Patrick's VFX Blog

http://www.dezineguide.com/inspiration/15-top-movies-vfx-breakdowns/ One of my friends on Google Plus pointed me to this page. I thought it was really worth blogging on this. It really reminds us that VFX is a massive collaboration of effort, resources and skills in many areas. All these come together to create the films filled with seamless and amazingly believable shots that we as movie-goers are so used to seeing in the films today. I think these breakdown clips (though often very enjoyable to watch) are proudly showing and reminding us of the hard work of the men and women working behind the scenes to bring those effects to life on the big screen. It is very common, for example, for objects that were shot on set to be painstakingly removed only to be replaced by a cg version of the exact same thing that looks... almost the same. Of course, these kinds of decisions are based on technical, aesthetic, and sometimes client requirements. However, all these are transparent to...

Here is the Singapore Grand Prix promotional video in action. My partner Kuodo Cheok designed, modelled and animated the geometry. I rigged, lighted, and created shaders for the animated geometry. In the beginning I created a script to enable a geometrical object to have its vertices and edges replaced by spheres and tubes which are able to grow and extend. At the end the growing was not needed.

Realflow Milk Pour 20120402 from Patrick Woo on Vimeo . I started with a partially filled volume (of milk). While letting it fall to fill the shape of the invisible glass, I introduced another fluid into the mix (chocolate/coffee stuff). These are meshed as 2 separate objects, and then imported into Maya to be lit and rendered. This time I had a better set-up for lighting and shaders. I also brought up the motion-blur factor from 1.0 to 2.6.

Realflow Milk Pour 20120331 from Patrick Woo on Vimeo . Testing of a fluid filling a container. Rendered with Mental Ray in Maya I had a friend asking if I could help achieve the effect of milk pouring into a container. Here's my initial test of milk pouring into a glass that's hidden so we can see the milk. I did this in Realflow 2012.

I was helping a friend out with his project. It is a TV commercial for promoting the Singapore's Formula1 2012. We handed over to the client beginning of February 2012. It has begun airing on TV channels. My colleague spotted it on sports pay-TV channels. The video is also featured on the F1 Singapore official website: The page might get updated at the end of the year so I've decided to do a screen capture of the page.   The project ended looking pretty close to their storyboards, but the animation was quite different from the brief my friend first received. We spent a lot of time testing and refining a certain technique only to be discarded in favour of a very much simpler and computationally cheap method which can easily be achieved. I even wrote a PyMel script to set-up any polygonal object to enable lines to grow and join at every edge and thus tracing out the wireframe shape of the final object. But I believe nothing is ever wasted, that I've learnt som...

I've got an ex-colleague who is currently working with another animation software. However, he trying to pick up Maya skillsets and getting familiar with the workflow in Maya. Going through the pains of finding out how things work, and how stuff is organised in Maya is no fun, and can cost you lots of time if you are figuring it out on your own. So I've decided to put up a simple video showing how to create a beach ball using a polygonal sphere and a NURBS sphere. The video will also show how to work with Hypershade to set up a simple Lambert shader and apply it to the polygon and NURBS balls.

Today, I had the challenge of setting up a shot in Nuke that was shot in reverse. My CG element was rendered forwards. Therefore in the read node I needed an expression to evaluate the plate's current frame number to play in reverse. Frame range was 137-290. After thinking for a bit, I figured out the expression is lastFrame - (currentFrame - firstFrame). In my case this would be 290 - (frame - 137). (frame-137) would give me a positive zero-based frame number where if the current frame is 137, would return a zero. That number would be subtracted from the last frame of the sequence such that as the current frame increases, the relationship of the scan would be inverse and decreasing in frame number from the last frame, in the reverse order. This is just a reminder to myself in case I need to use this again :)