Patrick's VFX Blog

Here's a little test I did using the Quad Draw Tool from Maya's Modeling Toolkit, available from Maya 2014 and up. Video tutorial coming soon! :)

I've been thinking about how cars' wheels are rigged up to move at different speeds in real life, and yet be able to be driven by a power source at the same time. This video is the perfect answer to my question. The solution is ingenious and the video explains it really well! My good friend +William Lin   further shared these videos on my Facebook post: And finally a video which was referenced from this link on Reddit .

20150407 nParticlesFillContainer v01 01 from Patrick Woo on Vimeo . This is a test that I've done a few months ago. It is done in Maya, using nParticles system. The particles are set to "Use Liquid Simulation", and to collide with all the visibile geometry in the scene, including the invisible sandbox acting as the boundary to the whole simulation. Each of the colliding geometry needs to be set-up as a passive nMesh for the collision to take place. The particle colour is mapped to a ramp that depends on their velocity. The final particles count is 816,540.

today I answered a question on Maya joint orientation , on Quora. I find that joint orientations are really important. Even though the primary axis is important, I find that the orientation of the secondary axis is equally critical for proper behavior of joints in a chain.

I recently wrote an answer on Quora to the following question: What Is the Standard Lens Length in Maya 3D? The question: This may be tricky for people who have only Maya 3D skills and no photography knowledge to answer.  A "standard lens" is a focal length which for a given size of film plane (or sensor) will neither widen nor magnify the image it captures.  For example, a 50 mm lens on a full frame 35mm sensor is considered a standard lens. I know perspectives can be matched using Maya 3D camera options, but what is the default equivalent of the sensor size in the program?   My reply: Indeed, many artists with no experience in photography will not be able to easily understand the relationships between focal length and sensor sizes / ratios. Having worked in the "camera department" on Hollywood films, it has given me great insight into the relationships between the physical camera and the virtual one in Maya. Maya does not make it easier. What we ...

Here is the main project that I was involved in for the last 2 months (amidst other smaller and shorter projects). The Navy 2015 recruitment video / corporate branding video / TV commercial has been released. My work is solely around 1:55 and 1:59 in this edit of the video, the robots and weapons. There are 2 main mechanical characters: The hero robot and the mechanical spider. Both the hero and spider robots were acquired from an asset store. From there I did quite a bit of modification to the geometry before they could be rigged. Aesthetically I had to modify some parts so the shape of the robot fits art director's requirement of fierce, steadfast and battle-worthy looking. I had to do a lot of modeling and modifying especially for the weapons, his head and visor, and missile mounts on his shoulders too. Technical fixes when dealing with the model involved conforming face normals, cleaning up and simplifying the models too. This involved grouping the parts into meaningful...

CG and visual effects are all over the place in movies and TV shows these days, and a large group of movie-goers are saying it is too much, vfx/cg suck and they are making films look bad. Well here's a great video telling the reason why. It will show how VFX have become ever more excellent technically and artistically, and how much work goes on in the VFX process. It will also give you examples of a huge number of well executed VFX in many movies that we never knew to be touched by VFX. Great work to the guys at Rocket Jump Film School on trying to educate the average consumer on the basics, the nature of VFX, and the hard work that goes into each shot!