Patrick's VFX Blog

The title of this post is the same as the title from the article I just read ( http://www.gamedev.net/page/resources/_/business/should-working-in-games-be-more-fun-r866 ) from gamedev.net . It is written by Francois Dominic Laramee. Francois seems to be a very experienced developer who has worked in small start-ups and huge international company, in private sectors and government sectors to educational sectors, and, inside and outside of games industry. What he writes is the reality and the state of the industry. This should be what a games developer should expect when entering the industry. It seems that there is a lot of hype by the media and general public about games developing. They make it sound fun, and makes people wanna come in and be part of the team that develops games, and have some fun doing the job. Francois does mention about the film industry having the same kinds of demand on the labour and hours involved to achieve the quality that can go on sc...

I recently come across this website  http://lesterbanks.com/  that does a lot of useful and amazing tutorials for loads of major 3D packages and compositing software.  They even have an online store where you can order hilarious CG and geeky software related taglines that only fellow geeks can understand.  I really wish I had the time to go through all the tutorials. I am just browsing and I am already seeing very useful tutorials that I would like to watch NOW! But... my wife is in London for holiday and I'm loaded with things to prepare for my return trip back home to Singapore.

What a big surprise! I opened up my email and I saw a receipt from Image-Line software, makers of FL Studio.  I went into the contest forum thread , and I found that I won the 2nd prize! First prize by AndrAKondrA had 167 votes, winning 25% of all the votes: This image is from the forum where there was a button to click to vote ;) 2nd prize was my entry, scoring a 148 votes, winning 22% if all votes: This image is from the forum where there was a button to click to vote ;) The entry by gamecat666. It won 3rd prize with 111 votes, bagging 17% of all votes: Winning the 2nd prize in this contest means I would receive 300 IL Virtual Cash. 1st prize wins 500 IL Virtual Cash and 3rd prize wins 100 IL Virtual Cash. There were comments on the voting page that 3D renders are more eye catching on computer displays and more likely to attract voter's attention. However the concept and layout/composition may not be the best in the context of a t-shirt desi...

Rendered in Mental Ray again, using a bokeh samples value of 32. Applying the reflected glow test from a previous post, I applied a Mental Ray mia shader which enabled the glow on the cable to be reflected on the ground. Compare this with the previous post and you will see the glow is clearly reflected on the ground. This gives a more realistic look. This took 4 hours and 31 minutes to render for 2000x1300 pixels. Much better than the render in the previous post, which took 7 hours with 64 samples in the Bokeh node.

I began toying with Mental Ray's bokeh phyiscal lens shader and tried this on my headphones scene, rendering at 2k, at 60 samples on the bokeh node. The image rendered for 7 hours 20 minutes!! (I left it to render overnight, so I dont know if this included the calculation time for the final gathering stage).

For the longest time I have not know that the "glow" effect in Maya could actually appear in reflections. Even in my headphone renders in the previous posts, I was using Maya Lambert and Blinn shaders even when I was rendering with Mental Ray. Today I learnt that the glow can be reflected, to my great delight. Terry Marriot sitting in the same room as me, he showed me his project that involved using any Mental Ray shader, and it worked. All you need to do is use a Mental Ray shader on your reflecting surface, and the glow will reflect correctly. Glowing Torus (Lambert shader) reflected on a Plane (Blinn shader) Glowing Torus (Lambert shader) reflected on a Plane (Mental Ray DGS shader)

I still wanted to persue the idea of a smoking cable and smoking logo. So I went ahead to Maya and tried a Maya fluids.  After developing the look for the fluids, this is the final result. I also brought up the overall brightness of the lights by quite a fair bit. Next up, I might want to animate this to a beat or something.