A little Friday inspiration

“Style Wars”

Style Wars

Playing around with my friend and photographer Eduardo’s motorizeddolly. A quick and imperfect roto in After Effects and 2 minutes in Garage Band.

My time at Cut and Paste 2011

This past weekend I had the awesome opportunity to participate in Cut and Paste 2011. I competed in the 3d round where I had 20 minutes to create an image based on the theme of “My Playground”. I chose to create a hamster cage to infer the “primal” similarities between humans and animals (thats my story and I’m sticking to it!). This image was created using Maya 2012 and Mental Ray.

A synopsis of my Cut & Paste 2011 qualifier that took place at the Soho House in New York City.

A short abstract motion graphics animation created using Maya and AfterEffects. Sound effects done using Garage Band.

Rendered out a small time lapse animation of the light moving in thescene.

Added the depth of field pass to the render. Still need to render the animation sequence.

Modelling and lighting is complete for this interior chair scene. The time it took to render on my ancient Core Duo macbook pro was about 20 minutes. All elements were modeled in Maya while the lighting was created using Mental Ray. The final and tedious task is to render out the 7 second time lapse of the light moving as well as complete a final composite of all the passes (the depth of field is missing!!!).

Wind tunnel effect test created in #AfterEffects using #particular.

Here’s a small update to my stairway scene. Progress has slowed down on the piece due to other obligations (web work…blah). It’s still very rough, a couple of more elements are needed before I can render out the small animation.

Some cg lighting inspiration

I’ve been sitting here rendering/testing/rendering/fixing etc…. for some hours now. There’s nothing like a little inspiration from something awesome to recharge your batteries. Here are a few pieces that keep me going, I’m sure you’ll like them too. But, you can’t take my word for it!

Marek Denko | Retrospective reel | Selected Works 2003-2010 from NoEmotion.Net on Vimeo.

The Third & The Seventh from Alex Roman on Vimeo.

Silestone — ‘Above Everything Else’ from Alex Roman on Vimeo.

Two real time animations created in C++ using OpenGL. These date backto my brief stint in the PC animation demoscene. The source codeprovided is done so “as is”. I do not claim responsibility for anydamage done to the machine. The code was tested and is deemed clean touse. “Synchronize” source code | “Little 1” source code

“Synchronize” source code
“Little 1” source code

Next lighting piece

The Becks beer animation is still on hold until I can get my hands on a machine that can run the Realflow sim for the beer. In the meantime, I’ve begun work on a scene to showcase some interior lighting. I’m about 85% done with the modelling and I’ve gathered a few textures for the geomerty.

Here is my reference photo:

Current WIP

CG clouds comped over a backplate. Created using Maya and After Effects.

Fluid clouds and the Maya ocean shader

Here is a quick comp of the clouds with a water effect I’ve spent some time trying to get right. The water shader obviously needs a lot of work and I need to go back increase the opacity of the clouds since some of the detail has been lost.

Fluid cloud test

I posted an image recently of some clouds I’m working on for this fly-by idea I’m realizing. Shortly after I posted the image a friend asked me how you would go about creating large billowing clouds (the kind you see from and airplane). A quick answer would be “just create a large fluid container and adjust the Perlin texture”. That solution only leads you to extremely long and painful render times, trust me……please. The key is to keep the fluid contain as small as possible (in the Y direction) probably in the 2 to 5 scale and scale up the noise texture. Also, when scaling up the texture you’re going to need to play around with the frequency ratio to gain some of the “lumps” back into your clouds.

This is the previous image with scale adjustments as well as other adjustments to make it less dense.

Fluid clouds v2

Here is a quick render of some clouds I’m doing for a small fly by animation (don’t you just love fly-by’s. I’m juggling this one with the Becks beer project. This is a little easier because everything is being done in Maya (in terms of the animation).

Glass studio lighting test

A preliminary lighting test for my Beck’s beer animation (I love Beck’s!!). I’m happy with the way things are looking but it’s far from complete. Next, I can finally continue with the particle simulation for the liquid in the glass cup.  

Back at it....again.

It’s been a while since I posted something in regards to work in progress. The last post was a kind of teaser for a small particle based pet project of mine. Now that the new year is here it’s time for me to charge full speed ahead with getting a new reel together. Since my focus is primarily in the areas of effects and lighting I felt it was necessary for me to produce things that reflect those areas. That being said, the P.I.L.L project has been put on hold. I’m in the process of created two small pieces, a tribute to Beck’s beer (with some cool fluid simulations) and a small urban architecture scene. The latter project has yet to be taken to the 3D creation phase because I’m still in the process of gathering reference photos. The Beck’s project is in the shading phase in Maya. Getting a good glass look is a pretty involved process. I want to be able to render this as fast as possible and still achieve a realistic look (it can be done, I just need to work out how). Photos of the Beck’s progress will appear soon.