I recently completed work on another viral video animation project, this time for M. Night Shymalan’s take on the classic Avatar, the Last Airbender.

My role as VFX supervisor mainly meant I was creating FumeFX animations of subtle dust and particle effects.

With just under two weeks to work with  the director, Matt Golding of Rubberductions, showed me some ILM clips and said “make it like this!”

Elemental Master performing a demonstration

Generally my workflow consisted of using PFtrack to track the shot, or to simply eyeball it if the camera was locked off – I then created a Particle Flow system that worked the way I wanted and used the PF particles as a fuel source for Fume FX.

Although the shots are very subtle there is a lot going on – especially with bodies and items swooshing the smoke around.

[See post to watch Flash video]

Vimeo link

Training Blast sequence

Element Academy – webcam game

I also produced VFX for a webcam game where the user must learn complex martial arts moves and demonstrate them in front on a camera - click here to play.

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.

18th Hole

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/2010/04/flash-radio-control-racer-alpha/ http://www.jd3d.co.uk/2010/04/flash-radio-control-racer-alpha/#comments Wed, 07 Apr 2010 17:41:24 +0000 Justin Dowling http://www.jd3d.co.uk/?p=649 Super Big Funtime Flash Racing Game!

Player Vs CPU

This is a racing game I began years ago for Ford. The job was halted before production finished so the game is incomplete; there are a few bugs and problems I do not have the time or inclination to fix. I still think at stands as an example of my level of Action-scripting ability.

Two Player Mode

Notable features include: two player mode; computer controlled cars; inertia and other simple phyics; changeable external maps; adjustable vector rendering quality; power-ups; 3D graphics; and a PHP scoreboard.

For some reason I received an ‘editor’s choice award’ for this, at a time when Flash game programming was in its relative infancy.  At the time Flash racing games were all cutting corners whereas I didn’t compromise on any details – things like collision detection or CPU controlled cars were always missing.  Nowadays this game is put to shame by what some people can achieve, but I’m proud anyway I learned a lot – anyway, if you’re thinking of hiring me for a job involving interactive menus or a bit of Max Scripting I hope this shows I’m able to do it.

Keys

Info Panel

Known issues:

Too numerous to list – come on, it’s been years since I’ve touched this, and it was stopped before it was finished.

• Track 3 is randomly refusing to load now.
• The embedded typeface seems to have lost some punctuation.
• Another typeface is missing, presumed dead (didn’t have permission to use at the time due to copyright).
• Sometimes the cars will fly backwards.
• The PHP high score table points to a location on a server with some guys I used to work with who have since taken it down.

If you do spot any bugs:

• I don’t care.
• Don’t point them out to me unless you are going to hire me to fix them!

Select Quality Mode!

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

Sunseeker Yacht Still

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.

Sequence 05

Sequence 04

Sequence 02

Final image

Model produced for Saddington & Baynes for Cathay Pacific.

closeup

test render of model

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.

Watchkeeper

Simple model of the Thales unmanned drone.