Archive for 3d
Verlet Spring Water Simulation
Posted by: | CommentsIt’s been done by better TDs than myself, but a question arose on SI-community so I decided to pull out and dust off a simulation I slammed together during green lantern in a couple of hours, as an example scene. I put this together when we were doing rapid look dev for a “green energy” effect at PLF, where a woman is rescued by splashing into a surface of “water” which then turns into a flood and whisks her away from the fight…
You can find the compounds and the scene used to make this image here.
More compounds for download
Posted by: | CommentsI admit it. I’m bad about remembering to post compounds for download. But not today… I’ve added a bunch of simple-but-useful compounds, some of the ones I use fairly often for a range of tasks. Included are a bunch of emission filters which can be used for all sorts of things, such as controlling placement of scattered objects, such as the tree cards in the images below. Enjoy. – AM
Fury Particle Renderer gets Furious-er
Posted by: | CommentsAs long as we are talking about Exocortex, they just posted this exciting preview of the next version of their point rendering tool Fury.
For those of you wondering why this is important, it’s simple enough. Fury is fast. Really, really fast. And it was written by Ben Houston, the original author of Krakatoa, a tool of choice for rendering particles. Softimage, Max and Maya users alike can move their simulations to ICE (or create their simulations with ice directly) and partake in the Fury awesomeness.
LOOK at it. 1 million points. Self shadowing and cast shadows. 1-second-per-frame.
“The major new features in Fury 2.0:
* GPU-accelerated particle self-shadowing
* Shadow maps
* Built-in compositing previewing.
* Command line renderer support.
* Synchronized Softimage and Maya support.
In this example, 1 million points are lit and rendered in about 1 second per frame and the shadow map is also created at the same time. Motion blur and DOF do not slow down rendering time.
The simulation in this example is from a alpha-version of SlipstreamVX 2.0 and thus the smoke motion isn’t quite perfect in this video.”
Congrats to Exocortex for Harry Potter VFX
Posted by: | Comments
There is a good article online about Exocortex and the work they did using Slipstream VX for the last Harry Potter film. You can find it here.
Some excerpts:
The pool, known as the Pensieve to Harry Potter fans, contains an oillike liquid that sloshes around in its basin whenever someone gazes into it. While they had managed to make do with available tools in previous Harry Potter movies, this time around animators wanted the effects to be bigger, better and more realistic than ever before.
Houston, 32, sold the company a piece of specially designed software that mimics real world physics and helps to accurately create water digitally. The water special effect had taken Houston more than three years to perfect. The software tool was designed to work with Gradient’s existing special effects software.
“I went and further customized our software to meet the needs of the Harry Potter production,” said Houston, adding the experience has been “awesome.”
Animators at Gradient learned about Houston’s software from a review in a computer graphics magazine, he said.
Having written the magazine article in question, I couldn’t be happier for Exocortex. Good work, guys!
GEAR – Use softimage? Get it.
Posted by: | CommentsJeremie Passerin is a TD and Rigger who has put a huge amount of time, thought and effort into an open source rigging toolset for Softimage, which he calls GEAR.
Very cool. But, you say, it’s for softimage and my stinking studio makes me use Maya. Well, Maya users, have hope. Jeremie has also been beta testing a Maya version, called MGEAR.
Let’s face it, there are more animators needing high quality rigs than there are high quality riggers. And rigging takes a lot of time. That’s why autoriggers came into being. If you are laboriously assembling all your rigs by hand and you just want to get to animating, you really, really need to be using a solution like Gear.
GEAR has the openness and enough well -thought tools to appeal to a dedicated rigging TD while also providing a fast and reliable way for animators to generate sophisticated rigs with a minimal learning curve. It’s modular in design, meaning it isn’t restricted to rigging only humanoids or quadrupeds, and it’s extensible, so riggers can use GEAR as a framework upon which they build in their own particular style.
It’s a very well thought out system and highly recommended for small studios and individual animators who need good rigs fast, as well as riggers interested in having the capabilities of an autorigging framework without the desire (or time) to make their own.
Mental Mill and Softimage
Posted by: | CommentsIf you are already an experienced shader writer, Mental Mill doesn’t have much to offer, auto-generated code won’t appeal. But for TDs who haven’t the experience or time needed to get a shader going, it’s a huge boon. It’s also a way to get a feel for shader code, letting you experiment and see how the code changes as a concept is changed.
Here’s the mental mill blog, with some info for softimage users.
What’s important for everyone to know about Mental Mill is that the same “tree” can be used to generate code for multiple rendering types – with a few caveats, you can create a shader for Mental Ray, a matching realtime shader, and a renderman compliant shader all in one go (ummm, Arnold? Oh well). For softimage users, this can give you custom solutions you can see in both the viewport and at render time. Here’s a video which covers creation of a realtime shader, for instance…
Mach Studio 2 review
Posted by: | Commentshttp://www.3dworldmag.com/2011/02/01/review-machstudio-pro-2-the-future-of-rendering/1/
A 3D World review I wrote a while back of the (now free) Mach Studio Pro v2, which I have also written about on this blog, is now online. – AM
ICE crash shot
Posted by: | CommentsFrom a couple of years back, when ICE was very new.
MS Pro 2.0 – Free?
Posted by: | CommentsStudioGPU’s realtime renderer Mach Studio Version 2 is now available as a free download, with exporters for Max, Maya and Softimage. Hopefully this reflects a change in marketing strategy and not a discontinuation of development, as the product was beginning to mature nicely… but either way it’s a powerful tool at a great price, well worth the download. My little tests on this blog have barely scratched the surface of this renderer. It’s not a replacement for all rendering, but if you need blazingly fast render times measured in seconds and minutes instead of hours and days, while maintaining a certain basic quality (which with skill can rival mental ray and arnold), it’s the only game in town.
Render time per frame at 2k resolution, 0.1 seconds.
Screen capture
Janimation Facial Animation
Posted by: | CommentsThis demo shows Janimation’s facial animation methodology. Mocap is run thru face robot for retargeting and to generate some base shapes, which are then sculpted and stored. A rig then uses ICE in some clever ways to blend those shapes as controls are driven by the mocap data (or new data) plus there are some other tricks. While Face Robot is used early in the process, the end result rig is proprietary to JA, and much faster and easier to work with. Cool stuff.
