Patrick's VFX Blog

20131104 maya nParticles fluid simulation water flowing and meshing from Patrick Woo on Vimeo . A project prompted me to look into Maya's liquid solving and meshing. It is easy to confuse Maya's fluid simulation, particles simulation and liquid simulation. Fluids solving involves using voxels which cuts up a volume into cells and calculating how density, fuel, and heat moves around in that space, how much and how fast. This takes into account incompressibility, taking into account and preserving the volume of the contents being pushed around. Maya's solution to representing liquid uses nParticles with a liquid calculation section that also solves for incompressibility. However no voxels are involved. Instead each nParticle has an incompressibility multiplier that pushes its fellow particle away from itself when the neighbour comes within a certain distance from the particle's centre. The simulation is then configured to have the appearance of a blobby surfac...

http://io9.com/unbelievable-pacific-rim-video-reveals-all-of-the-kaiju-634921963 A fantastic behind the scene breakdown of how the Kaiju (monsters) were created for the movie Pacific Rim. It really looks like the director respected the fact that they came from the Japanese monster culture and he wanted it to have the same elements true to their heritage. Also, the huge numbers of design and concept iterations is truly amazing, as is their attention to the detail of fleshing out the monster skin details. Amazing!

Man of Steel, look behind the scenes with this extended featurette! Its really great to watch and listen to the cast and crew talk about their combined vision for the movie, and how they try to re-invent such an iconic hero. I am looking forward to watch this!

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-22088371 Tiny Island founder and CEO David Kwok talks about his passion and journey Dream Defenders will start showing on Hulu in USA this summer 2013! A production crew from BBC news appeared in our studio today to shoot a piece on Tiny Island and Cg Protégé. They shot me while I was teaching. Thus for a few seconds in this video, I am seen teaching and explaining matchmoving to the class. Once again I appear in some kind of video. Thankfully I'm not the main person being featured this time :)

The wave of protest that was brewing since last year, and has been gaining momentum since. The topic was about unfair state of affairs surrounding the business conditions of visual effects companies and the welfare of visual effects artists. This started off  on the internet, in small discussion forums with some key veterans in the industry, who educated the rest of the vfx community about the big picture, giving informed figures the momentum of that discussions launched into action when. Here's a video that does an excellent job of summarising the cause and effect surrounding the current crisis faced by the vfx artists and facilities. Here's the video of the VFX Town Hall on PI Day (3-14-13).

Intel is showcasing the precision and practical applications of its processors in real-time control, precision sensitive tasks in an industrial environment like the one in the video. Besides being amazed by the technological precision and sustained performance in the machines and processors, the music is also pretty cool. This is the actualisation of an original animation of machine parts that create music by launching balls to hit sound-emitting pieces of instruments/machine parts. Here's the original video: The amazing thing is that Intel has managed to design such an actual machine, and has programmed and designed processors to turn a whimsical idea into reality. This is an instance where artistic visual actually drives practical design. It currently seems like the balls are being thrown out to trigger a single note at per ball. It would be even more cool if the balls were re-used, timed to hit multiple pieces taking into account their bouncing trajectory :)

Eye of the Storm 2012 from Patrick Woo on Vimeo . This is a class exercise conceptualised by Kooi Chek the original instructor for VFX at Cg Protégé and head of FX at Tiny Island Productions. KC has created a complete version for the class. The purpose of the exercise was to give students an opportunity to apply their knowledge of particle systems, volumetric lighting and rendering techniques, after they learn about Afterburn. Here I've taken that exercise and redone it with my own look and timing. I've also given it a bit more of a dramatic lighting, including animated lights cast by 'lightning'. If you are in Singapore and looking to get pick up practical skills in cg and visual effects please look up CG Protégé's vfx and other courses here .