GoodBye Brand New School

After four wonderful years, I moved on from Brand New School.  It has been a great experience.  Learned a lot from so many great people, but it is time for a new adventure!

A very interesting tool for Ivy generation

Link

SOuP Maya Procedural Plugin collection

For the last few month we been using the SOuP plugin collection generously released to the public by Peter Shipkov.  It give much needed Houdini like procedural capabilities to Maya.  Strongly recommend it.

 

 

VRAY … whats next

Now that we are using VRAY in production I have asked a team at ChaosGroup to adress the following issues:

- Allow arbitrary shapes for proxy assignment

- Allow usage of straight alpha

- Allow storing the particle system as a proxy

- Allow better management of flakes on car shader - perhaps utilizing PTEX textures.

- Allow simpler workflow of r particle rgbPP propagation.

- Better fluid rendering.

- Separate the transform from deformation motion blur.

- Add a bias to the fresnel reflection function on VRAY shader.

 

We are officially using VRAY.  Very exciting.  After 4 months of testing we are finally switching over.  Not to say that Mental Ray will not be a part of our render toolkit, but VRAY is our main package now

VRAY for MAYA

I have been currently exploring a potential of switching our pipeline to VRAY.  People at Chaos Group are kind enough to give us 4 moths worth of licensing to take it for a true test drive.  So far results are very promising.  I will be posting updates and movies soon.

Another great artist

I know.  I keep on posting links to other artist’s work.  But I love finding new sources of inspiration.  Sooooo, here is another one – Jason Seiler.  Great illustrator.

Interesting blog by a VFX artist

I thought I will share this link by a VFX artist from Mill London.

SI2K Update

I gave SI2K camera another shot for our current shoot at BNS.  This time around, the results are much better.  I think part of the problem last time was an inexperienced technician.  The key to successful use of the camera has been a new generation of hard drives – solid state.  Also, setting the look on set, and saving it as meta data was of absolute importance.

SI2K POV camera rig

The low weight of the camera body allowed for relatively easy install.

There are still problem with rolling shutter, as with most CMOS sensor cameras, but i found to be somewhere in a middle between red ONE and canon 5D II.

I still think the camera has a very limited use, primarily for POV and limited room shots.  But for this shoot , it was a perfect tool.

Long time and no update …

Its has been a crazy, CRAZY year.  I have been so busy since april that really have not had time to post anything new.  But I have some ideas for next topics.  Be posting soon …