In the summer of 2011 I worked closely with creative director Phil Webster at Play Nicely on the titles for the ITV Rugby World Cup.

I was responsible for managing the pipeline for the whole project, as well as the FumeFX particle systems used to render the ink effect.

I think we created some pretty damn fine particle effects.

Breakdown

Credits

Opening title sequence for ITV1′s coverage of the 2011 Rugby World Cup. The sequence is based around images created in ink – a reference to the native maori tattoos of New Zealand where the tournament is being held.

Directors Richard Norley, John McKenna.
Designed by Lee Jacobs. Composited by Russell Mann.
Particle Effects: Play Nicely

Just after Christmas I helped out with some motion graphics work for the National Television awards.

I was responsible for animating the text that explains how the voting system works - the sequence lasts for a minute and was the longest animated sequence of the whole night.

Animation done in Max then exported to Maya for rendering.

[See post to watch Flash video]

See the AR project HERE. You’ll need a webcam and a printer.

By pure coincidence, this is my second dinosaur project to end up showing at the Natural History Museum

Thought Den have done a pretty good job describing the project here, so I will only talk about my role, which was producing the 3D.

Yeah, so basically I did the 3D.

My tasks were split into 3 major sections – the first was to produce the Spinosaurus skeleton to be manipulated in the Flash AR environment – I chose to  rig the skeleton in CAT, which meant I could easily add, remove and edit bones; the second task was to create a fully skinned Spinosaurus, again in realtime for AR; and finally, to produce a looping animation segment examining an Egyptian dig site, that you can see below.

Modelling the skinned Spinosaurus was easy – I bought it from Turbosquid; To be be fair though it was a high poly model and was textured in a bit of an old school way with multiple sections pasted into multiple subobjects. So basically it was a simple ‘render to texture’ job followed by the proOptimizer.

The animation was pretty straightforward too. I used MentalRay’s daylight system and created a looping animation, moving the camera with a bit of old-school motion capture. I enjoyed this animation immensely as I knew it was for the kids – I always remember being a kid and looking at those science books that had incredibly detailed illustrations which could lose you for minutes at a  time. I tried to pack in as much detail and information as I could, from tent pegs to Indiana Jones hats – but alas, there is only so much you can do with a desert dig-site and 4 days.

I would also like to give special thanks to Mike at Everything Dinosaur who’s help was invaluable on this project.

I’ve just completed work on some animation for the BBC 1 Christmas eve broadcast of the National Lottery Euromillions draw.

The show was broadcast live from the Natural History museum and occasionally featured animations projected onto the building itself.

The projections were based on laser scans and photographs of the building, so that when animated the building looked to be moving.

I was supervising the VFX for a couple of the sequences, notably the finale where a dinosaur smashes out the front of the Natural History Museum revealing the final Euromillion number.

I produced everything in 3DS Max and imported the animated dinosaur in from Maya via FBX – the dinosaur was animated by the ever lovely Scott Pleydell-Pearce.

My favorite part was smashing the building up using Rayfire and PhysX – I think I have a real taste for blowing things up and destroying them in 3D now – can’t wait to do it again!

You can see the entire performance here (opens in new window).

[See post to watch Flash video] ]]> http://www.jd3d.co.uk/2011/01/national-lottery-christmas-eve-draw/feed/ 0 http://www.jd3d.co.uk/2010/07/wind-turbine-animation-for-422-south/ http://www.jd3d.co.uk/2010/07/wind-turbine-animation-for-422-south/#comments Mon, 19 Jul 2010 16:40:36 +0000 Justin Dowling http://www.jd3d.co.uk/?p=790

Dual Blade Wind Turbine

I have always wanted to work for 422 South so I felt honoured when they asked me to produce an animation for them.

The animation was for a dual-blade wind turbine system that would reduce the construction, transport and manufacturing cost over normal 3 blade systems.

I used 3DS Max with Mental Ray and took 5 days to complete the task.

I just finished a contract with Hi-Sim for 422 in Bristol, producing an animation for the Madrid 2018 Ryder cup bid. The job was very much like a standard architectural visualisation job except I had the chance to brush up my Maya skills and learn some new tricks from some great CG guys.

I still feel that Max has a clear lead when it comes to architectural visualisation, but found that both Maya and Max talk together so easily that it’s easy to perform a task in one then jump over to the other.

I was disappointed to find that there’s no way to save a Maya MentalRay architectural shader to 3DS Max even though the options are the same. The MetalSL language is supposed to fix the problem but only exists with 3DS max at the moment; I intend to write a script that will save materials from one application to the other.

I spent most of my time modelling and getting my head around the Maya MR proxy system.

]]> http://www.jd3d.co.uk/2010/05/madrid-2018-ryder-cup-bid/feed/ 0 http://www.jd3d.co.uk/2010/03/more-videos-on-my-youtube-page/ http://www.jd3d.co.uk/2010/03/more-videos-on-my-youtube-page/#comments Tue, 23 Mar 2010 17:32:32 +0000 Justin Dowling http://www.jd3d.co.uk/?p=556 Here is a a temporary link to my Youtube channel that has a whole bunch of stuff I haven’t had a chance to add to my website just yet.

http://www.youtube.com/user/mynewcat?feature=mhw4

At some point I realised that many of the arc viz animations we were doing at work were too ‘still’ – trees weren’t moving, birds weren’t flying, there was no sense of the space being alive.  I thought I would create a little library of basic elements that we could use in the background of animations so there was some kind of movement – little things that might draw the eye ; I thought butterflies might be nice so I had a crack at creating one.

Basic butterfly test – DOF, motion blur etc.

How?

I remembered seeing a documentary about butterfleis where it was explained they have an autonomic mechanism that causes them to jerky around in mid flight to avoid predators – a predator cannot accurately predict where the butterfly will be when it strikes.

Armed with that tidbit of information I placed the butterfly on a  dummy object with a noise position controller; the wings were animated with an out of range controller and I threw on a flex modifier.

After getting a basic butterfly working I wanted to see it in a basic scene – to work out how fast it should be moving and to get it to scale etc.

Butterfly test in situ.

Can I see the finished product?

Unfortunately I don’t have permission to show any of the finished projects where the butterfly was used, though I’m sure I will get one up in future!

Using my existing Gundam model, I used 3DS Max and VRAY to create environment where I could experiment with lighting and camera work – I then decided to expand the animation into a kind of viral style ‘UFO conpiracy nut’ type video (and yes this was well before seeing Transformers 2), which I proceeded to upload to LiveLeak.

Although slow and meandering, I got to use a variety of skills and produce some nice looking results – I even managed to camera track from mobile phone footage and composite a motion-captured animation of my rigged robot.

Other camera work was done by matchmoving a DVD camera and utilising the generated camera movement.

Compositing was done in After Effects and the video put together in Premiere.

GI Joe poster

I helped produce a viral video for the new GI Joe: The Rise of Cobra movie; the video was circulated around sites like Daily Motion to generate buzz for the new movie.

I materialised the suit, lit the scene, modelled and animated the skateboard as well as doing some of the rotoscoped animation of the ‘Joe’ in the powersuit.