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.

Truck Lighting Test

Here is a lighting test on the tanker. It was rendered using Mental Ray with image based lighting using a panoramic chrome ball HDR environment. I have used final gather and composited it with a Ambient Occlusion pass it make it sit in the environment better. This image took about 10 minutes to render and a bit longer or the Ambient Occlusion pass as I set the samples to 256 to stop noticable graining appearing.

Simulation Tests

Here is a simulation showing how the front windscreen would break once hit with the initial force of the impact.

glassTest.mov Watch on Posterous

This simulation was done using houdini's rigid body and fracturing tools. The window is broken by a hidden object that is fired at the back of the windscreen to break it and force it forward.

Texturing Part 2: close to final design

Here are a few photos showing the truck from various angles. The texturing phase is almost done now. Just a few refinements and bump maps to be added.

See the full gallery on Posterous

Texturing

The next major step for the project was to begin the texturing of the truck. To start with I assigned different materials to different components on the truck. These grouped components will have individual texture space. I have decided to go for a green and white colour scheme and have designed a logo to go on the side.

See the full gallery on Posterous

Animex

I am currently at the Animex Animation and Games festival - http://www.animex.net/

This is a superb event with talks from many of the Industry leading companies.

Will not be able to upload much this week but will keep you posted soon!

Modeling. Phase 3

See the full gallery on Posterous

As you can see here the bulk of the modeling has now been completed. A few refinements still need to be done and then the texturing can begin.

Pre-Vis mark 2.

This is the next refinement of my Pre-Vis. I got a lot of feedback as how to improve from my original Pre-Vis. From the most basic, the rule of thirds. In my original Pre-Vis I had my horizon line in the middle of the screen, this results in a boring and less stimulating shot. So in this previs I have moved the horizon line to the botto, third of the screen and have also changed the ending camera to bring the viewer more into the action.

playblast_comp05.mp4 Watch on Posterous

Modeling. Phase 2

Here is a quick update to show the progression of the tanker model. As you can see he majority of the front is done now and I am now moving onto the back of the cab where the container will connect to. I have also started the base model for the oil container.

See the full gallery on Posterous

First Pre-Vis

I want to get the story of my piece across early on and I know that in the Visual Effect industry Pre-Visualisation is key to working out the main stages of the shot and as a fast and cheap way to set up camera angles and show progression to clients. So here is my first Pre-vis:

playblast_comp03.mp4 Watch on Posterous

Modeling; Phase 1 of many.

As I had all the blue print views sorted out I could delve straight into the modeling phase.

See the full gallery on Posterous

As you can see here, I decided to start by modeling the largest structures to give some shape to the truck as quickly as possible. This allowed me to get the basic curvature a scale of the truck from an early stage.

I then decided to move on to modeling the front of the cab as this was the clearest section on the blueprints model from and it kept me motivated by seeing how cool it was starting to look =D.

There are a few sections that I might need to break apart as my edge loops seem to be bunching up in parts and are too spread apart in others. I will quickly be able to see these errors by adding a highly specular material to my model. I will do this at various stages of the modeling process as a simple and fast quality control.

 

Textures and Reference

As this animation was going to be in a more realistic style than cartoony I needed to get really good reference material not only to model from but to use as textures to get the tiny scratches, scuff marks and dirt that are so hard to mimic by simply painting in photoshop. I went on fun little journey to the local motorway service station to get some really good reference images.

See the full gallery on Posterous

These images are perfect for what I need, now I can start modelling =D.

Truck Design and Choices

My next step is to choose what type of truck design I want to model and subsiquently blow up. As seen in my moodboards I have look at many different tankers.

Here is a very common petrol truck withing the United Kingdom. This is a BP (British Petroleum) Truck, that has stopped at a petrol garage to refill. This truck is perfect for the design I am looking to mimic. However I do not like the front cab design and know that this cab design is out of date now.

Here is an image of a newer Mercedes truck cab. This cab design is more common at present and has a good visual design. As you can see in the image that this is just a test truck for mecedes and when they are bought by businesses such as BP they will respray them with their logos and colours.

As I liked the mercedes cab design my next step was to find really good reference with which to model from. I found some Mercedes truck blue prints. These were ideal as my model would then be perfectly to scale. As you can see in this image I have side, front and top views of the truck and have aligned them in 3D space so I can model accurately from all angles.