Patrick's VFX Blog

Mengdi (my colleague) spotted my Vimeo.com particles video tutorial on Lesterbanks.com! http://lesterbanks.com/2011/12/methods-for-resetting-particles-initial-state-in-maya/ This is totally unexpected and a pleasant surprise. It is so exciting that tutorial portals actually pick up things (even blog posts) that are relevant to them, and I am glad that I get to contribute to their site! Hope there'll be people out there who will benefit from the tutorials.

I came across a term that I havent been using for 2 months. Its called "wedge". I don't know if its a proper industry term for FX artists, but at dneg London all the leads and artists working on costume use it. I've tried to look-up the term on the internet, but I havent been able to find it in an article that mentions it in a vfx context. To wedge some values is to set off a few simulations with a range of value,(hopefully derived from some kind of educated guess). At the end of the processing, the FX artist comes back and takes a look at the result and use the value that gave the result closest to his/her satisfaction. I am wondering why it is called wedging. It is probably due to the fact that the artist is trying to squeeze in a few simulations instead getting the computer to just process 1 set of values. This is true especially in a big facility where you have a huge number of processors. To send off a few sim jobs simultaneously would definitely be much ...