Patrick's VFX Blog

Here's a project that I was involved in, in my personal time. It's Resort World Sentosa's publicity for their Halloween event. I helped out in a single key shot shot where crows fly out of the mummy's mouth (in the end they I think they kind of looked like flesh coloured bats). I matched the camera perspective and movement, then I matched the movement of the mummy's head and mouth. I also had to match the torch light for illumination and shadow casting. There actually is a handheld light torch light in the scene. My partner then refined a provided model of the crow, rigged and then animated them flying. The original shot was much longer than the final one, and it looks like it was sped up. Therefore there was a lot of camera, face matching and torch matching work that went into it that did not show in the final shot. In many cases this is the nature of the job. This is considered a nightmare in a matchmove artist's dreams. Firstly, there were no geometry...

This is the first of a series of tutorial I am going to be creating. In this first series I will be showing particle emitters. This video starts with 3D Studio Max's snow emitter. Since I started teaching visual effects in the capacity of VFX consultant 2 months  ago, I am faced with the repeated need to reiterate how to use certain features of the software because students could not remember, and needed to be reminded. So I decided to keep a collection of tutorials that students (and myself) can revise to.

Codecademy has just come up with a new scripting course for the Python language . Python is very prevalent in the software and application circle as a prototyping and a scripting language especially. Python's syntax is very similar to English. This makes it very easy for beginners of programming to pick up the language, as well as concepts that are important to programming. The object oriented nature of the language also ensure's its relevance to modern coding practices and paradigms. Many major 3D and compositing software package have scripting capabilities, and Python has almost become a universally common language amongst them. Some of these applications are: Autodesk Maya , Next Limit Realflow , Sidefx Houdini , The Foundry Nuke , etc. I wrote about Codecademy in a previous blog post , when I was going through the Javascript course . Frankly I have not really finished that one, mainly due to the fact that I had to shelf a webpage project that I thought could m...

 Scott Squires  http://effectscorner.blogspot.sg/2012/07/why-do-visual-effects-costs-so-much.html This post really paints an accurate picture of the VFX industry. I am shocked and disappointed that the huge extra miles of effort/time/money spent on the effects made invisible is also invisible to the director who should be the first person with intimate knowledge about how much work and man-hours get put into his shots, including those shots that get omitted due to editorial and storytelling decisions. If the director doesn't get an accurate picture, then I cannot set high expections that anybody else in the studio-side pipeline to really understand the true value that vfx has contributed to the film. Special features and behind-the-scene footage that come with DVD releases show only a tiny part of the volume of work that thousands VFX artists have to deal with on a daily basis, for many months from start to end of production. Even this cannot adequately describe t...

Lots of my friends went to watch the film over the past few days and snapped some imags from the credits roll (please forgive them for snapping images off the screen, since its not from scenes from the actual film).  There were a lot more people who poured out hours of extra work and effort to make this film the success it is. Credit rolls never adequately list out the full strength of all the people involved. My name is one of those not on the list. I was putting in the extra hours on the work and arriving at the office and hour or two every day for 3 months. I did it for the love of my craft, and because I knew it was going to be an awesome film. My work involved touching up and refining the model of the Bat and the Batpod for lower-polygon requirements. 

After watching everybody's hard work on the show, its finally finished and going to be shown in theatres! I'll be watching it in GV Max (Singapore of course) tomorrow :) The film was so fully booked that I could only squeeze myself into the fifth row from the screen. Well, closer is better I guess. I'll be able to appreciate how huge the screen is. Huge screen == more awesomeness! I have only worked on the project for about 4 months but it was a hard and intense period of rushing. I will definitely be proud of the work and effort from everybody working on the film when I sit there watching it tomorrow. It will be epic! Scouring the internet for pictures and video trailers and snippets, I found an awesome article from www.eonline.com  that had 5 video clips interviewing actors like Christian Bale, Anne Hathaway, Michael Caine and Morgan Freeman and Tom Hardy. Here are some posters and shots of the movie I managed to find online, just to get myself excited :) All...

Modelled and rendered in Maya with Mental Ray I have been modelling Lego bricks in Maya. This is part of an my involvement at an attempt in the CG Society's FXWars challenge with a few colleagues. This month's theme is BrickWars , where we have to do some simulation of Lego bricks. This render was done with Mental Ray in Maya. The shaders were all Maya's default Blinn shader. On top  of Global Illumination & Final Gather, I had a MR bokeh lens shader going on. Building a simple Lego brick isn't simple at all. We can all quickly come up with a decent shape, or so I think. After I made a simple 2x4 brick, I started making 2x8, 2x16. After all that, I started stacking them together. This was when I got a shock. The border of each brick ate into the next teeth. I got geometrical intersection. This is totally unacceptable, especially when we are going to prepare it for simulation. I had to redo the whole brick from scratch. This time, I started by...