I have been playing with Solid Angle's Arnold renderer and I can honestly say it is the best experience I have had with CG rendering. It is simple in it's settings approach in that it grounds you to a sample count in only 4 areas, AA, Glossy, Refraction and Diffuse. In short it means there is a LOT LESS time spent wasting time trying to find the magical render time saver leaving you with tons of time to spend just making a beautiful image. The image below has about 5 hours of work put into it and took 10 minutes to render out a few color passes and an AO.
A few months ago I completed a few elements for my demo reel and one of them was a Candle with smoke coming from behind and flowing across the ground. I have since then made the smoke a lot better and you can see it below.
I have also started playing around with realflow and below you can see some of the stuff I am made with it.
Here is some destruction stuff I've made with Maya 2012 and DMM.
I'm currently working on a personal project that I hope will open up a new avenue in my career adventure. This is not the first part of my project but rather the only part I I'd like to share at this time. There are several elements from all over being put together to make something that I think will be fun and enjoyable. Anyways a render is posted below for you viewing pleasure.
He is the main character from the indie hit Super Meat Boy. He has about 2.5 hours of work on him at this point from a box primitive to the lit render you see above. Hand is a bit crude I know buttt I got a little excited to jump on this aspect of the project after seeing the "Indie Game: The Movie" at a friend's house.
I am very excited about this current project and it'll be the biggest thing I'll have started/hopefully completed in my personal career to date.
Hey guys. I have been quite busy over the past 3 months and I'd like to finally share with you what I have created but first a story... As you may already know I have been working in Louisiana at a small company and my girlfriend in Dallas and we had been doing a long distance relationship that was starting to rapidly fall apart as we entered the 2nd year... Something needed to be done if we were going to keep it going and so we worked on moving towards each other and a few events fell into place or really apart at the time that made it actually happen. So in January of 2012 I moved out to Dallas to be with her. I can honestly say it has been one of the most rewarding and happiest moments in my life being with her and waking up in her arms every morning. There are things that I wish had happened differently or not at all but shit happens to the best and worst of us. Anyways enough of the mushy crap! I went hard to work on my demo reel and I think I have come a long way. Below is a collection of the works that I have completed in the last 2 months!
This is a WIP piece of an ArchViz scene.
I wanted to do a piece with a character so this is what I came up with. Character modeled by Elise Hatheway. http://elisehatheway.blogspot.com/
I wanted to do something with water cause it's kind of the first thing I created years ago when I first started playing with CG.
This is my latest project it's only about a week old but I wanted to do something with fluids cause they're super fun. I also wanted to do something with SSS cause it's also super fun!
Howdy. I have been busy with getting my reel actually completed... It's coming along pretty well. I've hit a few walls in the past week or so and I have 4 assets going at the moment. I want to post my progress but I don't want to showing anything 1/2 finished... With that being said I DO wish to share THIS piece because Elise has been helping me greatly on it! Look at the grungy texture job on the poster! She also modeled the character in the scene! She's amazing I love her! Anyways have a look at the preview render below. Textures on the character are not connected yet!
I added a bit of DOF to it. The artifacting will be cleaned up in post with proper layering!
Check this out. I finished the poker table project... It's not really finished I don't just want to work on it cause it's crappy lighting, terrible filming and ugly composition. So whammy right?
Hmmm well it's been a while and there's just too much to go through so I'll give you the highlight reel.
Had a job with Turbosquid.com as a support agent for the most part of last year. It was a pretty good job with quite a few people I will never forget. Good times indeed but of course it wasn't in film... So I had to get back to working on my reel. I Was doing small little things here and there like the ones you see on earlier blog posts when an opportunity presented itself. A coworker's brother was opening a studio down here in Louisiana and I had to be involved. Make things short I got the job and have been at this new VFX company since late November early December. It's called Bayou FX and it's definitely what I was looking for. Unfortunately I can't show any final pieces of work but I have been given permission to show how I got it done via my NUKE scripts. Soooooooo yeah... that's all... Long story right?
So here is the final for the project I was working on in the last 2 posts.
I know I initially wanted to have a good composition but I'd have to roto/paint out all of the cables, tripods and window reflections to achieve that. The footage was initially shot as a test so I didn't take that information into account and I should have. I think the composite came out well though so not all negatives right?
I've decided to put up a fill frame for you guys to get a more clear idea on what I am working on exactly. Short post I know but its Part 2... When has there ever been a good sequel?
Frame 57 now with playing card and specular highlights... yay...
I have been working on a bunch of new stuff all compositing related. I know its been a while since I've posted but hey who reads this crap anyway right? So the goal is to get some new animated stuff out there composited with live action footage shot with the EX1. I've got some filming planned out at an industrial site where a bridge near by was built years ago and I have some shots I've done in the house just for simple things. I'll post a little render on what I'm working but no composites yet... Don't wanna ruin the fun too too much... Anyways take a look below.
Just the CG plate ;) no footage comped for this post. Probably next time though!
YES! I have something to post about... I've been working on a few HDRI studio domes for a friend back at school and I made a few different ones. He needed something to use to show off his car models and I figured I could help him out a bit. They're not completely finished but the renders aren't going to change much with the test scene I created so I'll just post the renders made with them below. I'll probably share the HDRI's as well. Just ask for them.
Check it out, its an attic... I haven't posted something in a while so I decided to show you this since its part of a larger project but I can't tell you what it is cause its not finished yet. And yes I know its not fully textured...
Hey so I was trying some new things out I haven't really touched yet in CG and DOF came to mind so I decided to give it a go. I tried several different things out first like DOF nodes out of maya renderer and DOF nodes out of Mental Ray but I don't really want to sit here for years while they render out SO I decided to give z depth a chance. I found several different articles and tutorials on it and probably 18 miles worth of threads on CGTalk so I knew the material was there for me to learn I just needed to apply it. I decided to go with the crappy way of doing it... I setup a ramp with a projection map and made a separate render layer so I could gain more control over my depth of field. I know this isn't the right way of doing it but it was the fastest and allowed for more control so I didn't have to do a whole lot of nonsense compositing for animated DOF and focal point shifting. Ill be posting 2 renders along with an animation I put together with what Ive cooked up in Maya and Nuke. I know the DOF animation isn't realistic it's just there to prove I understand the concept and make Robert laugh at me.
I wish I could post my photos in the correct order but whatever this one is the z depth composite that took 1 minute to render the beauty pass, 5 seconds to render the z depth pass and like no seconds to render the composite out of nuke.
This is the mia_lens_bokeh render that took like hmm 20+ hours to render and theres STILL crap on the lens (noise).
Its been a while but I've also been really busy. I took a leave of absence from school for a few months for financial reasons and I've headed back to Louisiana but I've taken advantage of the free time and have been hard a work learning and expanding my portfolio. I have decided to put away the project I had posted about in my last blog post because I didn't feel I was ready to take on such a complex project all on my own. I scaled my focus down a bit and it has really paid off. Sometimes simplifying something makes all the difference. My current ArchViz project consists of a simple square room with some furniture, windows, rug, etc. I'm hoping to add motion with the window curtains so I can fit it into the theme I have come up with for my reel. I want to evoke an emotion and a feeling with the works that goes beyond just a simple "good job". I want to eventually do three scenes, the one I just mentioned, another in the UK during WWII in the 1930's, and finish with the project I had mentioned last post.
Ill post below some of the things I've been working on and the renders of the room I mentioned in this post.
Alright its been super busy lately at school!! So that's why I've been vacant from my blog... last month I had motion capture and art creation for games. The motion capture project was probably the best project I have had at school. We were instructed to get into groups and assign each other jobs in the production pipeline. I was of coarse the shading and lighting artist. In the end our final did not come as expected but it was completed and turned in on time...
Even though I don't find myself working in the game industry the art creation for game course really was helpful. The instructor really knew his stuff and there were MANY tips in tricks in all areas of computer animation that he passed onto us.
After last month our class was split into two classes, one game art and the other computer animation. This made it more apparent to us that the end is near and we should start thinking about our reels and our areas of focus. SO I decided to get to work on some of the things I want to demonstrate on my reel. i have been modeling and lighting a ArchViz project. I am using reference from the August 2009 Architectural Digest Magazine. The article was about an architect that developed a gorgeous home in Hong Kong. I am not following it exactly but there are many factors I'm trying to preserve. I will provide some early renders below. Enjoy.
Sorry I haven't posted in a while but I've been busy with the new classes this month. Were taking art creation for games and motion capture right now. It's a pretty exciting month because we actually get to use the motion capture system at school! Our final consists of a 4 person group project. Our group is doing a zombie-ish short trailer. We have to record an actor in the suit (student in class), clean up the raw mocap data, model shade and light the environment, layer animate the mocap animation and render it out. Our group got a bit of a head start because we really want to make a good looking piece of work. Ill share some early renders below. I wish I could go all out on this project but due to time constraints I'm stuck with short render time being my main priority and quality falling second in line... All's well though I still think it'll be better than most I've seen... hopefully...
I know there a bunch of unfinished items in this render but I wanted to at least give you an idea of what were shooting for... The texture on the walls is not tiled properly and the back area beyond the ally needs more going on... I also plan on placing a manhole in the scene.
