Patrick's VFX Blog

Great to be able to witness part of the workflow, and amazing team of many people working in collaboration to make this movie happen. This is really good stuff!

John Carter Costume FX Reel 2012 from Patrick Woo on Vimeo . Costume FX included simulation of accessories (bangles, rings, necklaces, etc), sword scabbards, furry mantles and loincloths. This included crowd characters as well as hero characters. In many situations the dynamic items on each of the characters had to be individually tweaked. I enjoyed working on the show. Effects Reel for Bourne Legacy 2013 from Patrick Woo on Vimeo . All of the effects I was involved in, was falling snow. Falling snow looks different through different camera angles, different camera moves with different speeds and directions. We went through a huge amounts of shots that required snow fx.

Just today I tasked myself to find out the sensor dimensions of a particular brand of a camera, for the possibility of matchmoving footage shot from it. The camera make and model is the IO Industries 2KSDI . This image was acquired from  shop.vuetec.de/Flare-2KSDI-Camera-Kit_detail_2668.html Looking into the specifications section on the official page , I found that the camera shoots in 2048 x 1088 (pixels). I require the actual sensor's width and height (in cm, mm or inches) however, so I continued reading on the page. There is only 1 measurement of the sensor, and it is reportedly 12.7mm diagonally. I tried searching for sensor measurements from other sources, like re-sellers and distributors websites, and even forums, to no avail. It seems like nobody needed to know the width and height (besides for camera tracking purposes). I remembered from trigonometry back in school, of being able to calculate the third side of a triangle if two sides are known, or somethin...

I've just uploaded a video showing myself playing around with Maya blendshapes, after discovering that blend-shapes can use splines/curves. I was just playing around and stumbled upon it by accident. You're probably laughing at me for the late discovery, and I do feel silly, but I've been doing quite a bit of props rigging, so it was a natural discovery for me. In this tutorial I show how to set-up blend-shapes with curves (which is exactly the same as setting it up for geometry). I then proceed to animate the blending of each shape to produce a controlled and directable behaviour for the base curve, to show the potential of using this in a wide variety of situations, including animation, rigging, modelling and effects. I hope you find it helpful :)

Just discovered this video being shared by Disney's official channels. This is just mind blowing! Looks like Disney is continuously innovating and improving on their technical problem solving from show to show. Better innovations lead to better ability to fulfill the aesthetic requirements of the director. Hats off to the brains behind this project! Frozen should be a show to watch out for!

Going after the unattainable – Allan McKay This is a really long article, a very well written story of veteran visual effects artist and supervisor, on how he started out on a seemingly impossible goal, but through dedicated, focused, consciously directed effort, overcame all obstacles a step at a time, until he finally attained the goal he set out to do. Through this journey, he shares with us how the majority of the people around him tried to tear down his resolve with hurtful words and scorn. However, he also clung on to every little bit of encouragement from those who believed he could fulfill his dreams. It is not just about computer graphics, visual effects, or even an artist's career. It is the story of believing in yourself, holding on to your dreams, constantly taking directions and doing reality checks to guide yourself straight towards your goal. Also it reminds us to appreciating the people who believe in whatever we are doing, and how it will help strengthen our ...

20131104 maya nParticles fluid simulation water flowing and meshing from Patrick Woo on Vimeo . A project prompted me to look into Maya's liquid solving and meshing. It is easy to confuse Maya's fluid simulation, particles simulation and liquid simulation. Fluids solving involves using voxels which cuts up a volume into cells and calculating how density, fuel, and heat moves around in that space, how much and how fast. This takes into account incompressibility, taking into account and preserving the volume of the contents being pushed around. Maya's solution to representing liquid uses nParticles with a liquid calculation section that also solves for incompressibility. However no voxels are involved. Instead each nParticle has an incompressibility multiplier that pushes its fellow particle away from itself when the neighbour comes within a certain distance from the particle's centre. The simulation is then configured to have the appearance of a blobby surfac...