Patrick's VFX Blog

I know my posts are all over the place, but I found this Maya API tutorial. Chad Vernon is a Character TD, Studio Pipeline TD and Software engineer. He was previously a Creature Pipeline TD at Digital Domain. Here's a write-up on Chad at CG-Circuit. In his blog, Chad has some very useful of technical resources that will greatly fellow artists and TDs, mostly in the areas of Maya and Direct X. Do take a look at his Maya API related links at his site: http://www.chadvernon.com/blog/resources/

More quaternion resources! A fellow colleague pointed me to this site. http://www.isner.com/tutorials/quatSpells/quaternion_spells_14.htm In the page Michael shows us how we should approach rotations, and with concise diagrams, how we can visualise what is happening to our objects as we operate on them. Check it out if you are a geek wannabe, just like me ;)

So I'm reading up on the concept of quaternions. Stumbled upon this page by arlab.com entitled Quaternion The Magic of the 3-Dimensional Space It's a simple introduction to problems related to rotations in 3D spaces and why quaternion is an efficient way to deal with this.

20140701 Cubes on a Deforming Plane from Patrick Woo on Vimeo . Here's my latest test: an array of procedurally generated cubes on a deforming plane, This is probably a piece of cake to Houdini users, but in Maya, without some rigging knowledge and scripting automation, the average artist would probably not be able to pull this off. This is a playblast from Maya's viewport 2.0, with motion blur, screen-space ambient occlusion and anti-aliasing.

Here's an excellent short film that I had the honour to have been a small part of. Directed by Sacha Goedegebure , this film is his second one produced being a part of Omens Studios . This film shows a captain and his obsessive, paranoid and delusional search for the Sperm Whale. I played a part in developing creating the water effects in the shot where the camera pans down to reveal the eye of the whale. This involved creating the effect of water draining from the whale surface. Watch the full short film here! Produced by Omens Studios

I cam across an article on CG Masters School of 3D Animation and VFX . It is called: The Culture of Crisis in Animation and Visual Effects In today's computer graphics (CG) and visual effects (VFX) industry we see worrying trends in places where companies are counting on artists putting in unpaid overtime (which is illegal by the way) as a norm, delayed payments, bidding below production costs, under-cutting the competition just to get projects, and the exponential increase in a trend of outsourcing in an attempt to reduce operating costs. Has the industry always been like that? Do computer animation companies and visual effects studio know how to do their businesses? Does CG and VFX really cost this much? Can they really be outsourced? This article is written by Nicholas Boughen who is a VFX Supervisor, CG Supervisor and VFX School owner who has worked in the entertainment industry for 34 years as a team and facility manager, project manager, trainer and artist. In...

Great to be able to witness part of the workflow, and amazing team of many people working in collaboration to make this movie happen. This is really good stuff!