Summary Senior Digital Effects Artist and Team Leader specializing in plate reconstruction, 3D set extension, texturing, rotoscoping, character animation and visual effects compositing. Experienced in pre-production planning, production FX supervision and postproduction, television and film.
Softimage XSI is my primary package with skills extending to other major 3D applications. Effects animaton for broadcast and film industries: experience in preproduction shot planning, character rigging, effects, texturing and general animation. Production experience extends to compositing, technical and HDRI photography, team planning and leadership, preproduction planning, camera matchmoving and on-set supervision of digital effects.
Resume and demo real available on request. Contact andymoorer at gmail.com.
I have been testing Mach Studio Pro for PLF for a while now, and while it's a very new tool I am pretty pleased with it's capabilities and potential. MSpro is an application which accepts scenes from most 3d packages (including Max, Maya, XSI, sketchup etc) and enables the artist to shade/light/render in realtime. Quality is high, with renders being competitive (and sometimes mistaken for) mental ray/vray etc in many cases. Being a realtime application there are caveats and limitations of course, for instance raytracing is not (yet) supported, nor are true radiosity/GI effects. Fair enough. And you'll still need to render out vFX passes like particles and volumetrics in another app.
But most CG isn't about all that - it's about the basics and that's where MSpro shines: on the 90% of the work you render which you can now do so in seconds rather than hours. It's very liberating being able to light shots with immediate visual feedback, and MSpro was written with a fair eye towards being a production-friendly application with python scripting, linear lighting and HDRI workflow, output to open EXR as pass breakdowns etc.
This is clearly the direction the industry is moving and Mach Studio is not without competitors, but as a just-out-of-the-gate package they are off to a great start. And don't get me wrong, MSpro isn't just about the bare minimums... realtime microtesselated displacement maps aren't basic, and realtime AO and SSS go a long way towards giving you the tools you need to create great imagery. In real time. No more waiting on farms. No more unpleasant surprises a day later as deadlines loom. And most importantly, iterative and immediate feedback enabling you to see the end product while you work.
People have been playing around with the "emit from SRTs" compound quite a bit and have had questions regarding use etc. To help out, I've uploaded some example scenes.
I am now a lead TD at Pixel Liberation Front. My focus is Pipeline, rigging, effects, wrangling, compositing and TD problem solving using Nuke, XSI, Maya, ICE, MachStudio and nDynamics. Python scripting, mel. Work includes major motion pictures, game cinematics, previs, postvis and finishing work.
oops and upcoming.
Thursday, 13 August 2009 20:46
An earlier version of the "Emit instances matched to SRT" compound had a bug which caused two instances to be emitted per object. My bad! the 1.2 version fixes this (all downloads from this site are now bug-free). Thanks to Lawrence Pankhurst for spotting it and letting me know.
Also a number of users have been startled when they use the compound in a simulated tree and see a continuous emission of instances. This is normal behavior - if you want a single copy of each instance master use the compound in a non-simulated tree to generate each instance. You can them simulate them in a second simulated ICE tree.
I'm currently out of the US and have varying connectivity as a result of travel until mid-September, after then I hope to release some more tools and compounds including the "self shadowing" compound many people have contacted me about on vimeo. Thanks to everyone for the interest and enthusiasim they've shown, I really appreciate it. - AM
Fragmenting objects for animation in ICE
Sunday, 26 July 2009 14:30
Currently ICE has no provisions for creating or destroying faces or edges, which means we can't create compounds directly in ice which for instance shatter objects. So what do you do if you need a "blastcode" type destruction effect in XSI? One solution is to approach the problem with XSI's rigid bodies, but they have their own issues and it's frustrating not to be able to leverage some of ICE's power for this kind of thing.
The good news is that if you can create fragments outside of ICE you can use ICE instancing to go from pre-fragmented instance masters to ICE particles. For instance, build a brick wall out of individual bricks, instance them in ICE with the same SRTs, and do a rigid body simulation in ICE. Or in the examples below, use ICE to animate geometry fragments or polygons.
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To achieve these effects I've written a script which extracts selected polys from a model and groups them as needed, and a compound which seamlessly takes a group of instance masters and creates identically placed ICE instances ready for simulation.
