Patrick's VFX Blog

20140701 Cubes on a Deforming Plane from Patrick Woo on Vimeo . Here's my latest test: an array of procedurally generated cubes on a deforming plane, This is probably a piece of cake to Houdini users, but in Maya, without some rigging knowledge and scripting automation, the average artist would probably not be able to pull this off. This is a playblast from Maya's viewport 2.0, with motion blur, screen-space ambient occlusion and anti-aliasing.

Here's an excellent short film that I had the honour to have been a small part of. Directed by Sacha Goedegebure , this film is his second one produced being a part of Omens Studios . This film shows a captain and his obsessive, paranoid and delusional search for the Sperm Whale. I played a part in developing creating the water effects in the shot where the camera pans down to reveal the eye of the whale. This involved creating the effect of water draining from the whale surface. Watch the full short film here! Produced by Omens Studios

I cam across an article on CG Masters School of 3D Animation and VFX . It is called: The Culture of Crisis in Animation and Visual Effects In today's computer graphics (CG) and visual effects (VFX) industry we see worrying trends in places where companies are counting on artists putting in unpaid overtime (which is illegal by the way) as a norm, delayed payments, bidding below production costs, under-cutting the competition just to get projects, and the exponential increase in a trend of outsourcing in an attempt to reduce operating costs. Has the industry always been like that? Do computer animation companies and visual effects studio know how to do their businesses? Does CG and VFX really cost this much? Can they really be outsourced? This article is written by Nicholas Boughen who is a VFX Supervisor, CG Supervisor and VFX School owner who has worked in the entertainment industry for 34 years as a team and facility manager, project manager, trainer and artist. In...

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 :)