Patrick's VFX Blog

Modelled and rendered in Maya with Mental Ray I have been modelling Lego bricks in Maya. This is part of an my involvement at an attempt in the CG Society's FXWars challenge with a few colleagues. This month's theme is BrickWars , where we have to do some simulation of Lego bricks. This render was done with Mental Ray in Maya. The shaders were all Maya's default Blinn shader. On top  of Global Illumination & Final Gather, I had a MR bokeh lens shader going on. Building a simple Lego brick isn't simple at all. We can all quickly come up with a decent shape, or so I think. After I made a simple 2x4 brick, I started making 2x8, 2x16. After all that, I started stacking them together. This was when I got a shock. The border of each brick ate into the next teeth. I got geometrical intersection. This is totally unacceptable, especially when we are going to prepare it for simulation. I had to redo the whole brick from scratch. This time, I started by...

I am now trying to improve on a Maya script I wrote a while ago. The old one was done using Python.  It had some user-interface controls in a window.   I re-doing it using PyMel  to code those same controls to display as an overlay in the viewports via the HUD controls command. Will post an update when the script is done.

 I came across a funny 9gag article (click on the logo to read the article). One of the comments was really funny. It said "If Your Code Runs Every Time, You are Doing Something Wrong".  Coding is not supposed to work all the time! ;)

Phew, finally we can stop holding our breaths as the Avengers hit the big screens all around the world! Over the last weekend a huge number of my friends (and colleagues) went to watch the film. Afterwards they either excitedly talked about it, or commented on social networks how awesome it was. It was hard work not to read comments that came close to being spoilers when they spring up in front of you on your Facebook update. :) Having to work over the weekends did not allow me the luxury to watch the film, plus I'll be going an a week-long tour end of this week. So I'll be wishing really hard that the movie will still be showing when I return from my trip. In the mean time, here's a good article from fxguide.com. Behind the scenes vfx crew like visual effects supervisor Janek Sirrs, previs supervisor Nick Markel (The Third Floor) and Jeff White (ILM) share about their experiences and process of creating and sustaining the epic visuals that show up so casually in the ...

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.