Minecraft Style Gangnam Style Parody Finished

Minecraft Style! I guess this is what happens when Minecraft meets Kpop. 

http://preview.tinyurl.com/8c4xps8

Minecraft Style Gangnam Style Parody

I have been doing lots of little projects here and there and here is a new little one that I have fun with. The purpose of this project was to teach myself the basics of tracking and compositing in a 3D character. Here is a playblast of the character perfectly tracked into the footage:

 

The next step is to, refine the animation, add shadows and lighting and finally the all important music track =D.

The Greenwich + Dockland Festival

I have just finished doing some work for the Greenwich + Dockland Festival. The huge event will be in the theme of Prometheus in the midst of the London 2012 Olympics. The festival will take place in Greenwich Park. I have helped develop a building projection light show that will light up Queens house at the north of Greenwich park. 

The event will be taking place at 10pm on the 22nd August. It is free so please come along =D.

More information and directions to the event here: http://www.festival.org/whatson/1/prometheus-awakes/

 

 

End of my final year at University

Hi, I am finally finished. Well almost. It has been a painful and fun journey but not long until I am out in the big bad world. 

Please visit my new portfolio website here: www.dtwatson.co.uk 

It has taken quite a bit of time to set up and I wanted a minimalistic look so I hope you all like it. Please feel free to send me an email and you can also see my showreel here:

 

I will also be at Expotees which is a huge graduate show that showcases many of the Universities best work and I have been selected. Here is a quick blurb from Teesside University:

ExpoTees is an annual showcase of students’ projects demonstrating innovation, research and development in a wide range of computing subjects – from advanced computer technology to those centred on entertainment.

ExpoTees 2012 will take place on Wednesday 9 May 2012, 1.00pm – 7.00pm, in the brand new building of the Darlington Campus.

For more information about ExpoTees, please visit their website :
http://www.tees.ac.uk/schools/scm/expotees/

I hope you like my reel and I will see you very soon as I already have a number of projects that I am ready to get my teeth sunk into.

Houdini Problems

The stage I am at now is making a simulation for the front of the cab to break apart when the missile first hits the ground in front of it. I have made a basic RBD simulation in Houdini to imitate how the front of the truck would break apart after impact. I am now having a problem exporting the geometry from Houdini into Maya as I can only export as FBX and only one peice of geometry at a time.

Explosion Render

Here is my fully rendered explosion simulation. I managed to optomise the scene to get the explosion to render 8 frames in an hour which was a huge improvement from 1 frame ever 5 hours.

 

 

Explosion Test

[[posterous-content:pid___0]]Here is a render of a frame from an explosion I made using Houdini's powerful Pyro FX tools. This image took about 30 minutes to render at 1920x1080 on low quality settings and using depth mapped shadows 512x512. I unfortunately do not have the luxury of a render farm so I am trying to find as many ways as possible to optimise the explosion in order to reduce render times.

Houdini works with LowResolution and UpResolution simulations. The workflow being that you are able to quickly get the simualtion looking the way you want before switching the simulation to UpResolution to render it out. I have had many problems with this the main being that the render times sky rocket and is not feasible to achieve on my lone PC.

I am going to continue to try and find ways to change this but at the moment I am limited to a Lower Resolution render and I cannot use Ray Traced shadows. This obviously makes the simulation look worse but there is little I can do at this stage.