A Nice Cup Of Tea

So I realise it has been a very long time since I last posted anything, I'm not promising I'll be putting it all up but I'll try. Anyway here is my submission for 'A Nice Cup Of Tea', had to rush the last few scenes but overall I'm fairly happy with it.

Seminar: Spine Rigged (clone love)

Rigged the spine, everything went fine, had one hickup where I added the controllers as bones in the skin, which baffled me for a while as I didn't realise I did it, but I sorted that pronto. Thought I would break away from the 360 degree view videos I have been putting up and instead rendered some clone loving. Enjoy.

Seminar: Leg Rigged with Bones

Buggered this up a little by misplacing the ankle, but here we are:

Seminar: Basic Man with Hands and Face

Todays seminar task. Mucked up the ears a little bit, oops.

3D World: January 2010 [P1]

Just a list of the companies that had work mentioned inside of the magazine and what I found out when I chased them up.

Air-CGI produce brilliant Visualisations, they create photo-realistic models (prominantly of cars) but integrate them perfectly with real captured footage, meaning if you didn't know any better then you wouldn't have a clue of the CGI's presence.

Moving Picture Company have a piece featured called Kerry LowLows 'Mouse', which I am sure you have all seen and would agree that the animation is ace. But there's more where that came from, they have a long list of animation and VFX clients, and as well as having produced amoungst the best TV Commercials I have seen they have also produced VFX for the following films:

• GI Joe. The Rise of Cobra
• Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince
• Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
  
• Night at the Museum 2
• Watchmen
• Narnia, Prince Caspian
• Sweeney Todd
• James Bond: Quantum of Solace
• 10,000 BC
• Angels and Demons
• Surrogates
• Dorian Gray

These are just the lastest, the list of films is massive and worth a look at. This company is huge and has branched into a lot of different areas regarding 3D. They are present in TV Broadcasting, Commercials, Films and Digital. They also have a 2D department.

Passion Pictures appear to be in a similar field to MPC, being quite prominant in commercials, not however breaking into film just yet. They are features for a piece called Coke Zero's Happy Kingdom, which I might add is brilliant, and is done by a man called Pete Candeland. When looking at the Passion Pictures Showreel I couldn't help but notice my absolute favourite advert, the latest from comparethemeerkat. I hope they turn this into a move, I love it. Oh, and the man responsible is Darren Walsh.

Tyson Ibele

Just looked up Tyson Ibele because of a plugin he did for max (building generator), and he is absolutely awesome. He's only a couple of years older than I am, and amazing with max. He does both visualisation and animation, and has been learning how to use 3D software since 2000. So maybe 9 years from now I'll be as awesome as he is. Here's some of his work:

Seminar: Basic Man Shape

The task from todays seminar.

Animation: Cup Fill

I'm still not hitting much luck. I think I have a mental block today because I just cant knack this. This video is meant to show a liquid pouring into a cup, but the liquid in the scene isn't so 'liquidy', it's more of a sludge. On the possitive side of things, the cup is successfully filled, the liquid raises as more enters the cup, and has rotation, possibly too much though. I used blobmesh in this one, but it hasn't worked out too well, as the liquid is actually blobby, I think it could work if i just reduced some parametres. I used a vortex to create the rotation and a uDeflector once more, this time combined with a 'collision' value from the paricle view. The particle system used was PF Source.

Animation: Water Bounce

I have tried to create a water bounce with super spray, uDeflector and a gravity system, however I don' feel I have achieved it. The particles are too many and the shape is consistantly circular, it looks fake. The bounce on the other hand looks ok. I have done some reading and apparantly a blobmesh may help towards realism.

Animation: Dynamic Water

First attempt at making dynamic water. I used reactor to create this.

'Up Above Down Below' Final Piece

Not so happy with this one, there's a lot more I wanted to do with it but didn't leave enough rendering time. The lighting could have been better, there could have been more in the scene, the speed needed to be regulated at the start and I didn't get to put in my big finish, which was to change the camera view at the end towards the earth to see it be blown up by the giant space invader.

Animation: Grass

Just modelled some grass and animated it. Used scatter to create the grass, then animated it with volume select and multiple wave modifiers to vary the movement.

Its the same piece of animation, only the second video has its speed reduced to x1/4 and had a light put into the scene.

Modelling: International Space Station

This is a piece I modelled for the visualisation project "Up Above Down Below", it's a slight adaptation of the International Space Station, the adaptation being I havn't put in the scaffolding around as it looked better without, and the textures are different.

It is available to download from TurboSquid HERE

Cinema: Avatar

"The world shown in Avatar is fleshed out in such detail and scope that you really feel like you're in a place that exists" - Dan Lemmon (FX supervisor, Weta Digital

After seeing the film twice in 3D I couldn't agree more. The environments in the film have such depth it does seem like you could step into any scene, whether it be the lush forests of Pandora or the futuristic human base camp.

However, as astonishing as the world of Pandora looks, the inhabitants blow that all away. The main race of humanoids that make up the film are called the Na'vi, and are the most complex characters ever created. They have multiple skin tissue layers, as well as tendon sheets to create realistic dynamic flesh, however the faces of the characters are even more complicated. Weta used HD cameras to capture their actors facial expressions, then using their in-house software created a map of muscle firings for expressions and converted it into motion data that could be applied to the Na'vi. They would then compare Na'vi expressions to the actor expressions and tweak whatever they needed to. Also worth mentioning, to create wrinkles in the skin of the Na'vi, instead of using traditional methods of adding them in a displacement map (allowing them to simply dissolve in and out) they were actually sculpted into the models, allowing for skin to squash together to form the wrinkle. The characters are full of little techniques such as this.

At A Glance:

• Large trees in the forests had up to 1.2 million polygons each.
• 1,852 total shots1,818 animated shots
• 900 crew at peak 
• Crew from 46 different countries, spread across 6 locations
• The larger shots of Pandora had more than 1,000 digital assets, excluding characters
• More than 1,900 digital assets were created
• Some of the larger shots had use between 5-50 billion polygons
• Around 10TB of data generated per day
• 483 unique plants, with geometry and texture modifications there are over 3,000 variations
• 53 unique Na'vi characters with over 100 variations
• 25 unique vehicles
• 21 unique creatures created, with texture modifications there are 68 variations
• 90 unique environments - 1,500 shot specific terrain pieces/elements to make these up
• 4,352 rendering machines 
• 34,816 CPU cores
• 104TB of RAM

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'Of Bots And Bananas' Final Piece

I'm fairly happy with this, there's a few things I would have liked to have done better, such as putting in a more noticable jolt of the shoulders in the walk cycle, and sound effects, but as a whole I'm happy with it.