Eureko November 22, 2008
Posted by Daniel in : Projects , add a commentWe were asked to create two crowd shots for this commercial. We had three weeks to deliver them so I build up a crowd system from scratch.I used a model library with around 100 meshes and textures and got animation cycles for the crowd. This was my first Houdini only project. I was really impressed how easy it was setting this up in Houdini. The rendering was done in Mantra. Using delayed read archives it was possible to render 10.000 people with three 2 k texture maps per character, raytraced shadows, ambient occlusion and motion blur in around 10 minutes.
Here are the two shots we did:
Mattoni November 17, 2008
Posted by Daniel in : Projects , add a commentWe were asked to create a water dress for a Mattoni commercial directed by Matthias Zentner.
After trying out several approaches (and no one worked) we finally decided to do the simulation in Maya using a custom fluid force field (an partly implemented version of this paper).
The dress was split up in several layers :
* the base layer covering her body with a thin surface (~750k particles)
* particles which were shot against her upper body and got visible with their first collision, to get some streams pouring down her body (~300k)
* particles emitted from dynamic curves which were attached to her body. The particles again just became visible after their first collision (~150k)
* and the skirt layer which should stay as a closed surface as long as possible (~300k). After breaking up some of the particles were replaced and some got killed to get lighter drops at the border (~100k)
Here my part ended…
The particle caches were then imported into houdini with a custom Phyton SOP, meshed and rendered with mantra’s PBR renderer.
Realflow was used to create additional feature splashes which were rendered in Mental Ray.
With this system running we then had to create 22 shots in three weeks.
Clip 1: First you see one of the particle simulation layers done in Maya, second is a meshed version of that and the last part is a demonstration of the implemented liquid force field.
Clip 2: Here you can see several versions of the skirt element.
Gran Centenario November 16, 2008
Posted by Daniel in : Projects , add a commentWe had to create dust effects and angel wings for a clip by Matthias Zentner. It’s about two people becoming angels.
So for the dust I created a particle system with sprites and instance geometry for the debris. The wings were a bit more complicated. We split it up into the covering top feathers - which were created using particles with instanced feathers:
and the long main feathers which were attached to curves. To get rid of interpenetrations I wrote a plugin deformer for Maya which traced a ray for each vertex of each feather against a nurbsplane which was lofted between the curves (representing the overall shape of the wing). Each feather was lifted from the rayhit-point according to the luminance of a queried ramp-texture - so we were able to get nicely shaped volume into the wings.
Here are a few shots:
Siemens April 26, 2008
Posted by Daniel in : Projects , add a commentMy first project at Blackmountain VFX in Stuttgart. We had about four weeks time. My job was primarily shading and to find a solution for the creation of a scene with more then 500 cars.
I developed a system to use particle instances. It automatically chose between several car colors and rims and set the position and rotation according to locators which where positioned in the scene. The benefit of using instances was also that they canbe toggled down to show only the bounding boxes. So it was also used for shots with just a few but very high-res cars. Here’s a fun test I did showing the connection between very low-res rigid bodies and the particle instanced cars:
The other thing I developed was a script to automate the creation of the transfer of a standard car to it’s exploded assembly drawing style version. It builds a Maya network to control the animation, it’s dimension and style in realtime. Just have a look at a shot from the clip:
yeeeeeeeeeaaaaaaaaaaaah February 11, 2008
Posted by Daniel in : General , add a comment
Smirnoff just won the VES Award for “Outstanding Visual Effects in a Commercial”.
Here’s a list of all winners:
www.fxguide.com/qt/235
Herbal Essences - Long Term Relationship February 10, 2008
Posted by Daniel in : Projects , add a commentThis was another project I was working on at Framestore. It was kind of - hmmmmmm - not my favourite. But from a technical point of view it was quite interesting.
My job was to create the silk ocean. Starting with some cloth simulation it eather didn’t bring the detail we needed or just got too slow. So I made some nice folding sheet animations with nCloth and rendered those as black and white heightmaps.
In Shake I created a 8k map and spread the heightmaps across it.
Using this texture on a big polyplane with a custom deformer in Maya it was quite easy to get some nice detail and animation. By adding more procedural ocean and ramp textures I got the look we needed.
Smirnoff Sea February 9, 2008
Posted by Daniel in : Projects , add a comment
When I arrived at Framestore CFC in march I was told that this should be my first project. I should take care of the water effects (splashes/drops). I started doing RnD and realized soon that one thing is the dynamic part and the other big thing is to get a few hundred thousand particles simulated and rendered. So I wrote two custom Maya fields. One for doing something similar to flocking (surface tension/collision/velocity matching) and another one to make many particles match the velocity and position of a few high quality simulated.
Here’s a video which shows how the so called “Massfield” works:
Monster Spot March 3, 2007
Posted by Daniel in : Projects , add a commentCrowd
The main thing I’m working on for the Monster Spot is the development of a crowd-plugin for Maya. After three months of development this is the first (renderman-) rendered result:
(Clip 4,3 MB)
So here are some captures of the final plugin:
Modelling
Here a thing I’m doing besides my “big” task to create crowds: I’m modelling a house for the main-street. It’s still wip but here it is:
Miniature Fun
Since quite a long time I wanted to try a miniature shot. So I ordered a 1:18 model car and bricks and we tried it with a hdv cam. After some retiming it looked like that:
(Clip 4,1 MB)
Happy about the result we took the chance to use a highspeed-camera, ordered another car and bricks which weren’t too big and gave it another try:
(Clip 1,8 MB)
Kieselstein February 12, 2007
Posted by Daniel in : Projects , add a comment
Kieselstein is a movie about a little girl who builds a monster out of garbage in the backyard. Her mother is calling her for dinner and want’s here to clean up the backyard. But the monster is alive… It’s a 3d animated short for kids, It’s the diploma movie of Ellen Hoffmann and I decided to learn to rig by helping her with the monster.
Here you can watch two first animation test with my rig by Ellen.
Here’s the link to the movies homepage
Das Leuchten February 1, 2007
Posted by Daniel in : Projects , add a commentI was asked to do some effects for this 15 min short. A sci-fi helicopter should be totally covered in a cloud. After starting to enjoy working with sprites it was decided to do the cloud with filmed footage and my job changed to do missile trails.
