to add.

Nike spot stills

2011-04-09T07:48:00.000-07:00

Heres a few stills from the first commercial from our new VFX studio for Nike. These are from the new in-house grade. We are toying with the idea of getting a Smoke in house to hire out too, so watch this space....

Nike Lunar Complete

2011-04-06T11:17:00.000-07:00

Three weeks of post, 46 shots and a couple all nighters - our first spot for Nike is complete and successfully delivered on schedule. Nike Lunar is being launched by Footlocker in Europe and we delivered 3 versions with alternate 3D language cards including French and Italian. It appears this commercial wont be broadcast in the UK for the time being for some reason. A few shots towards the end are completely CGI shots. Following a laughably bad grade done by a top VFX house in Soho (and i mean really bad) - the spot will be be retracted and graded by ourselves in house. Quite how Baselight operators get away with charging so much is still a mystery of the post industry to me....

About time....but worth the wait it would seem

2011-03-22T08:21:00.000-07:00

Some friends just put me onto this video.
3Dsmax 2012 released looks to of finally addressed the headache of the last 10 years - high topology viewport performance. Not only that - you can model and develop your poly object in pretty much AO/toon shader realtime whilst modeling. Its actually kinda jaw droppingly good.
Fuck you Softimage :)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gz6bOU4JX1w

Co running a new VFX studio

2011-03-09T10:20:00.000-08:00

What usually remains a pipe dream and frequent topic of forever lasting discussion for most this week became a reality for myself and co-runner/founder Mike Merron, as we began work in our new work space. Just a month ago we discussed the idea whilst walking back from a lunch break. A few weeks later, Mike was bundling furniture into a studio space and triple checking if I was still up for the idea. Another week later - and here we are in our own studio space with some brand spanking new high end 8 core, 16 RAM workstations, networked up and all the rest of the usual office amenities like couches and a 3D television. And so work commences on the Nike Lunar commercial - out April....i presume.

Stage diving cows....yes

2011-03-02T12:40:00.000-08:00

In the weeks leading up to christmas I worked on this fun commercial whilst at MPC commercials.
I worked on the lighting and compositing of the CG cow towards the end that runs and leaps into the crowd. The shots were brief but the lighting a challenge due to the complex stage/concert lighting in the shots. It was also a crash course and opportunity to learn MPC's impressive in-house hair and fur tool 'Furtility' and rendering of the groom via 'Tickle' - MPC's inhouse Maya to Renderman translator. Renderman ploughs through the millions upon millions of hairs in no time at all and makes me wonder if I will ever touch Mentalray ever again!

Nike Lunar Shoot

2011-03-02T07:06:00.000-08:00

Just returned from a location shoot for an upcoming Nike commercial. Was a long, tiring day - but the crew was top notch and there was some great lighting setups by DOP Will Bex.
I did the chrome ball thing, explaning it around 10 times to various crew members and gathered extensive set info and HDRI via fisheye. Now the hard work begins for a collaboration between myself (Angry Pixel) and Mike Merron (Analog Studio) on what will have some pretty damn cool VFX. More to come.

2011-02-12T07:23:00.000-08:00

Ive been working over at MPC commercials dept. for past few months and was working on this piece over the Christmas period. Just a couple weeks to put it all together. Pretty simple and easy job this one but was kinda fun to see it come together.

http://www.moving-picture.com/index.php/commercials/1067-south-bank-sky-art-awards.html

New Brekel Kinect/scanner update

2011-02-06T12:52:00.000-08:00

Jasper over at www.brekel.com has just released an update to his already outstanding Kinect software allowing 3d scanning and motioncapture. This update is primarily a big leap in the mo-cap area - allowing data to be hooked up directly in your preferred 3D application and not having to pipe it through Motionbuilder.

I posted a brief video about the 3d scan features using the Kinect a few days ago here:

3D stereoscopic and its epic failure

2011-01-26T14:24:00.000-08:00

A collegue of mine pointed me to this article recently. The uncreative creative directors of advertising should have a good read.....and then celebrate how they managed to sell a load of shit...twice....and at twice the price of a regular movie ticket. Also, its a real pain in the ass for visual effects artists like me to bugger around with stereoscopic stuff.

I actually dont like stereoscopic movies at all. I cant really see anything - it all blurs about and after 5 mins of 'oooooo's - i realise i cant see any of the amazing imagery very clearly. Heres why:

http://blogs.suntimes.com/ebert/2011/01/post_4.html

550D 2,3 and 4k hack/firmware?

2011-01-01T10:55:00.001-08:00

Sadly this claim from nobody, nowhere , USA appears to of turned out to be a big unhilarious hoax....but wow, such a strange one. It would of been an exciting development in image capture technology itself - a possible leap in image aquisition....not just home users wanting a freebie.

Ignoring the perpetraitor himself, im enormously worried about just how utterly stupid and dumb many of the freebie grabbing consumers (including a number of professional users) are. Equally hilarious is how so many people seem to think they can make a feature film if they get a 3k firmware hack.
Errrrm.....you could go buy a Red One camera for 35k and you still wont be able to make a movie guys.
I kinda hope the purpose of this hoax was to illustrate the blindness of consumerism or something as grande' - as we consumers already have some incredible technology at our disposal.
As a Bafta and VES award winning visual effects professional, i deal with totally crap plates, film and technically inferior bitrates on an almost daily basis. But you know what? Its fine. Almost all film and television is no larger than 2k at best. All the commercials ive worked on at shot on Arri film and its over/underexposed or super grainy in a lossless 50mb per frame 16bit DPX. Sometimes the stuff ive shot as reference on a set with my 7D or 550D looks better!!
The 550D is a nice little bit of kit, but do you really think a giant like Canon would distribute such technology with the possibility that it could be 'opened up' into something that could theoretically compete with RED and other cameras that start at 20k plus?
I guess everyone was still slightly drunk from the christmas celebrations.

Moving on to Moving Picture Company

2010-11-15T12:39:00.000-08:00

After 4.5 years at Jellyfish Pictures - I have moved on and joined MPC London as a 3D/FX/Lighting artist. I was sad to leave Jellyfish, having made many good friends, shared many headaches, successes and awards with them.
I shall aways value the time I spent there and the space I was given to develop as an artist in this ever turbulent industry.

I now look forward to the collaborations and late nights at MPC commercials as I get stuck into the propriatary tools and try to make the horrible Maya interface look like the 3Dsmax one....

Render.

Vimeo...finally!

2010-10-19T17:52:00.001-07:00

Around a year after creating an account and coughing up for a 'plus' account, ive finally gotten around to uploading some content to vimeo. Vimeo is fast becoming a prefered platform to view high quality (compression wise) content, so its a great place to stick all the RD and renders/sequences.

Heres my channel. Join/view/like them.

http://vimeo.com/user1310153/videos

Alembic

2010-09-09T02:26:00.000-07:00

From Wikipedia:
'The word "alembic" has taken on a metaphorical meaning, anything that refines or transmutes'

After years of pointcaching and Mark Wilsons ever reliable Pointoven (which i still highly rate) - Alembic looks to be the next step in FX tool 'baking' and simplification of heavy scene setups.
Most caching plugins/options now and/or recently support changing topolgy and point counts...which is extremly cool...and so i would expect Alembic would have this capability and beyond. SuperMesher from Boomerlabs is a recent one that comes to mind.
Its webpage is a little up its own arse.....basically, it appears to be a caching too...a good, efficient one presumably.

http://www.alembic.io/

This is Deep....

2010-08-01T11:59:00.000-07:00

Visual effects for television are good fun to work on due to the variety of different projects and clients you end up working for/with. The problem with television however is that there is so much of the damn stuff, it begins to be self destructive. The demand is so high for new content all the time that budgets continually shrink, yet the expectations of quality and originality climb ever upward.
The area im referring to in particular is visual effects and post of course.
A recent example of something both good and tragic about television is this piece of work:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p0092xyd

The Deep is good and appeals to me firstly because its finally something new/original (putting the obvious Abyss movie comparisons aside) and also because i was involved with creating a pitch for the visual effects a couple years ago. We didnt get the project due to the entirely expected and typical behavior of production picking the cheaper, lowest possible bid by another studio. Perhaps this is all sounding like sourgrapes? Well, maybe just a little - it would of be fun to work on. Its just that it all looks and feels laughably piss poor for a prime time television show and i thought id post up the pitch piece myself and a couple collegues put together in a few days for comparison.

I sat Fabio on an office chair which was sat up on a table with a badly lit screen behind him and a desklamp aiming up at him to suggest illumination from controls or some shit.
I walked around him filming with a 300 quid Sanyo Xacti HDcamera.
I tracked this in Syntheyes, stabilised to remove handheld jitter and then lined up the camera, plate and keyed footage inside 3dsmax. Animator Sam Howe had slapped together a random minisub model in the meantime in Softimage. A few nice shaders and rendered with Brazil RS - with some FumeFX plumes rolling up past camera for some kind of mysterious underwater vent things and we were done.
I had to strip off the sound fx and music.....as the music is copyrighted etc etc etc.

Heres some old shader/lighting tests too.

I guess the studio that did it did their best with the budget and time available to them. Of course they did.....and there lies the tragic, ever repeating error in UK television. 'Ah - those guys are cheaper to create our 75 percent visual effects demanding television show - now we have enough money to cast James Nesbitt.....again'.
Is that guy really that expensive? Or have i got it backwards and with this turning out to be a low budget thing....he was bound to show up.

Film still and I/O data capture on a budget

2010-07-03T04:20:00.000-07:00

Using the 35mm adapter and lossless capture rig, a couple weekends ago we shot some new scenes for our movie and the quality still amazes me when reviewing the recorded footage. The rig itself is starting to get pretty heavy for long use due to all the batteries which allow shooting in remote areas. So i now have a whole shoulder mount with supports to make it easier to run around with. The Nanoflash is simpply astounding and reliable in terms of capture and quality. Here is a frame grab and also a look at the RGB channel data. the Nano is capturing at 23.976 (automatically performing pulldown) and at 4:2:2 YUV. The crispness and cleaness of all channels is a joy to work with in post and grading. Every time we shoot we move closer to attaining a wonderful cinema aesthetic - and all with a camera/adapter and lossless capture solution totalling just a few thousand pounds.
Even the recent DSLR cameras dont come anywhere near as close.
Shot at 24p (23.976) with shutter 1/48th, f5.6 on a 28mm/35mm adapter mounted to an HV40 with live HDMI out into a Nanoflash unit at 180Mbs.

3D map visual effects!

2010-06-26T10:44:00.000-07:00

I just stumbled over this and realised its the most amazing thing ive seen turn up online in a long while. We are truly edging closer and closer to those near realtime, popup, whizzbang graphic representations we all see in scifi movies and fantasise about.....

Truly a remarkable technical achievment.

Even cooler is that we visual effects and matte painting artists have a forever growing technical resource to refer to.

http://www.yell.com/maps/MapAction.do

Turn on 3D at the top right and use the buttoms top left to spin around and up and down.
Awesome.

New releases

2010-05-21T03:18:00.000-07:00

This week has been an exciting week for FX artists, with the release of Nextlimits Realflow 5 and FumeFX 2 from Sitni Sati. I never managed to get ahold of RF5 while in Beta - but i have it up and runnign here at work and its absolutely phenomenal. Im loving the whole new ethos of removing the coding and scripting bullshit and implementing the tools and controllers artists expect....allowing the artists to....make art and not have to trawl lines of python (one of my pet hates). Foam, spray and even mist particle creation is all now included as standard (and scripting allowable additionally on top of this if you wanna be an egotistical show off).
Its an amazing progression and will surely put NextLimit in line for another academy award for technical acheivement.
Fume 2 is pretty much the same - but faster or course and has some amazingly handy new tools/options for adding and faking finer details. Wavelet turbulence and a great retiming system for literally retiming simulations without having to resimulate. Theres also a 'burn' shader option, which allows models/objects vertex colour/weight channel to be painted by the fluid simulation. This means burn makes, ash and general shader interaction. Very cool.
This wkend is going to be sunny and warm apparently - sadly i will miss it, as ill be indoors playing with this new kit. Sad indeed......

bedroom mocap v2 beta

2010-05-11T03:54:00.000-07:00

Ive been getting many great, usuable results fromLuuk Steitner's Zign and the latest release is currently entering beta. The new array of features looks promising, with mulitcamera support, various marker configurations and even the ability to construct custom facial marker layouts.
Im always very interested in motion data aquisition and whether im animating a face or not, i think the data that can be captured through this affordable solution is very powerful indeed.
With a large creature production starting up at work - ive been successfully retargeting motion data to control micro movments on eyes, iris dilations and blinks.
Check out Luuk's demonstration of some of the new features here:

http://www.youtube.com/user/zigncreations#p/a/u/0/ECK3-TQPlyA

R&D

2010-04-24T12:47:00.000-07:00

Work is getting busy with our latest big project, and when i say big - i mean it in more ways than one. Its a big show, for a big client with big things in it and the amount of work is big and the R&D, prep and assets are big.

Im currently in the RD stage, developing shaders, models and techniques in preparation for what will surely be a fun but mountainous project.
Its will be all completly CGI, with no plate photography at all and will have to hold up to full HD resolution scrutiny. So thats a few pixels short of a film pipeline.

Im excited at this stage however and ive been busy building eyeballs, trees, breaking sufaces, gooey stuff and ground shaders so i can prep my render team when they start in July.

I thought 3D VFX was easy and there was a 'make a photoreal explosion button'....said the client

2010-04-21T03:38:00.000-07:00

This gem was circulating the studio emails today and although its hilarious....its oh so true. I never cease to be amazed at just how many people (clients) think it is really done this way, simple and cheap. Making a CGI movie is like making a house...hard work, time consuming, expensive and you have to buy or invent new tools along the way to get it done.
Quite how people who think we make it with photocopiers and pencils manage to get into production pipelines is yet another mystery of the universe

http://www.cgchannel.com/2010/03/what-you-dont-understand-about-3d/

bedroom mocap

2010-04-12T14:06:00.000-07:00

Its always best to be alone and do this sort of thing in private....no...not that....I mean motioncapture. Facial motion capture....especially when you are going to put markers all over your face and make strange expressions whilst shouting out lines such as 'DIE INTERDIMENSIONAL DEMONS!!!'.

Ive been toying with getting decent custom motion capture data for a while now without investing huge amounts of money for data aquisition. Most systems start at 6k - but ive gotten some very useable and stable data from Zign track by Luuk Steitner.

With FaceRobot now built in as standard since Softimage 2010 and after hearing some loose promises from Chinny during an Autodesk visit about further FaceRobot developments - my interest in bringing custom mocap into production without wiping out the wispy television budgets has been re-kindled.

Its not just for doing at work however - I hope to implement it for my own projects and there are a number of shots lined up in ZCK that will require such hard work as a little facial motion capture. Specifically some creature shots towards the end.

Upon successfully tracking and exporting the data - we can bring the TCR data into 3dsmax and use whatever linking or constraining methods we would like to drive an underlying rig.

FaceRobot in Softimage can create very versitile and stable human face rigs, but is currently driven by a specific C3D mocap configuration. Whilst we can still use the TCR null data to drive the FaceRobot rig - there is alot of fiddling and manual constraint work to setup.
Something im very excited about is the upcoming Zigntrack 2 ability to export C3D files directly - which could mean we have an option to drive the rig with facial motion capture data that has been captured in the bedroom with a lamp and a webcam/and/or DV camera.

Im getting great results with the data so far and will be posting up some examples when i can.

camera mapping tutorial

2010-03-20T16:06:00.000-07:00

Camera mapping is nothing new, but i recently got an email practically begging for an explanation on how to blend two DIFFERENT projections together so you can do more than the usual 30 to 40 degree camera move. Strangely - this does seem to be something not covered before....at all. So i put together a 30 min video on how to blend 2 render angles together.
I used this technique on Carbon Footprint, somtimes blending 3 or 4 maps together to save on render times and to ensure there wasnt any GI sampling problems or flickering.

Red ball boy

2010-03-14T18:05:00.000-07:00

I was quite happy how my plasticine shader came out earlier in the week - so i started to develop small, strange scenarios for him to find himself in whilst sitting on the train home.
I knocked up a quick environment for him and started some texture and shader work.
This scene will progress in my spare time and hopefully ill have enough time to animate it.
Hes a practically immobile red blob - so theres plenty of danger i can bring to his front room.....

Rendered with Brazil RS 2.1 and using some displacement on the floor boards. I almost NEVER use displacement and it did add a crazy amount to the render time. Ill turn it off again now.

Julian Rowe's artwork

2010-03-14T10:29:00.000-07:00

Its Sunday, im rendering god knows what here at work - so its time to tout the paintings of my good friend (and technically step father) Julian Rowe.
Julian quit his long term job as a graphic designer last summer to pursue his passion of generous impasto style, textured oil paintings full time. I hear the house stinks of oils and spirits, but he likes it that way. He is currently a featured/resident artist at the artspace gallery in St Ives, Cornwall - the place of my birth and upbringing. CORNWALL!!! Not much down there...but it sure is pretty and a great place to visit. I need to get back down there some time and get some surfing in.

A quick word of thanks to Julian aswell, as i probably wouldnt be in the art/creative business at all if it wasnt for him letting me mess around with his paints while i was growing up. I might of ended up down the bus shelter drinking cider like all the other kids.

Head on over to his website which is hotlinked below along with gallery. Why not drop him a mail or purchase a beautiful original and unique piece of art.
http://www.julian-rowe.com/

http://www.artspace-cornwall.co.uk/gpage1.html

China!

2010-03-09T16:49:00.000-08:00

Ive made alot of posts recently- considering my usual habit of sparse blog updates.

I never cease to be amazed at just how far the little soda can in 'Carbon Footprint' has rolled.
I posted up some making of videos that i had talked about during Siggraph 2008 in LA just a few weeks ago. Its almost 3 years since it was made.
Since posting these - Footprint has again started to be talked about and this time turns up in Chinese VFX site HXSD.

Im not sure what it all says, but chinese collegue Richie Xu here at Jellyfish assures me its all good.
Not sure where that picture of me is from though.....

http://video.hxsd.com/videotopic/100303mattachments/index.html

Plasticine

2010-03-09T10:37:00.000-08:00

I recently read through an article about the lovely work done by MeindBender creating some Cartoon Network spots. Creating surfaces and textures that look malable and pushed around by fingers is a favorite area of mine - whether its clay, plasticine or shiny surfaces with grubby finger marks. Such subtlties add an immense layer of realism to your renders.

http://features.cgsociety.org/story_custom.php?story_id=5493

A number of artists have successfully created plasticine and putty like materials before - though this one stands out more than most due to its humour and great animation....done in Maya i believe.

I was stunned to read that they had spent 6 hours a frame rendering with Maxwell Render 1.7.

6 hours!

Some things take longer than others to render obviously, but for some red blobs in a studio lighting environment, this is clearly the wrong approach and the wrong renderer for the project.
Sure, it looks pretty - but if i told my boss....or even fellow workers that it was gonna be 6 hours until we could see a clean crisp render....well, i dont think i would have a job anymore. I would love to have 6 hours to spend on a frame.

Maxwell is of course an unbiased renderer - meaning its a hands down, brute force physically correct render - respecting the exact information you give it from real world values.
This is great, amazing and gets beautiful results - but im amazed the guys at MeindBender could spare this amount of time to generating the imagery.

As an example and comparison as to this crazy decision to use Maxwell - i created a plasticine material with the Brazil RS inside of 3DSmax. Brazil is an amazingly advanced QMC based renderer - with a powerful balance of quality and speed.
It also comes with its own optimised photometric lights for accurate Kelvin controls etc.

The first render was done in just over two and a half minutes. There are two GI/indirect illumination bounces, two photometric lights with varying temperatures and full, bi-directional sub surface scattering. Oh - and theres also displacement and bump in there, an HDRI reflection map and anti-aliasing/sampling at Min 1 and Max 2.

The second render is exactly the same, except for the sub-surface is turned off. It still looks respectable and we have a considerable time saving. Note the warmth and softness the SSS brings to the first example however - spreading light around inside of the fingerprints and recessed areas.

And ill point out again the render times, as noted on the renders.

Heres a blob with eye balls.

3DSMax 2011 announced

2010-03-09T03:00:00.001-08:00

Some nice features finally added - particularly the node based material tree (previoulsy available but as a third party plugin), Toxik compositing and further Open EXR support/additions.
Its nice to see CAT finally intergrated as standard, though i would still question the sanity of an animator to rig and animate fully in 3dsmax.....though maybe now it will be less painful.
Theres a good rigger/animator here at Jellyfish named Antony Magdalinidis who can do some nice rigs in Softimage and 3DSMax - heres a link to his stuff on Vimeo:

http://vimeo.com/user2261906

The Quicksilver hardware renderer also looks useful - though im not sure just how much. Perhaps good for environmental, point based effects or sprites/particles. If i can do a fast hardware render of a Pflow snow flurry, with camera multimotion blur and DOF enabled - im gonna be happy :)

http://area.autodesk.com/blogs/ken/3ds_max_2011_announced

Maya 2011 has been announced aswell - as has Softimage.....my friend and enemy.....though Softimage is the one currently lacking any images or in depth details as to exactly what has been improved and/or updated.

mud ball boy

2010-03-08T17:30:00.000-08:00

I tend to make alot of characters out of balls - so here is 'mud ball boy'. I think i will try and get him walking along trying to find his purpose....and then drying up in the sunlight. Poor little guy.....he looks sad. He is made of mud afterall.

MentalRay shader again - though im beginning to tweak it and want to get a wet slimy surface - like water is accumulating there. Will be fun to fracture him and run the parts through Pflow/Physx and some fine dusty particle work for when he spends too long in the sun.

Fat Head

2010-03-08T04:11:00.001-08:00

A couple years ago, i remember starting to make a clay/mud man for some project or shot idea i had which was doomed to never be completed or followed through.
I favor the Brazil RS most of the time but began to mess around with MetalRay again after seeing a nice material posting/test render on Jeff Pattons Blog. Recently i noticed 3D artist, sculpter and zbrush guru Ryan Kingslien had referenced this same blog posting and done a great job of recreating the shader in Maya with one of his figure study sculpts. So i dug out my old renders and decided to post them up. I often use Softimage at work, as well as 3DSmax, but I am convinced that MR is Softimage is now truely broken at its core....as i have been unable to recreate/rebuild such a surface inside Softimage that even remotely looks as good as the Max/Maya one. Im not one to give up though and im determined to make it work....and ill post it up here aswell if it ever does.

Renders from 2008 with MR material with 3DSmax. Jeff gives away a lovely tileable fingerprint texture on his blog aswell - but have some fun and make your own! It makes the whole process even more fun.....though it took me a week to get the ink off my fingers....

Busy

2010-03-06T05:24:00.000-08:00

Not a day has gone by over the past month where i havnt been busy and doing 50 things at once. Firstly, and most importantly - CONGRATULATIONS to my best buddy/co-film maker Alex and his girl Katy on announcing their engagment. People who get married are crazy in my book....but beyond my cynicism - i have a soft spot and think its all rather gooey and sweet :)

ZCK is going well and ive nearly completed the plate work/tracking for the opening scenes. Trying to dedicate the time needed to it has been difficult the past few weeks, but myslef and Alex are meeting up again soon to go over the script and arrange the next shoot.

Ive recently gotten in touch with vfx fluids expert Brandon Young, whose fx work i like to follow from time to time. Im prepping for a HUGE vfx project at work and the schedule is tight considering the volume and ambitious shots we will be undertaking. Im looking forward to consulting with him on the practicalities of large scale (time consuming) fluid simulations - ultimately so i can have a realistic/more accurate estimations of just how much of such an effect i might be able to achieve with the rendering team over the course of the upcoming year.

I also returned from a short and much needed break where i went skiing for the first time.
After an hour of hard falls on slushy ice in the kids section of the slope, my girlfriend pushed me the big slope and i found out i could ski on the way down. Its pretty good fun. Though i was thinking about making an HDRI on the way down.....

And the popular website 3Dtotal recently featured the videos i made years ago for Siggraph on their 3dsmax tuturial pages. You can see them on their site or the same series i uploaded to youtube a while ago.

Oh, and im trying to sort out moving into my new, large flat.

Invisible Camera

2010-02-14T12:15:00.000-08:00

Ive finally managed to find some time to work on one of the opening sequence shots - which will need alot of tracking, roto and paint work. The shot itself isnt particularly difficult, it just needs alot of time invested to assemble it all together.
Its one of those continous, disorientanting, seamless mirror shots......the only example springing to mind to be along the lines of the kinda shots Robert Zemickis likes to use from time to time. Conceptually they are quite simple - but need alot of planning and careful timing.
I placed some little tracking markers on the mirror cabinet and timed a move over towards it until the mirror fills frame. These markers will aid the shot to be tracked and another seperate plate inserted into the mirror, which was shot by literally placing the 7D into the bathroom cabinet.
Even though i had set the white balance to compensate for the large amount of tungsten lighting we were using, the shot was still overwhelmingly warm and orange, not helped by the bathrooms yellow walls. Colour timing is usually something you would leave until much later, but i found it a great help to push more cyan into the plates to just make it nicer to look at whilst working.
You could do this a number of ways, but one way i highly recommend is to use the Metadata of Cineform's Firstlight system. This allows you to grade and correct your footage and store this correction as a 'layer' - kinda like an adjustment layer in Photoshop or Aftereffects. Its really powerful and means you can keep all the original data and photography without any additional rendering out of footage.

making of footprint....2 years late

2010-02-07T06:46:00.000-08:00

I managed to get around to uploading some making of videos i made last summer (2009) during the heatwave. For past couple years ive been meaning to upload these. I crudely talked over some videos i took to Siggraph 2008 in LA in......2008....in LA - when we did a talk/presentation about Carbon Footprint and how we made it. Footprint was nominated for Best of Show that year along with work from Framestore and Dreamworks. Not bad for a 2 man VFX team.

Thanks to everyone who came to to the talk at Siggraph and to all those who have emailed and asked about it over the past 24 months. It looked great digitally projected on a 70ft cinema screen aswell :)

Sleep time

2010-01-21T18:07:00.001-08:00

Well well well. Here i am at 2am. We were processing all the footage tonight and it takes bloody ages. Converting all the shots to CINEFORM PROSPECT HD to allow for realtime edit and playback, aswell as 10bit colour grading. CINEFORM is insanely underated and unknown to many - i highly recommend making the investment. Theres even a 4K edition if your feeling ambitious and have a REDONE or ARRI sitting around and feel confident your movie will end up in IMAX.
So much for an early night....though im so knackered from the past few nights of filming and insomnia that i think.....im...gonna.......ZZZZzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

Bathroom part 2

2010-01-20T18:55:00.001-08:00

What the hell - its 3am and here i am again. My old friend insomnia has come to visit me again. My boss even gave me a bottle of Melatonin today. Of course, i bloody forgot and left them on my desk at work. Fear not, earlier i made use of my eternal waking hours by shooting a remaining and important scene for ZCK. Alex put in a great performance as the upset, vomiting protagonist and there was lots of vanilla milk shake vomit all over the bathroom floor.

Here are some stills from tonights shoot with a quick grade applied. Again filmed on 7D with a 24mm Nikon at F3.5 and 400 iso.
These are larger frames at 2.35:1 aspect ratio. Blogspot wont let me post fullsize frames and like to destroy the images with heavy compression artifacts.
Many thanks to good friend and compositor Fabio Zaveti for our disjointed email discussion on how best to make a poor mans cinemascope framesize.

No more coffee tomorrow.

ZCK is underway...

2010-01-19T19:48:00.000-08:00

Its been eleven years since myself and collegue Alex Burton first concieved ZCK (Zombie con Karnie). Eleven years is a long time, but somehow we have managed to keep talking about it all this time and brought it a long way since its humble 10 minute college movie incarnation.
There was a potential 2004 version back in....2004 - but we couldnt find the opportunity to get it off the ground.

Today...well....yesterday - we have finally entered full production...well....kinda of. Its currently work by day and ZCK by night. Its bloody tiring and its almost 4am already.
Many thanks and congratulations to Kevin - who fit the part perfectly for an undead bathtub body and didnt mind sitting in a cold bath for 2 hours. He has the blood spattered honour of being the first zombie cast in our movie.

We shot with the Canon 7D at 400 iso and F3.5 on an 18mm nikon for much needed wides. The bathroom (its a real bathroom) is small and so framing was a pain. A number of shots were tripod and dolly track shots, some mid shots being with a Nikon 50mm, which acts more like an 80mm on the 7D, due to 1.6 cropped sensor. We did some lighting tests months ago for this shoot and found we didnt have enough, but since we are now using the 7D for interiors - i was astounded at the quality we have acheived - then room lit with a couple 60w bulbs and a big 1000w stage spotlight flooding in through the door.

Here are some stills from our current offline footage. A quick colour grade has been applied.
More to come soon.

Oscar winners

2010-01-09T14:26:00.000-08:00

Always good to see the true winners of the coveted Oscar award - these guys developments & achievements you will be taking for granted in 12 months....
Congratualtions to the winners and their excellent research and achievments.

http://www.oscars.org/awards/scitech/winners.html

2010-01-03T08:06:00.000-08:00

Happy New Year!! Its 2010, i still dont have a flying car...and now im 29. Onwards.
Ive spent the last few precious weeks off working on ZCK and designing the title sequence.
Title sequences are something ive always admired and loved watching.....the tension, beauty or grotesque that they convey and reveal. Titles can even make or break a movie sometimes. Ive heard so many countless times that 'white over black' is/was considered a cheap ' we have no budget' way to do titles. I could disagree more - stick on Blade Runner for the first 2 mins. Titles dont often come so extraordinary than that. Ok....so its accompanied by Vangelis. Slight advantage.

Building titles is something i love doing, but also find to be a mountainous struggle. I study each frame and make my life a painstaking back and forth 'frame fucking' from hell. I usually find that its been done before in some form or similar aswell. I think we have cracked it this time though.
With ZCK being a blood spatter zombie movie, Ive opted for the grotesque and intimate title sequence, which Im hoping will make people squirm and squint upon viewing. Early reactions amongst friends and viewers has been positive (lots of 'Oh man thats gross') and so the ZCK titles are done.

It was an interesting journey and i shall post more technical details on how they were done soon, from raw image aquistion, to up-sampling, tracking, grading and realistic film stock emulation
Here are some stills for now....

More 7D and 35mm adapter stuff

2009-11-30T15:59:00.000-08:00

Something else that we have been messing with lately is shooting with anamorphic lenses....think new Star Trek movie but without the blinding, headache inducing lensflares (well...maybe just a couple).
Something that never ceases to amaze me is the resourcefulness of the online communities and forums that you can stumble across every day. So many people have tried whacking alsorts of lenses on the front of their cameras and its great to see all the different results you can get. Theres a slight unstoppable lust to gain the perfect, technically correct aspect ratio....but if thats your thing...thats your thing. Ive gotten hold of a couple anamorphic lenses from ebay and attached them onto the 7D and my custom made 35mm adapter with an HV40 stuck on the end. To my suprise, the 35mm adapter doesnt really suffer to much from vignette or light loss and is actually able to grab a wider image than the 7D. Streamed from the HDMI into my Nanoflash at 4:2:2 - the footage is too good to be true. The 7D does have the advantage of the 1.6 cropped sensor though - and crops out the vignetting brute force.
Another shoot is scheduled for the 12/13th of December and we will be using the anamorphic for a couple external scenes.
It isnt my plan to shoot anamorphic all the time however, especially when we are going to be encountering a wide range of lighting conditions. Our DOP Antonio will get angry if i keep waving that thing around.
Plus is makes vfx and plate tracking slightly more time consuming. Interesting sidenote - this is why alot of pre-digital/older movies were not shot 2.35:1 aspect ratio - as the optics and post processes were often deemed to expensive to do later. A good and noticeable example of this is 'Predator' which is 1.85:1 and features an intentionally squashed 20th Century Fox logo at the start. The squashed logo being done purposefully by the director in protest at not being able to shoot nice and wide.
I think its even mentioned in the directors commentary if i recall correctly.

So a problem arises regarding such things as bokeh. An anamorphic bokeh is....anamorphic. Its squashed lookin' and oval shaped to suck in all that wide angle light. Other lenses are not. They are round or rounded - the blades often visible on the hotspots of out of focus objects...such as a vehicles headlights. This looks great and makes us go ooooooo pretty.....
This means however that we are going to get some inconsistancies in our shots and if your an annoying perfectionist like me, you will want it to match - even though 90% of others havnt noticed anything.

A cheap trick ive been using is to cut an oval/anamorphic shape in a bit of dark card and slot over the lense. Or you can stick it on with some electrical tape. It takes a bit of faffing about to get the size right, but now we have forced any bokeh that may occur with our standard 24mm canon FD 2.8 to appear oval and anamorphic looking. Pretty neat. Its not going to capture any wider stuff - but its an effective and dirt cheap way to match some shots that are goign to be cut together with less visual jarring.

Referring back to HDMI 4:2:2 capture i mentioned earlier - this IS possible on the 7D aswell - but is natively restrictive in terms of resolution. Hooked up to the Nanoflash - we can record out 1920 x 1080 but letterboxed and cropped by around 200 pixels. Damn it we all shout - but its better than nothing and is perfectly usable. The HDMI output is always 60i - as it also is with the HV40 - but the 24p is safely embedded within the stream. Theres nothing wrong with this before you start fretting - 24p has been obtained this way for a long time and looks fine to me.
Recently, i noticed a company called Syndicate have boasting about their 7D setup and 4:2:2 capture tether (and a Nano ive just noticed...though not actually mentioned).
Well....so what - anyone can do this. People have done it for ages tethered into a capture card.
Ive got a Nano and have done this for months with any Hd camera. Even more strangely - they are selling a bit of software at an outrageous price that is basically a 3:2 pulldown removal and auto crop/resizer.
Its not that im skint or anything, but asking 200 euros for something i can do in AfterFX or Nuke or ANY post application in about 3 minutes is taking the piss. Perhaps i missed something important? Just seems to be automated.

The only manual labour you will have to invest in is sometimes looking at the 3:2 stream to see which order it has been captured in. Sometimes you will start with one interlaced frame or perhaps 2 progressive. Once you have worked out the order by just....looking - select/input that setting into your preferred post app and away you go. Now enlarge the plate a little to crop out the crop marks and after grading and film grain emulation, your not gonna notice much loss.
Plus you can spend the 200 euros you just saved on London public transport for a week. What a great deal....maybe not.

Ooops - i do tend to fly off at tangents in these postings - but overall point here being, you dont need to spend money on the very best lenses and little fix it plugins to get the results you want.
Close Encounters of the Third Kind wasnt shot on a Canon EF lense - it was on a lense that is older than i am - looks shit hot to me.

Film progress and a bit of new kit

2009-11-30T15:20:00.000-08:00

Getting back on track - the film project is progressing well and we have added a Canon 7D to the equipment list. You probably know what one of those is by now and if you dont, you have seen one and just didnt know it. A great camera that opens alot of creative doorways and opportunities for film makers. Ive gotten hold of one mainly for interior/lowlight scenes and holy shit does it work well. With some fast glass on the front we can film under a 60watt bulb if needs be - but here lies the danger.
Shit loads of footage and movies from users of these cams (and its big brother, the 5D) are almost always shot by candle light or something. OK - wow - it can see pretty well in the dark, but i havnt watched any classic movies lately that didnt have a lighting setup and DOP controlling what the camera sees. So much of it is utter crap - more tech demos than anything else. Closeups of people smoking or having a drink on the street or sitting on park benches.
Undeniably impressive in terms of image quality- but a fanboys bokeh dream. Some genuine genius has coined the phrase 'bokehke'....as in getting a faceload of the stuff and not really being able to see much else. Lovely. It may of been Stu Maschwitz even - think i read it on his blog maybe. Smart guy. Cool vfx stuff too - though i would say that......
Theres a rather popular chap called Philip Bloom who gets up to all sorts with his rigs and cameras - and if you like bokehke - be sure to check it out. Phil's input and tips and expansive general knowledge is invaluable and he embraced the world of 35mm adapters whilst most of us were graduating with a debt certificate. All this test drive type stuff is essential. I recommend browsing his site/blog. He does a load of training stuff too, though to me camera operation seems pretty simple....but times have changed alot over the last decade and barely anyone i know seems to know what an aperture/stop or shutter speed is. Its all point and click madness. I think ill buy a bottle of stopper to sniff whilst i upload my stills to my computer.....why isnt there a chemical process with digital cameras? ah well.

I wonder if my blog will actually turn up or be read now ive mentioned a couple names.

Speaking of readers - thanks to you guys who have dropped me a line over the past weeks asking various questions and help with VFX stuff. Especially to Aki - stop apologising every damn line. Im nice and always email back :)

Machinarium

2009-10-23T03:30:00.001-07:00

An immense assembly of visual eye candy which somehow pulls you into another world - this game is the most beautiful looking thing Ive ever seen. It also rightly grabbed the Excellence in Visual Arts award at the IGF Awards.

Its not terribly original, cute robot things and scrawled, kooky environments are the penchant of any 3D/2D artists portfolio...but its done so very very well. So well that when the perfect reverb laden soundtrack kicks in - you will be sitting alone in the dark all night playing it until you fall asleep at your desk.

http://machinarium.net/demo/

Countdown

2009-10-01T13:29:00.000-07:00

Barely a week to go until myself and long time collaborate Alex Burton embark upon shooting our feature film. Its been literally 10 years in development hell, through countless preparations, false starts and broken hearts.
Im waiting on a few last parts and accessories for my high end lossless HD camera rig, along with made to order costume for the lead character. I suspect we will have to throw it under a few vehicles to weather it out (the costume not the camera) - but then we are all set to shoot the opening scenes.

We are aiming to shoot in chronological order in an effort to maintain our sanity during what will unavoidably be a rather disjointed shooting schedule. Ill be working on some pretty highend big budget productions at my place of work, Jellyfish Pictures over the coming months, so it will be an interesting discipline to balance them both.

Ill be posting some images of the camera rig ive put together soon for those people who are asking about it.
Ive decided to shoot the bulk of the movie through the Canon HV40, due to its true native 24p capability and 'neater' HDMI out ports. The Xacti 2000 will be used for 60p shoots at higher shutter speeds such as 1/120 for slomo sequences - though we have realised there wont be as much of that stuff as we first thought. Ive done some very successful vector retiming tests with 60p shot at 1/2000 shutter speeds - which allows a pretty damn good, fluid slow down to almost 300fps. There are a few limitations and requirments to make this work well and ill post some details about that stuff soon.
I also did some lowlight performance tests with the Nanoflash capture a few nights ago and the results are stunning...for a geek anyways. Considering this movie is shot on a sensor or 1/2.5 - a full HD frame looks incredible direct from the sensor at 140mb data rate.

11th October we begin screentests and bring a long and dedicated development journey to an end.

Legit software and the unspoken consequences

2009-09-27T08:53:00.000-07:00

Software piracy is everywhere. Ive lost count of how many studios and freelancers that rake in the cash without spending a penny. Well thats just fine and good luck with that. I wont name you because thats just mean. Admittedly Ive done it too and if anyone tells you they havnt in this industry, you can safely tell them they are full of bullshit.

The developers and retailers can chase the pirates - and rightly so, but without wading into a massive debate about it....there is another much more serious underlying problem that isnt mentioned much.
In fact, its happening to me right now...which is why im wasting time on this blog.

Ive got legit software. I use and like to use legal licensed software. I know how much time goes into making these amazing tools. I have more than i realised actually cos' i just checked. More than a few places where ive worked in fact. Yeh, that pisses me off - but not as much as the fact that even when you have purchased legit, legal, licensed software....YOU CANT FUCKING DO ANYTHING WITH IT for literally days until the developer guys can bother to check the emails and issue response codes/serials etc.
Those torrents are looking so very tempting to me at the moment. Im currently waiting on no less than three developers to send me some registration and activation codes. Ive been waiting since Friday.
Well, well - it looks like i wont meet the deadline i have for tomorrow. Great, thanks chaps. How about I install that crack so i can use it immediatly and get the work done.

Of course, I must be polite and professional in emails and correspondance to these people - but come on guys, ive just given you cash for your product and im still fucking waiting for it. We dont wonder into department stores, hand over money and leave empty handed do we? If you are wanting me to pay for your hard work, you have to be prepared to make sure i can use it. I dont care if its your bedtime. Yes thats right - alot of other people work weekends and Im one of them.

Well, its not all bad. Many companies are simply excellent with support, problem solving and customer service. Orbaz - makers of Pflow particle boxes are simply excellent and whether it day or night, i have my problems addressed and resolved. Splutterfish (Brazil RS developers) are also superb and effiecient with dealing with customer concerns, questions and most importantly.....getting you up and running.

So there is every 3D artists dilemma. Its also a damned good valid point to bring up when piracy prevention squads start eyeing you up.

" Er yes....im running cracks....im still waiting for my purchased license to arrive and couldnt afford to sit here for days waiting and doing nothing.
Fuck off. Oh look my codes have just arrived...literally moments after i told you that. Amazing. Oh...er yes...sorry about the language. Hey look...the official, legal activation process has encountered an error and so it still doesnt work.
Fuck off. "

Shooting a short film with new camera rig

2009-09-03T08:37:00.000-07:00

The last weekend/bank holiday of August was spent on a shoot in the middle of nowhere, Norfolk.
Flatmate, chum and fellow VFX artist and film maker Paul Cousins had been trying to organize a shoot for months and we finally managed to align schedules.
Its a short haunting/spooky movie kinda thing involving one man and his metal detector. It was also a great field test for my camera system and just browsing through the raw movie files has been exciting. Its working great and emulates film extremely well - the focus screen emulating a film back and colour recording is stunning. Not bad for a system that cost only 3-4k to set up. Frames/stills from this look better in colour and quality than cameras that cost 10 times as much!

There is a fair bit of relatively simple post processing to do - mainly to convert the 60i to 23.976 fps.
This works great even when piped through AfterFX, though there are many factors to obtain/complete that 'film look'. Ive read and learnt a lot from the forums over at www.RebelsGuide.com and reading up on tips and ideas from Orphanage co-founder Stu Maschwitz. This kinda info is 50/50 most of the time though. Just because it works for someone on their project, doesnt mean its going to work on yours. The best way to figure it out is to learn your equipment and learn it well.

I wont go any deeper into that stuff - as it is all widely available and discussed and argued about in this forums and countless others. Ideally - you should just shoot native 24p - its becoming more and more widely available in consumer level video cameras. I choose to shoot 60i for now though because i don't want to go out and buy another camera, just for that straight 24p function when the camera i have works fine and has other additional functions I like to utilize as well.

This was a great chance to try out the rig and it brings myself and colleague Alex Burton some encouragement and excitement as we approach a shoot schedule for our upcoming feature.
I haven't mentioned that much yet have I? All will be revealed in time.

Amalgamating a highend HD camera

2009-08-24T16:47:00.000-07:00

Ive never, ever been satisfied with the video quality available to low/non-budget film makers and it seems you cant really get anything that is even close to the quaility of a scanned negative without investing a shit load of money. Even with the introduction of the affordable (er, not really) RED cameras a number of months ago and its upcoming family of camera variations - unless you have a spare 50k clogging up your bank account, the implications of investing in one of these monsters to shoot your film with is gonna involve going bankrupt, getting depressed and eating from tins for the next 10 years.

Generally, the quality you are gonna get from cameras in the price range of 250 to 5000 are going to be pretty similar....and pretty shit. Ive always been puzzled over this broad price range as generally, you really cant tell the difference between what was shot on a camera that cost under 1k and a camera that cost 5 times that. I have a 300 GBP Sanyo Xacti and my flatmate has a 3k Sony V1. The Xacti is superior in resolution and quality in 75 percent of shooting situations.
The only difference most of the time is the lense. The more expensive the camera, the larger the lense.....but this doesnt solve my problem; the problem of image quality.
All this video we are shooting is being compressed. HEAVILY. Whether its HDV or H264 - the internal workings of your camera is squeezing the data until it all kinda mixes together and looks utterly shit.
This is fine if you are just gonna film your kids eating sweets until they vomit or your dog eating another dog's poop. But to the more trained eye, such important moments are ruined.
This is a great shame, as consumer level cameras are increasingly featuring some extremely cool features...such as the SANYO XACTI HD2000. This thing can shoot 60p....yes, full 60 progressive frames per second. Thats what a Sony Varicam does....and they start at 20k!!
Problem is - its compressed with H264 and made into an MP4 movie. Plus you are shooting through a rather unimpressive lens.

To over come the lense and infinite focus problem of crappy small cameras - you can get yourself a DOF adapter...more commonly known as a 35mm adapter. These are a great bit of kit and enable you to shoot/film with 35mm lenses on your little handheld camera. There is alot of reference and various models/manufacturers for such devices and i highly recommend looking some up. I bought one from Ebay with a rod support set (to stop its weight ripping the small thread from the front of my camera) and the difference it makes it astounding.
Now i can pull focus and use a quality lens (in my case Nikons') and admire the beautiful film like bokeh now acheivable. This is an important asthetic element of shooting for a 'film look', but im still not going to get a high quality output.

Alot of people have been investigating 'live' feeds from their low end camera. Methods of streaming the video data out live and directly into a computer for capture. Using ports such as an HDMI output on your camera connected up to your PC/MAC or laptop is a great solution, as you are effectively 'stealing' the unprocessed images directly from your cameras sensor chip/s before your cheapy camera has the chance to process and compress it.
Problem is - this isnt exacly portable. Ive seen some guys come up with a few more portable options, such as a laptop with an external PCI drive that contains an HDMI capable capture card, all runnign from a portable battery supply. This works, but its still pretty cumbersome and ultimatly impractical to carry around whilst remaining flexible on a shoot. What if you need to sprint down the street after a zombie or something? Ain't gonna happen with a laptop on your back.

Ive spent the last 6 months researching and constructing my own small camera rig to overcome this output quality problem. Using the Sanyo Xacti 1010 and more recent model HD2000 (60p capable), ive gathered bits and parts from all over the internet and invested in the recently released NANOFLASH from Convergent Design. The Xactis' are powerful and overlooked consumer level cameras with a suprisingly good low light performance and good shutter controls. The NANOFLASH is currently the worlds smallest HD solidstate (SD) recorded and can record/dump live HDMI data directly to highspeed compact flash cards at huge data rates. Huge data rates mean higher quality....near lossless infact, which is essential to high motion scenes and motion blur.
The data rate of the Xacti alone is 19mbps...which isnt bad considering the maximum for H264 compression is 24mbps. Streaming out to the NANOFLASH yields superior results however - with data rates from 100mbps and upwards in both Long GOP or Intra Frame.

The overall size of this setup is far more portable and practical and i can even easily fit it to my Flycam rig. The SD unit is powered by a D-tap battery and so i can be completly free of wire connections and plugs.

The total cost of this setup? Around 3000 GBP. Ok, its not entirely cheap - but its not completly unaffordable either. Its also far superior in image quality to that of camera systems in the same price range. By streaming out live HDMI to a small portable unit, I can have full master, negative scan quality frame capture - all stored to CF cards. Complete camera setups in this kind of price range offer nowhere near the same image quality - the Sony EX1 (average price around 3k) compresses video to 35mbps. Why invest such large amounts of money in a highend camera when you can simply utilise the shutter speeds of a much cheaper consumer level camera fitted with a 35mm adapter and output directly to disc at a near lossless master quality?

There will always be a form of elitism assoicated with camera users and their camera units value - but increasingly with all related forms of digital imaging technology - the price does NOT reflect the quality.

Heres my setup and some description.

Revolutionary?

2009-08-20T16:58:00.000-07:00

So here it is - James Camerons titan (ic) of a scifi movie was unvieled in early trailer form today. I was genuinely hyped about this movie and I think everyone in this industry knew someone or had friends working on it somewhere. But oh dear - I just cant help but think that it looks completly shit. Its horrible. I found myself laughing when first seeing the rather funky looking tall blue monkey cat people with dreads. Im sure ive seen people who actually look like this - standing around on the corner of tottenham Court road at 2am trying to sell me some charlie....
I thought i was laughing in excitment at first....but alas, it was disbelief. I heard people claiming this was going to change the face of cinema...be the next evolutionary step in film and story telling entertainment. Well, ok - it was online...compressed and not in 3D - im sure in 3D it will have its moments - but overall....i was overwhelmingly underwhelmed.

We’ve all been exhaustingly told that Avatar could not be done without the technology to render emotional expression on faces of the Na’vi. The story wouldn’t work without that tech, because we wouldn’t believe it. And no, I don’t quite believe that Avatar is actually about a race of giant elves or shaved Thundercats. Undeniable effort went into animating the Na’vi, who do look good in a few scenes renderwise, but nothing I’ve seen so far earns my interest, much less my sympathy. The design doesn’t bridge the uncanny valley; it lives deep within it, and i found myself making faces and scrunching my nose around as if attempting to make my face look like that of the blue cosplay people.
The photo-real CGI isn’t there, and to make the Na’vi fit into the world with real humans, everything appears to have been saturated and be as visually overpacked as a supermarket shopping aisle.

This looks like a 13 year old boys wet dream....creatures, guns, soldiers, robots and humanising the female alien just enough to look a bit sexy; and even have her pert boobs out. Ill be keeping an eye out for the bikini clad poster version used to sell school kids stationary very soon.
Looks like they speak english with an american accent too.
Im going to bed.

2009-08-12T16:41:00.000-07:00

April 2009 - Almost 2 years on and Carbon Footprint continues to win awards including another Promax and a Clio award. Its great, but slightly depressing - as no interesting projects have come up since. A horrible combination of the worlds economic climate and a 7 month slog on one of the most completely shit and unimaginably bad projects that no one wanted to work on. Cant name it of course, but we've all had at least one of those....now i gotta try and recover all this lost time. What day is it....what year?

Febuary 2009 - Carbon Footprint finds appreciation on the other side of the world at the Japan Media Festival, winning an excellence award in the media and entertainment categorie. Compositor Fabio Zaveti and myself were flown out to Tokyo, courtesy of the Festival to attend the awards and drink way to much saki. A big thank you to our hosts and all the new friends we made whilst slurping noodles in late night Roppongi.....and yes, Toyko is awesome.

August 2008 - Carbon Footprint is nominated for Best of show at Siggraph. Myself, Fabio Zaveti and Stefano Salvini hung around LA and tried to find somewhere that served something that resembled food for most of the week.
Met alot of cool guys and a load of ego maniacs in equal measure. Sure, this kinda work is cool - but it aint cool enough to warrant the hilariously cringeworthy Blur party. Im sure Carmen Electra loved all the nerds learing at her. Softimage party had Vanilla Ice......and i cant possibly find any explanation for that one. Its an LA thing i guess....
Many thanks to all who attended my talks and presentations at Siggraph 2008. Thanks to Softimage for making my brief demo look so cool on that huge exibition screen and thanks to Barbora, Jill, Sam and so many others who made the event such a memorable and technological experience. It truely was an honour to be nominated for best of show along with some of the finest visual FX and animation work from the past 12 months. That 70ft digital projection screen was nothing but insanity....and it looked sweet.

May 2008

'Fight for Life' wins the BAFTA craft award for best visual effects. Congratulations to the Jellyfish Pictures team. Awards were at the Dorchester Hotel and all the tables had some really horrible decorations. Food was good though, and a Bafta is quite heavy...not as heavy as the VES though.
Pictures from the night can be viewed HERE.

April 2008 - 'Carbon Footprint' wins GOLD at Promax BDA Europe 2008 for best Sting/Interstitial.
Great, but im kinda eager to do something new.

FEBRUARY 2008

Fight for Life wins the VES award for outstanding visual effects in a broadcast series. I attended the awards in Hollywood to collect the award along with VFX supervisor Phil Dobree and fellow lead TD Marco Iozzi. Congratulations to all the team at Jellyfish!! Pictures from the evening are HERE.
I also declare im single and interested in Megan Fox in my acceptance speech, but alas - get no more than a small wave from her back stage. But its ok, i do actually have a girlfriend and just wanted to say something funny. The award trophy is rather heavy and i had fun trying to get it through customs at LAX.

Stash no. 40 and 3DWorld magazine feature 'Carbon Footprint' following its official release by Discovery Channel EMEA just before Christmas. Im feeling good that its been so well recieved and i get a flurry of emails from students (and one studio) asking if they can have the project to 'learn' from. Err.....no.

NOVEMBER 2007

Jellyfish wins an RTS Royal Television Society award for outstanding visual effect for 'Fight for Life'.
Even though we were all sick to death of creating macrophages and babies....we were all rather happy that the hard work had been noted.

SEPTEMBER 2007

Visual effects short 'Carbon Footprint' is completed and i become very very ill from 6 weeks of 18 hour days, 7 days a week. Its amazing what you can do when you dont sleep though. I meet compositor Fabio Zaveti whilst working on the project and the two of us pull it off and eat a huge amount of Thai food in the process. In London and want Thai? Go to Thai Cottage and say Mr Jellyfish sent you....

JULY 2007

After working a full year on BBC 'Fight for Life' - Ive accepted a full time postion at visual effects studio JellyFish Pictures as TD and Lead visual fx artist.

2009-08-12T15:54:00.000-07:00

And so here is the first blog posting - literally years behind when i probably should of made one.
I never liked the word 'blog' as it sounds so utterly shit, but unfortunetly its stuck around and everyone appears to know....or even if they dont really...still claim to know what it is/means.
I dont really know what it means, but im sure there are many megabytes of space taken up somewhere explaining what it is. What a waste.

Anyway -
Many thanks to all the people that have taken an interest in my work and sent nice emails (some of them slightly strange emails) over the past couple years. Its great to keep in touch with people and share ideas, workflows and hear that someone likes your work after seeing it on TV.
So heres a blog.....my blog...yes that word that sounds like it should be used to describe some sort of luxurious toilet seat after a morbidly obese man has sat on it.

Ive a shit load of back dated stuff to upload before i get to the new recent and potentially exciting stuff....so id best get to it.