Patrick's VFX Blog

Just came across this series of rage comics which are pretty funny. and here's one guy that took the simple line art like some of these: and turned it into this: Sam Spratt did paintings of the rage comics, the above is one of his renditions:  http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=2638744051999&set=o.101331686581995&type=3 Pretty cool art eh? ;) For more info and samples of the rage comics go to http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/y-u-no-guy

I've entered in the FL Studio Merchandising Artwork Contest from Image-Line. Actually they are asking for artwork to print existing products in their online store. These include t-shirts, water bottles, slippers, etc. But my entry is actually suggesting a product that does not exist in their store. The following turn-table models are modelled in Maya, rendered with Mental Ray. The text inset in the box are displacement maps. Using Mental Ray approximation editor, I had to turn up  the smoothing iterations to 5 on the animated turntable. The rendering time for that came up to about 1min 20seconds per frame. In addition, I had to submit a 2K still for the contest. For that I had to bring the iterations in the approximation editor up to 8. That took about 33mins for a still frame. (Maya crashed when I set the iteration value higher than 8). Fruity Coin Bank Fruity Candy Bar with an open lid Fruity Candy Bar with a closed lid A sample high-res render (...

Since the announcement of Apple co-founder Steve Job's death on 5-10-2011 at age 56, there has been a huge wave of media coverage. I've received and read loads of links from many different sources. Some were articles, some were videos. All of them about Steve passing away and his great contribution to the betterment of our society, the enabling of technology that affect our lives, including the way it's shaping the society and bringing people closer to each other, and, his contributions to the animated feature films and music industries. http://dyn.com/steve-jobs-1955-2011-our-employees-pay-tribute/ This morning, (it's a Sunday!), from the Facebook page of  Dyn (Dynamic Network Services) , my free web host service provider, I came across an article where their employees pay tribute to Steve Jobs. It was full of sincere admiration and appreciation for the man who has a great part of his life trying to make our world a better place. It is something else...

http://www.alembic.io/index.html I've recently heard of an open framework that allows storage of surface and points description such as geometry and particles to be described in a cache in one application and handed over to be processed in another application, thus making the surface independent of application and yet consistent across different software platforms. Follow the link above to take a look at what it is, and what it is not. The framework is jointly developed by Sony Imageworks, and Lucasfilm. At this moment you can only download the source, and need to build the executable in order to run it. (I have absolutely no idea how to do this, even if I follow the attached instructions).

http://notepad-plus-plus.org/ I have started to script again, using Python (Pymel too) in Maya. Right now I am just reminded again the neced for a windows notepad replacement. This made me remember how much I relied on Notepad++, the freeware notepad application. It is also a very powerful source code editor that supports 50 programming and scripting languages built-in. On top of this, it is possible to install more user-defined languages from a bigger list available from the website. Notepad++ very configurable in terms of colours for text and the way code and script is highlighted in different styles and colours that change with the programming/scripting language. It also supports many plug-in to expand its functionality. I especially like the lines-numbering, and  code-folding functionality that allows me to hide/show blocks of code defined by indentations or brackets (different for every programming/scripting language). I've just got it up and running. I am happy no...

http://www.exoticmatter.com/overview/ I've recently been made aware of this new product called Naiad. It is for the most part a solver for dynamic bodies such as fluids and gas. It is also an open source software package that is part of a standard which other software can also be written to conform and process data from the Naiad Graph. This is a full GUI front-end for the artist to interact with the solver. Although it is relatively new to the scene, it has already been used for solving gas and fluids in quite a few feature films, including Avatar, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2, Pirates of the Carribean 4, Narnia: Voyage of the Dawn Treader, X-men: First Class, The A Team, Final Destination 5, etc. Although Naiad is now only available on the Linux platform, versions for Windows 7 and Mac OS X will be announced later in the year. Go to the movies page to see examples of the solver in use.

I just got to know about this website: http://shadermonger.com/ Its an open community of people developing shaders and sharing them. There's even a plug-in for Maya that can directly browse, access and for you to publish your own contribution to the shader community! It is an excellent idea to set up something that would benefit the whole community of CG artists. Well done guys!