Patrick's VFX Blog

Sean and I were talking about passion, interest and tenacity. He says a CG artist (or vfx artist) are one of those jobs that especially need tenacity to stay long in the industry. Many jobs only requires you to work hard during the working hours, and you will have gained the required experience to move up and excel in your career. Not for CG. Many times we need to keep practising our craft. Especially when working in a huge pipeline, you may not always necessarily be doing the full spectrum of work you would like yourself to be doing. In many instances we are just doing a very small part, or something else entirely. To keep ourselves relevant in the specialisation, in the capacity we want our career to move towards, we need to keep "sharpening our blades", and keep doing the things we eventually want to be doing. That is quite a tedious and joyless work if we have no passion, or if we do not have enough determination to do it till we actually get to where we want to go. ...

After watching Pixomondo's VFX breakdown of Hugo in my last post , I went to look up the company. I knew they were big, I knew they had operations in many countries, but nothing prepared me for what I found when I went to their website. Pixomondo is a company that started in 2001, doing 3D animation, video installations and commercials. Now the company has facilities spanning across a jaw-dropping 12 counties! These are: Los Angeles, Berlin, Beijing, Frankfurt, London, Stuttgart, Shanghai, Munich, Toronto, Burbank, Hambug and Imprint. It is beyond impressive. Being part of a multinational VFX company myself, I observe the common problems that plague companies with multiple facilities in different countries. One of the huge obstacles is the different time-zones, where production staff work different timing from each other. This translates to time loss. Sometimes at the end of the day in one country's office, things must wait several hours until their counterparts c...

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 ...

This was a tv commercial that I worked on with a partner, a year or two ago. The commissioning client was Critica TV. This project was done in 3D Studio Max using the VRay renderer. I modelled and lit the environment. This involved creating some textures, like holes and displacements along the wall. I also modelled some internal parts of the mouse, and fine-tuned the materials on the mouse too. The robotic arms were designed and rigged by Kuodo Cheok. He also did resurfacing on the exterior casing of the mouse. Foreground objects like the mouse, table and robot arms were lit by Kuodo as well.

Picture taken from a page by the  National Research Council of Canada A friend is on a project that requires animation that resembles a constellation diagram, with glowing dots joining up and forming a pattern with lines. This has to be done to several geometrical shapes that will only be confirmed in later in the project. Helping him break down and plan the project, I foresee a need to create a workflow where I can take any geometry, create dots and then making lines to join the dots. How can this be done? I will attmept to write a script to procedurally create spheres and tubes on vertices and edges of any geometrical object. The spheres and tubes should follow the edges and vertices of the object as it transforms and deforms.  Also, there should be controls that can influence the thickness and size of the spheres and tubes in order to change their appearances in the render. There should also be a slider that controls the tubes to grow from zero length to the full ...

Tools are underrated. The more efficiently we can automate Repetitive tasks, we can have more time to tweak other aspects of the projects we work on. Before I have that capability in your project, I usually wish vehicle hard that I had this or that tool to help me with a certain task. Then comes the euphoric moment when I actually have it (from creating the tool myself or a tool release from the software vendor). This lasts about 3 minutes. Then it becomes part of my toolset and instantly I take it for granted. I forget about all the hard work it would've taken me if I did not have it. Published with Blogger-droid v2.0.3