NATE SHAW LIGHTING & LOOKDEV VFX REEL 2014 from NATE on Vimeo.
Showing posts with label cg. Show all posts
Showing posts with label cg. Show all posts
Wednesday, October 22, 2014
Monday, October 20, 2014
Divergent: CG Dog & Houdini Feather System
While I was organizing my latest reel I thought it would be fun to make some gifs of my work in the past few years. The first one and my favorite project so far at Method is Divergent. For the film I lookdev'd a cg dog and some cg ravens. Conveniently someone already made a gif of the dog that I did for the mirror room sequence.
The Dog
The dog was a pretty straight forward fur groom. Of course I used Houdini's fur grooming tools, not quite out of the box but customized for better control. The challenging part of this groom was the length of the fur and the fact that I had to match a live dog exactly. Long fur tends to have S shaped bends where the fur bends back on itself a couple times. To get this effect I combo'd direction, curl, and frizz attributes. It wasn't always a perfect S curve but it got close enough. The on set crew filmed a live dog but due to the complexity of the sequence and the infinite mirror reflection the environment, we had to supplement the further back reflections with a cg dog. This combined with the fact that I also had to do a jaw replacement for the dog in a few shots, half his face real half cg, and a few full cg hero dogs, the dog had to match perfectly. This just meant a lot of time with a line up camera going back and forth between the live dog and the cg one. I learned a couple of things on this groom. First was that its sometimes easier to to get precise coloring with painting color attributes in Houdini rather than relying on a texture artist. Since most texture artists don't have much experience with fur, they tend to just paint color patches where they see them. This is problematic with long fur though. Since the fur gets it's color from the root point attribute in Houdini, you have to paint the patches a little offset from where it's supposed to go. I found the feedback loop was much faster to handle this in Houdini rather than back and forth with a texture painter. When I say that I painted color attributes, I mean I painted masks on the geo and drove all of the color in the shader. I believe I had about 15 different mask attributes to drive patterning in this groom, from root and tip color to fades and solids. In addition to handling the shot lighting, the lighters also had to run the fur sims for the dog. Once I dialed in the sim settings, I created a system for the lighters to paint in areas of fur floppiness and a dial to easily control how much floppiness the fur needed in what area. In the end, I'm proud of how the dog turned out, I even got a full cg dog shot, the one in the gif above.
The Ravens
The ravens were a bit more technically challenging than the dog. I ended up using two fur systems and a feather instancing system for various areas of the bird. The easiest feathers were the ones on the head. Those are the finer feathers that look almost like fur. For that I used a straight ahead Houdini fur procedural. The body feathers were slightly trickier. They needed to look like actual feathers and the VFX Supe wanted them to be ruffled up as well. This meant that a displacement map wouldn't work as well as actual geometry. I ended up modeling about six feathers of varying sizes from curves in Houdini. I then made my own grooming system for instancing these feathers. I could paint direction and size and even had the control to animate the feathers raising and lowering on the back of the bird. From these attributes I used Houdini's fast point instancing to put these feathers on the birds at render time. It was a pretty efficient way of getting a really nice textural feel for the body of the ravens. For the wing feathers I modified the fur system to generate fur to look like flat wing feathers. This was a little tricky to do and I built off the work of some of my coworkers earlier feather jobs. In the past at Method, our earlier birds were modeled with curves and I was the first to use the fur procedural for them. Part of the system required grooming every feather to the right shape. Since then, I've modified my feather system on later jobs to use modeled outlines of feathers to derive the shape. The system worked pretty well and the render times were fairly reasonable, though when we got up to 15-40 birds in the frame at a time, some of them full frame, renders started taking a little longer.
The Dog
The dog was a pretty straight forward fur groom. Of course I used Houdini's fur grooming tools, not quite out of the box but customized for better control. The challenging part of this groom was the length of the fur and the fact that I had to match a live dog exactly. Long fur tends to have S shaped bends where the fur bends back on itself a couple times. To get this effect I combo'd direction, curl, and frizz attributes. It wasn't always a perfect S curve but it got close enough. The on set crew filmed a live dog but due to the complexity of the sequence and the infinite mirror reflection the environment, we had to supplement the further back reflections with a cg dog. This combined with the fact that I also had to do a jaw replacement for the dog in a few shots, half his face real half cg, and a few full cg hero dogs, the dog had to match perfectly. This just meant a lot of time with a line up camera going back and forth between the live dog and the cg one. I learned a couple of things on this groom. First was that its sometimes easier to to get precise coloring with painting color attributes in Houdini rather than relying on a texture artist. Since most texture artists don't have much experience with fur, they tend to just paint color patches where they see them. This is problematic with long fur though. Since the fur gets it's color from the root point attribute in Houdini, you have to paint the patches a little offset from where it's supposed to go. I found the feedback loop was much faster to handle this in Houdini rather than back and forth with a texture painter. When I say that I painted color attributes, I mean I painted masks on the geo and drove all of the color in the shader. I believe I had about 15 different mask attributes to drive patterning in this groom, from root and tip color to fades and solids. In addition to handling the shot lighting, the lighters also had to run the fur sims for the dog. Once I dialed in the sim settings, I created a system for the lighters to paint in areas of fur floppiness and a dial to easily control how much floppiness the fur needed in what area. In the end, I'm proud of how the dog turned out, I even got a full cg dog shot, the one in the gif above.
The Ravens
The ravens were a bit more technically challenging than the dog. I ended up using two fur systems and a feather instancing system for various areas of the bird. The easiest feathers were the ones on the head. Those are the finer feathers that look almost like fur. For that I used a straight ahead Houdini fur procedural. The body feathers were slightly trickier. They needed to look like actual feathers and the VFX Supe wanted them to be ruffled up as well. This meant that a displacement map wouldn't work as well as actual geometry. I ended up modeling about six feathers of varying sizes from curves in Houdini. I then made my own grooming system for instancing these feathers. I could paint direction and size and even had the control to animate the feathers raising and lowering on the back of the bird. From these attributes I used Houdini's fast point instancing to put these feathers on the birds at render time. It was a pretty efficient way of getting a really nice textural feel for the body of the ravens. For the wing feathers I modified the fur system to generate fur to look like flat wing feathers. This was a little tricky to do and I built off the work of some of my coworkers earlier feather jobs. In the past at Method, our earlier birds were modeled with curves and I was the first to use the fur procedural for them. Part of the system required grooming every feather to the right shape. Since then, I've modified my feather system on later jobs to use modeled outlines of feathers to derive the shape. The system worked pretty well and the render times were fairly reasonable, though when we got up to 15-40 birds in the frame at a time, some of them full frame, renders started taking a little longer.
Monday, September 8, 2014
Windmill test
I made this animation a while ago at Drexel as I was experimenting with different looks for cg animation. I found this when i was backing up some old data and thought it might make a cool gif.
Tuesday, October 2, 2012
Beautiful Creatures trailer
Now that Kia has fully wrapped, I've been working on this film due out early next year. I have one shot in this trailer and lots more in the actual movie!
Saturday, June 30, 2012
Monday, February 20, 2012
Houdini Snow Tool WIP
Houdini's greatest selling point as a 3D app is its procedural workflow. I wanted to create a tool that could place snow geo on environments without having to model the snow. You could just build out your environment without snow and then use this tool to generate the snow on top of everything. I spent a morning with it and came up with a rough beginning. The basics are in there but it could be refined a bit:
You'll notice that which ever way the torus is rotated the snow stays on top. As is, the snow isn't shaded yet. I know that I could do all of the snow in displacement and I may yet play with that a little more as I work with it.
You'll notice that which ever way the torus is rotated the snow stays on top. As is, the snow isn't shaded yet. I know that I could do all of the snow in displacement and I may yet play with that a little more as I work with it.
Monday, November 21, 2011
Dragon Texture
Its been a while since I posted about the baby dragon project I started back in June. I finished the model and the texture a couple of months ago but the carver on a cliff project took precedence as I rushed to finish it for the pixar td residency deadline. Thats past and sent out and that project is nearing completion. As a part of my time at Side Effects I will be getting a mentor to help me through a quick effects shot in Houdini. I will be meeting my mentor on wednesday, he'll be from SPI so I'm pretty excited. I am planning on using the baby dragon project as my mentor shot. I have several ways of scaling it in order to keep it within scope of a ten week project.
This is a viewport render of the texture I painted in Mudbox. Looking at it now I am not very happy with it. I was working with some serious hardware limitations on my box. I am hoping that I'll be able to sculpt and re-paint in 3D coat at SESI.
Tuesday, November 1, 2011
Friday, July 8, 2011
Windowsill
You can use Christmas ornaments for taking HDRIs! I read about someone using one instead of a mirror ball and had wanted to give it a whirl.
And I made this animation:
And I made this animation:
Dome Master Renders
I uploaded the dome master renders from the Dragon Dome project. Visually it doesn't make a lot of sense, you have to imagine that this is being projected onto a dome. The edges are between 6 and seven feet all around and the middle is straight up.
For more info on this project, check out my earlier post.
For more info on this project, check out my earlier post.
Tuesday, June 21, 2011
Dragon Turntable
A turntable of the dragon I modeled, sculpted, and textured for the dome project. Click on the picture to see it!!
Sunday, June 19, 2011
Dragon Dome
Judging by my post frequency lately, it looks like I haven't been doing anything lately. Its not true, I swear!
One of the projects I just finished up on was "Dragon Dome." DD was a project for my "Imersive World Building" class at Drexel, one of my very last classes there. The class needs a bit of an introduction to fully understand the project. The idea behind the class is to make an animation for a planetarium. If you've ever been to a science museum, they usually have some sort of astronomy show where they project some stars on a dome. The bulk of these types of shows and others like them show the main action as happening in front of the audience who is probably seated. Things come from behind to appear in front. The problem with the majority of the work is that it does not fully utilize the full screen area, an entire hemisphere.
My goal going into the class was to create something visually stunning that the audience would have to stand in the center of the auditorium to fully appreciate. Things would happen all around the audience who might, at times, have to turn their entire body to catch something happening.
I decided I wanted to feature dragons flying around, making the audience feel like they are dwarfed by giant flying reptiles.
There are some concerns and challenges that are different from the usual flat screen challenges. First of all, the only off screen is below the horizon. Really, the camera needed to be treated not as a camera or picture frame (like most productions) it needed to be thought of a space that the audience inhabits. This means that there couldn't be a floor in our environment, the camera couldn't move, depth of field doesn't make sense, and sizing things was a challenge.
Another interesting challenge was lighting. I am used to lighting things for a single camera. The lights needed to make sense but also illuminate everything, quite challenging in a 360 degree field of view. We found if it was lit too brightly, the light would bounce around the dome and wash everything out.
For the final animation, I teamed up with two of my classmates, Greg Ruane and Dan Bodenstein. The animation started with the two dragons flying right above the audience from the front to the back of the planetarium with two more dragons circling high above. For about 40 seconds dragons weave through tall mountain peaks that dwarf the audience. The animation ends with on hero dragon landing on a rock directly in front of the audience and letting out a huge roar. Audio was completed in an extremely short amount of time by John Avarese, (who, you will remember, completed audio for Big Catch). Unfortunately there is no possible way for me to upload the animation for others to see as, I am assuming, no one that reads this blog has access to a planetarium. Hopefully, it won't be lost to time, at least one more class of Drexel grad students will get to see it, even if I never do again.
For the project, I modeled, sculpted, and textured the dragon. (see previous posts) I textured the mountains and modeled the hero mountain. For the sky, I used nuke to create a star field. I created a noise and tweaked it into tiny, different sized specs and glowed the heck out of them and then overlayed a colorful milky way-esque texture. It turned out looking pretty good even if the planetarium guy caught my fake star field the moment he saw it. For the hero dragon, I did a cloth sim for the wings using Maya's nCloth.
Dan was the smoke and render TD for the project, in addition to making procedural mountaintops. Rendering this thing was a whole job in itself. We had to take 5 camera's (top, front, back, left, and right) and stitch them together into something that looks like a squished dome. From there they needed to be cut up to the 8 projectors to be projected onto the dome. Dan also figured out a way of getting depth information for the camera that would allow for distance falloff effects, something that was apparently a struggle for the entire dome industry (according to our professor). Dan was hilariously pissed when he found out it was a thesis worthy project, months too late for him to do anything about it.
Greg rigged the dragon and animated him. mmmmm motion paths.
This is a "glommed" image that would get projected onto the dome. It doesn't make a whole lot of sense in its current state (on a 2d plane, your monitor).
What you see in the middle of the image would be directly above the audience and what is on the edges would be just above eye level (what you would see if you looked straight ahead.
Some technical specs:
Software Used:
Maya
ZBrush
Renderman for Maya
Photoshop
Houdini
Nuke
Sky Skan
One of the projects I just finished up on was "Dragon Dome." DD was a project for my "Imersive World Building" class at Drexel, one of my very last classes there. The class needs a bit of an introduction to fully understand the project. The idea behind the class is to make an animation for a planetarium. If you've ever been to a science museum, they usually have some sort of astronomy show where they project some stars on a dome. The bulk of these types of shows and others like them show the main action as happening in front of the audience who is probably seated. Things come from behind to appear in front. The problem with the majority of the work is that it does not fully utilize the full screen area, an entire hemisphere.
My goal going into the class was to create something visually stunning that the audience would have to stand in the center of the auditorium to fully appreciate. Things would happen all around the audience who might, at times, have to turn their entire body to catch something happening.
I decided I wanted to feature dragons flying around, making the audience feel like they are dwarfed by giant flying reptiles.
There are some concerns and challenges that are different from the usual flat screen challenges. First of all, the only off screen is below the horizon. Really, the camera needed to be treated not as a camera or picture frame (like most productions) it needed to be thought of a space that the audience inhabits. This means that there couldn't be a floor in our environment, the camera couldn't move, depth of field doesn't make sense, and sizing things was a challenge.
Another interesting challenge was lighting. I am used to lighting things for a single camera. The lights needed to make sense but also illuminate everything, quite challenging in a 360 degree field of view. We found if it was lit too brightly, the light would bounce around the dome and wash everything out.
For the final animation, I teamed up with two of my classmates, Greg Ruane and Dan Bodenstein. The animation started with the two dragons flying right above the audience from the front to the back of the planetarium with two more dragons circling high above. For about 40 seconds dragons weave through tall mountain peaks that dwarf the audience. The animation ends with on hero dragon landing on a rock directly in front of the audience and letting out a huge roar. Audio was completed in an extremely short amount of time by John Avarese, (who, you will remember, completed audio for Big Catch). Unfortunately there is no possible way for me to upload the animation for others to see as, I am assuming, no one that reads this blog has access to a planetarium. Hopefully, it won't be lost to time, at least one more class of Drexel grad students will get to see it, even if I never do again.
For the project, I modeled, sculpted, and textured the dragon. (see previous posts) I textured the mountains and modeled the hero mountain. For the sky, I used nuke to create a star field. I created a noise and tweaked it into tiny, different sized specs and glowed the heck out of them and then overlayed a colorful milky way-esque texture. It turned out looking pretty good even if the planetarium guy caught my fake star field the moment he saw it. For the hero dragon, I did a cloth sim for the wings using Maya's nCloth.
Dan was the smoke and render TD for the project, in addition to making procedural mountaintops. Rendering this thing was a whole job in itself. We had to take 5 camera's (top, front, back, left, and right) and stitch them together into something that looks like a squished dome. From there they needed to be cut up to the 8 projectors to be projected onto the dome. Dan also figured out a way of getting depth information for the camera that would allow for distance falloff effects, something that was apparently a struggle for the entire dome industry (according to our professor). Dan was hilariously pissed when he found out it was a thesis worthy project, months too late for him to do anything about it.
Greg rigged the dragon and animated him. mmmmm motion paths.
This is a "glommed" image that would get projected onto the dome. It doesn't make a whole lot of sense in its current state (on a 2d plane, your monitor).
What you see in the middle of the image would be directly above the audience and what is on the edges would be just above eye level (what you would see if you looked straight ahead.
Some technical specs:
Software Used:
Maya
ZBrush
Renderman for Maya
Photoshop
Houdini
Nuke
Sky Skan
Monday, May 30, 2011
Lighting
A couple of weeks ago I gave a lighting lecture to my class. The idea was to take a simple scene and light it three different ways. I almost always use spotlights exclusively in Maya. This is mainly due to the controls they have but also because I have been rendering primarily with Renderman and depth map shadows for the past year and a half. There are certainly instances where one might want to use other lights but for these demos I used all spotlights. The renders are a bit on the low quality side because you don't want to wait too long for the scene to render when doing a live demo. These are all rendered in Mental Ray for Maya.
The first scene is lit with one spotlight with an image mapped to the color to simulate the shapes you get from the glass of a light bulb and the flashlight.
The second is lit to look like a studio light setup.
And the third is supposed to be lit from a window. Again I mapped an image to the spotlight.
The first scene is lit with one spotlight with an image mapped to the color to simulate the shapes you get from the glass of a light bulb and the flashlight.
The second is lit to look like a studio light setup.
And the third is supposed to be lit from a window. Again I mapped an image to the spotlight.
Monday, April 25, 2011
Dragon Dome
I had a bit of time to work on the sculpt and texture of the dragon. I was going to use Mari for the texture but my tablet wouldn't work properly in the painting view. :( So back to ZBrush's ridiculous interface.
Also, because these are triple boot machines with Mac keyboards that refuse to screencap using every button combination known to man, it took me about as long to take that picture as it did to paint the dragon. ("Snip" ftw)
Also, because these are triple boot machines with Mac keyboards that refuse to screencap using every button combination known to man, it took me about as long to take that picture as it did to paint the dragon. ("Snip" ftw)
Sunday, April 10, 2011
Dragon Dome
Dragons on Domezzz!!!
My WIP model for Dome project. This bad boy (once I finish modeling and sculpting him, teeth, extra horns, claws, etc.) will be all set to be all big and fly around a planetarium.
Monday, March 28, 2011
Big Catch
So nearly six months from the start of production, my Advanced CG/Crowd Simulation animation for Drexel is done. Actual production only happened between late September through very early January. The past couple of months have just been waiting on the audio. If you have seen my reel you've already seen like a third of the animation. So in this case done means I am not going to work on it any more. Its actually really hard for me to watch. Very nearly every scene has issues I wish I could have addressed. Ultimately though, its time to move on. I learned quite a bit throughout the production of this piece.
I have been making animations in Maya for about a year now and I've pretty much stuck to that software (with help from Nuke for some basic compositing). This animation I decided to take on two new major software packages. I had to use Massive (for crowd simulation) to fulfill the requirements of my Crowds class. I also jumped into Houdini for the smoke simulations. I owe a lot to Dan Bodenstein for getting me started with that. I wouldn't have finished the smoke without his help. To get started in learning Houdini, I used a lot of Peter Quint's videos on Vimeo.
The audio and score was made by John Avarese. John teaches a lot of audio classes in the Film Department here at Drexel. He does really good work, including feature work. I was really excited to have him on the project. Definitely check him out: John Avarese.
Anywho, give my animation a look and let me know what you think!
(Click on the picture and watch it in HD)
I have been making animations in Maya for about a year now and I've pretty much stuck to that software (with help from Nuke for some basic compositing). This animation I decided to take on two new major software packages. I had to use Massive (for crowd simulation) to fulfill the requirements of my Crowds class. I also jumped into Houdini for the smoke simulations. I owe a lot to Dan Bodenstein for getting me started with that. I wouldn't have finished the smoke without his help. To get started in learning Houdini, I used a lot of Peter Quint's videos on Vimeo.
The audio and score was made by John Avarese. John teaches a lot of audio classes in the Film Department here at Drexel. He does really good work, including feature work. I was really excited to have him on the project. Definitely check him out: John Avarese.
Anywho, give my animation a look and let me know what you think!
(Click on the picture and watch it in HD)
Monday, March 21, 2011
Compositing
A fun side effect of being a new CG and VFX student is coming to the realization that NOTHING ON TV OR IN MOVIES IS REAL. I used to share an opinion with many people that digital vfx were making movies less good. I guess I was thinking of the Phantom Menace or something. Little did I know that very little on tv is not digitally altered in some way. Think you can always spot digital vfx? Watch this: Ugly Betty VFX Breakdown Now its not perfect but if someone hadn't mentioned that this was all digitally recreated then I probably would never have known. Another great vfx breakdown, this time for Black Swan
So that is compositing. I just finished my first (and last, I guess) class in the subject. The class was entitled: Matte Painting. Unfortunately there was no actual matte painting going on in the class, not really. It was really an advanced compositing class. This term the professor added an extra element to the project. We had to do the project in stereo. (thats 3D for the general public, you know, like the movies where you wear the glasses, for example Step Up 3D).
We had to shoot our own footage for the project. Having never touched a video or film camera before this was quite a challenge for me. On top of that was the stereo requirement, so I had to shoot the footage out of two cameras at once. I really screwed up the footage part, which caused major problems down the line that never really got resolved. Basically the stereo portion of the project is unwatchable. (even if you happen to have a 3d monitor, projector, or tv. or more likely but still probably not, have anaglyph glasses sitting next to your computer like me)
I learned a lot in the process so the project wasn't a failure. You can watch the mono version of the project on vimeo. Click the image to be sent to the video page:
I'm going to do a quick breakdown of the plate eventually.
So that is compositing. I just finished my first (and last, I guess) class in the subject. The class was entitled: Matte Painting. Unfortunately there was no actual matte painting going on in the class, not really. It was really an advanced compositing class. This term the professor added an extra element to the project. We had to do the project in stereo. (thats 3D for the general public, you know, like the movies where you wear the glasses, for example Step Up 3D).
We had to shoot our own footage for the project. Having never touched a video or film camera before this was quite a challenge for me. On top of that was the stereo requirement, so I had to shoot the footage out of two cameras at once. I really screwed up the footage part, which caused major problems down the line that never really got resolved. Basically the stereo portion of the project is unwatchable. (even if you happen to have a 3d monitor, projector, or tv. or more likely but still probably not, have anaglyph glasses sitting next to your computer like me)
I learned a lot in the process so the project wasn't a failure. You can watch the mono version of the project on vimeo. Click the image to be sent to the video page:
I'm going to do a quick breakdown of the plate eventually.
Monday, February 14, 2011
Mental Ray
Last spring I did some work with trying new rendering techniques (new to me anyway). You may remember my windmill tests. I am going to be using some renders for my thesis so I went back into mental ray contour rendering workflow and did another test render of some models. Instead of using lights for shadows I used ambient occlusion in mental ray. The great thing about this type of rendering is that its blazingly fast. This full HD render was probably under a minute on my box.
Thursday, February 10, 2011
Animations!
I uploaded two more animations to my vimeo site this week. The first is "Arrival." This was my animaiton 2 midterm project at Drexel. I worked with Jake Nichols and Kev Gross on it. The responsibility breakdown is on the vimeo site. It was nice to work with a group. We each could really focus on our individual tasks and do the things we liked to do. I had experimented a little with compositing for Moth but for this project I got to really have fun with it. Also thanks to my sister, Nyssa for some ideas when I was designing the texturing of the dragon.
Arrival on Vimeo
The second animation is the throat project I worked on with Jake and my animation 1 prof Dave Mauriello. It was a segment for a longer documentary about a throat doctor.
Throat on Vimeo
Arrival on Vimeo
The second animation is the throat project I worked on with Jake and my animation 1 prof Dave Mauriello. It was a segment for a longer documentary about a throat doctor.
Throat on Vimeo
Saturday, January 29, 2011
My Reel
I finished up putting together my reel: Here on Vimeo!
It is a collection of shots from a handful of animations that I've worked on over the past year at Drexel. Right now its more of a generalist reel, when I get to actually applying for jobs I'll probably edit it to slant it to a more focused skill set. For now, though, its everything. Also, I decided not to include music. In general, when employers are looking at reels they turn it off. When I watch reels I always turn off the music. I know that it would add interest to the piece (as a separate piece unto itself) but there are all sorts of problems with adding music that I didn't want to get into. I figure here is a good spot to recognize the other people that contributed to some of the work shown. Evan Boucher did the character animation for the first two Carver clips and Jake Nichols and Kev Gross worked on "Arrival" with me.
It is a collection of shots from a handful of animations that I've worked on over the past year at Drexel. Right now its more of a generalist reel, when I get to actually applying for jobs I'll probably edit it to slant it to a more focused skill set. For now, though, its everything. Also, I decided not to include music. In general, when employers are looking at reels they turn it off. When I watch reels I always turn off the music. I know that it would add interest to the piece (as a separate piece unto itself) but there are all sorts of problems with adding music that I didn't want to get into. I figure here is a good spot to recognize the other people that contributed to some of the work shown. Evan Boucher did the character animation for the first two Carver clips and Jake Nichols and Kev Gross worked on "Arrival" with me.
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