Finally HD 720p. Click HD button or watch on youtube. My laptop doesn’t even run the video smoothly without an optimized encoding.
Generalist visual effects from a limited selection of CG work (r03), as a “student thesis” for NYU 2009. We don’t actually have a thesis, just optional classes and projects, only attendance is required (yep college headcount). Projects from Star TV, CFs, and other freelance gigs.
See my other videos for full length animation and tools presentation.
HD download & descriptions on my site: gophercg.

Version r03 is much more organized, newer clips, timing, by subject (kind of?). A pure effects reel is usually under 2 minutes, and animation showreel well above 3 minutes. I’m hoping this generalist demo is not too long.

3 minutes is pretty short, so all my clips feel like a difficult quantity to prune down. Next stop would be to focus and raise the quality. I mentioned the work permit issues here, and keep getting interviewed for some reason, so yes, I’m looking for a (legal) job!

Some recently finished modeling. A wheel and a baseball, sounds boring eh? Well not at all, it’s quite challenging.
Previously I’ve done mostly organic modeling (and not even high detail), where topology’s more important near detail areas, and each vertex (for subd or smooth) is more forgiving. Hard surface on the other hand, can have parts with careless topology, like flat areas. But once precise curves and flats must join, every detail area needs both perfect topology and vertex location.

The wheel somewhat references a Lamborghini Reventon Roadster, since the 2009 version debuted with a strange looking wheel, actually similar to some older Reventons. A problem was lack of reference photos for the wheel (there are only a handful of unique Roadster 2009 photos online). But I wanted to challenge the features, not the exact positions of shapes, so the details turned out nice.

The tire treads are a challenge, since I wanted connected treads, separate extrude treads, and even circular treads (inspired by cloud patterns on JP wear), besides very dense fillet. Everything turned out well, except the top cap of some treads. The tire process lends itself great to procedural/history based modeling, which Maya does to a limited extent (I had to deal with a messy node graph and reconnect nodes and hope it works). And it switched halfway from a Nurbs model to a dense poly, so unfortunately some top caps are separate geos and have gaps with the sidewall fillets. I planned to keep all nurbs, but SW and MR render with the highest nurbs settings couldn’t remove visilble gaps at trims. The best I got was random black dots along the seam. Ok, still learning Nurbs, maybe Rhino or some methods can give correct nurbs rendering.

The steel rim, spokes, center and bolts are also by a Nurbs -> poly process. Nurbs was great setting the precise curves and exact cuts. Though I’m still gauging when the poly conversion should best occur.

The baseball also took lots of experiments, and now it’s curvatures are precise to baseball spec, and all Nurbs. The trims get away because the render’s small enough. And the 108 stitches are fairly light weight since it’s paintfx.

Slideshow:
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Or see all images:

UPDATE: video up!
I’m still freelancing for now, and thought a 13 second ID is cakewalk! Well, not quite, but was doable. Can’t speak of specifics yet, but a 1 person do-all faces lots of issues I thought were easy.

Transparent mapped polygons and shadows have lots of issues.
Set shader shadow attenuation=OFF. Shadows (ray) cast are affected by angle of surface normals, so it must be off for any objects like architectural people boards.
Reflections are easy with useBackground, but shadows were a pain. I’m sure there’s a better method, but my shading experience is limited now.
useBackground for a groundplane doesn’t work, because this shader doesn’t have the common shadowAttenuation. So I get weird clipped out shadows and the ugly poly shadows. A makeshift method is use a normal shader instead, but colored. Key the color out later. It’s not great because the ground borders shouldn’t be visible in shot (curved up corners like a greenscreen set), and real uniform light for the plane is needed, since ambient/incandecence and other tricks of uniform color washes out shadows completely.

So far it’s all raytraced shadows, and soft shadows work but slooow. Although I should give mentalray a try, I need to hack my way in a short time and a test render shows mr shadows with the exact problem maya has.

A last issue I couldn’t fix with uping reflection limit or any other settings is when transparent mapped planes intersect, the shadow cast from that region is gone. So we get nice shadows with odd poly shapes cut out.

I’ve also defined an asset for “ambient occlusion” between these transparent planes. It’s really just final gather. But the boards were background elements so raytraced shadows sufficed. There are actually two ways for transparent AO (mentalray AO only supports plain geometry). One is normal FG, very easy and no special shaders. The other is the mr shader network you’d find if you google it. The FG shader seems more predictable, but I haven’t tested enough to compare their quality. I just find the simple FG has more varying shades (noise?). Theoretically AO is a white environment subset of FG, but getting FG to have clean results for sharp edge shading on white needs quite some tweaking.

Do I like freelancing? Well, it’s fun, sometimes. And exhausting, always. Don’t think of earning, because after you’ve done a few months, you’d be glad to earn a fraction of a month’s rent. I “landed” two official jobs recently, stable pay, insurance and all, but too bad this country’s foreign worker regulations make it impossible. What a shame. It’s a pretty island. If it doesn’t work out…well then it’s Singapore, Canada, EU, Hong Kong!

i wonder why screencaps are harder for me than coding and fixing 3d? anyways. I’m organizing the old bird rig into a screencap presentation. Publicizing works is quite important, as it keeps me more organized and on task. I’m still quite surprised why I made 60+ shelf scripts (mostly MEL) just for the BIRD! And a few aren’t just short tool scripts.
Hoping this video turns out well, I’ll do a first pass into revisiting just what this bird does….stay tuned

Website! Yay cleaned up the homepage, mostly CSS details, and clean graphics (gophercg). I still prefer the minimalist feel (maybe major turn-off by making a text console style LOL), but now it’s all pleasant and tidy. As for the grid in galleries I know how to use divs/spans for the presentation, but so far my site is fine in firefox and IE, so before I decide on a pure flash site, I’m keeping em tables! Image galleries are converted to Flickr sets too.

Improved from cloth fracture 01, where the tearing was dynamic by the houdini cloth solver. In 02 I fixed the pre-fracture designs, by help of a houdini developer removing hidden fuse nodes. He filed this as bug 36556.

There is no tear/pull btw patches, but notice the left side are smaller pieces, while the right has longer strips. And I made the edge more jagged, which can’t occur if auto tearing does the breakage. It’d be nice however if I can pipe custom designs into the tear solve.

Also learned that packaged/defined nodes can be opened and allow editing (this is different from node lock). Basically change the default cloth object type.

It’s quite weird as an effects/programmer to relearn CG modelling, especially when it’s been several years since I did extensive character/scene models. Now maybe I’m becoming a well rounded CG generalist, or maybe uping skills to extend fx ability even further, since a lot of effects do rely on understanding topology/model detail etc (more practical than supernovas and nuclear blasts?).

zbrush is pretty fun so far, but I wish to learn more about controlling topology, since it’s a bit insane to just make polys 16x denser whenever more detail in a small area or direction is needed. zbrush does surprisingly well on a laptop, but I’m worried for maya when it needs to process that poly weight.

First model in zbrush:



aweful head!!

(* 7 sided just for fun)

Initial tests with the basic Z tutorials:

Radial symmetry sculpting is very nice and takes practice. I haven’t figured out ZProjection brush. The top of a dog head is embedded onto the vase. Maybe it doesn’t work with models with concave areas respective to view projection? So it’s like a z displacement?

Move brush on the blade. I’d rather use some larger deformers like lattice, since move can distort details while moving in a nonsmooth way. The video did it pretty well, so I should try fiddling with settings and move more precisely. Handle texture I’m totally not getting, fillobject? I can’t paint color, only entire mrgb shaders, and the paint edges are poly jagged.

Later add old maya into the mix…more to learn!

(fullsized models)
CG models

dailies for Tuesday…
dabble in smoke. 1 clip rendered. I’ll post both when the 2nd render’s done.
There was a default volume material with no texture settings (1st clip), so I searched for a 3d texture that works like maya’s texturing in fluid.
It’s billowy smoke. I suppose it can be changed to perlin noise or others but I like the tweaked shadows+lighting now.

edit:
03 fixed motion, shadow, still a bit jittery:

02 good volumetric shadow, shading, “laughing intestine” is kinda disturbing:

01 flat aweful shading, too random:

For now I’m moving to web development. Maybe I could learn speed modeling to keep some dailies up, since every vfx takes longer timeframes to learn and develop.

Wacom + Vista
The problem is common across Graphires and pro series recently. I’m not sure about Cintiq’s since I’m away from our animation lab and just what is a Bamboo.
Actually I experienced a pile of issues with the tablet and Vista. Perhaps getting back the old Graphire and xp would be the improvement.

Fix 1:

Pen and input/
Enable right click and eraser. Clear everything else on all tabs/parameters.

This removed weird conflicts between Vista’s tablet driver and wacom’s own driver. But Photoshop x64 had no pressure sensitivity, while my other x86, x64 apps are fine. So I installed the latest (5.1.1) wacom driver. PS is fixed, but now I joined everyone with right click/hold causes pausing or staggering issue. It’s reported in max and maya. I must hold right click and move it far enough to see maya menus, so productivity became a serious issue. Colleagues with Intuos also has this issue.

Fix 2 (from online):

device manager/
Disable wacom virtual HID device
Features/
Remove the Tablet PC Optional Components

This should remove some hogging processes and fix the stagger after restart. My Vista refuses to remove the “components” (mostly handwriting recognition + Journal etc), so I did the optional fix.

Fix 3:

services/
Disable tablet pc input service
(KEEP TabletServicePen, which is the wacom driver)

This removes the 5 processes from wistip & tapTip. 3 pen_tablet processes remain for wacom. Caution: some CG artists found stopping the Vista service stops tablet use completely (no detection?). However, except for the usual nondetection between hibernation/sleep/boot requiring another reboot, I used the three fixes and Graphire runs slick.

particle concepts & fun with ink. MOV files below.

waving cloth structure

First time using HDRI. Don’t laugh. Was reading HDRI tutorials before 2003, but when needed, I usually found IBL from normal images (like “LDRI”) sufficient and easy to design my own. For realistic soft environment lighting and GI-like shadows IBL has been great. But HDRI gives more definition to highlights and smoothness.

UPDATE: 2nd revision. I removed the odd flickering (due to mentalray sampling), but left some extra “sparkle” at one point for a starry sky feel. The DOF by floating point control was hard to use, but there’s still some rack focus I hope it’s effective. The “DESIGN” text is clearer now, with new frame compositions for the primary marks.

morphing sphere

You’ll find a 2 petal and 3 petal pattern. weird?

lots of pastelly balls

I tried the renderers to find a speedup, since we couldn’t use the shot because of the render times.
hw 45″, mr 3:45″, sw 4″
Yes 4 seconds for Maya software, sw wins again! And for 10k balls, raytraced shadows made more sense since each ball could receive shadows.

Chinese ink

first try at an ink shot.
I’m gathering some references, and there’s a wide variety, some with apparent methods (like that must be from so and so software + plugin…). Also it’s important not to overthink the movements. Some truly good ink splashes in 3Dare photographed and comped well.