Patrick's VFX Blog

Last night I uploaded showreels from 5 more movies I worked on. I received them shortly after I came back from London. In chronological order, latest to the earliest: Captain America: The First Avenger - matchmove co-lead, body track, lighting, modeling, lookDev Paul - matchmove, proxy construction from plates The Sorcerer's apprentice - matchmove lead, object track, proxy prop rigging, scripting Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time - matchmove Sherlock Holmes - matchmove

I was given time off from work today to attend a software demonstration on Maya and XSI workflow. Initially I thought I would not be able to spare the time to go, because of my commitment to the schedule at work. At the last minute I asked Darryl my producer who told me to go for it. At lunch time I left work with William, Nizhen, and Mengdi. After having lunch at Bak Kut Teh across Clarke Quay Central, we went to ACA Pacific's office just across the road. The demonstration was held in one of their training rooms. My former classmate from CG Protege, Edward, was the demo artist who did the Maya 2012 part of the demonstration. He showed HIK (Human IK), camera sequencer and Softimage XSI's interoperability with Maya and Max. Some parts of the Maya 2012 demonstrations in points: Human IK - Human IK provides an automatic rig that is very close to look and functionality of Motion Builder. - Easy and familiar for animators using Motion Builder. - Once character is...

The title of this post is the same as the title from the article I just read ( http://www.gamedev.net/page/resources/_/business/should-working-in-games-be-more-fun-r866 ) from gamedev.net . It is written by Francois Dominic Laramee. Francois seems to be a very experienced developer who has worked in small start-ups and huge international company, in private sectors and government sectors to educational sectors, and, inside and outside of games industry. What he writes is the reality and the state of the industry. This should be what a games developer should expect when entering the industry. It seems that there is a lot of hype by the media and general public about games developing. They make it sound fun, and makes people wanna come in and be part of the team that develops games, and have some fun doing the job. Francois does mention about the film industry having the same kinds of demand on the labour and hours involved to achieve the quality that can go on sc...

I recently come across this website  http://lesterbanks.com/  that does a lot of useful and amazing tutorials for loads of major 3D packages and compositing software.  They even have an online store where you can order hilarious CG and geeky software related taglines that only fellow geeks can understand.  I really wish I had the time to go through all the tutorials. I am just browsing and I am already seeing very useful tutorials that I would like to watch NOW! But... my wife is in London for holiday and I'm loaded with things to prepare for my return trip back home to Singapore.

What a big surprise! I opened up my email and I saw a receipt from Image-Line software, makers of FL Studio.  I went into the contest forum thread , and I found that I won the 2nd prize! First prize by AndrAKondrA had 167 votes, winning 25% of all the votes: This image is from the forum where there was a button to click to vote ;) 2nd prize was my entry, scoring a 148 votes, winning 22% if all votes: This image is from the forum where there was a button to click to vote ;) The entry by gamecat666. It won 3rd prize with 111 votes, bagging 17% of all votes: Winning the 2nd prize in this contest means I would receive 300 IL Virtual Cash. 1st prize wins 500 IL Virtual Cash and 3rd prize wins 100 IL Virtual Cash. There were comments on the voting page that 3D renders are more eye catching on computer displays and more likely to attract voter's attention. However the concept and layout/composition may not be the best in the context of a t-shirt desi...

Rendered in Mental Ray again, using a bokeh samples value of 32. Applying the reflected glow test from a previous post, I applied a Mental Ray mia shader which enabled the glow on the cable to be reflected on the ground. Compare this with the previous post and you will see the glow is clearly reflected on the ground. This gives a more realistic look. This took 4 hours and 31 minutes to render for 2000x1300 pixels. Much better than the render in the previous post, which took 7 hours with 64 samples in the Bokeh node.

I began toying with Mental Ray's bokeh phyiscal lens shader and tried this on my headphones scene, rendering at 2k, at 60 samples on the bokeh node. The image rendered for 7 hours 20 minutes!! (I left it to render overnight, so I dont know if this included the calculation time for the final gathering stage).