November Robots

November was full of robots.

In the first half of the month, I finished unwrapping the walker mech and started fiddling with materials with a little bit of texturing. Here are some renders.

There is no weathering. I hope I can get away without it in the final product.

I then spent a few weeks drawing mech designs for a friend of mine. He was creating a board game with mechs, so he got me to design 4 mechs from one of the mech manufacturers in his game.

Why does the military use animal names?

The mechs should look economical, something akin to "the default choice". Alligator is an all-rounder model. Next is Crocodile, an upgraded version of Alligator. Komodo is a heavy mech meant for short range battles. Finally, Salamander is a light unit with heavy fire power. I found designing these mechs a mixture of fun and frustration. The fun comes from drawing robots, obviously. The frustration comes from my not being able to convey the feel of cheap/economical. We even had to resort to adding a hand, something that I think is rather expensive to manufacture.

Moving on from drawing, I resumed working on the car park robot VFX shot. Right now I am recreating the scene in 3D, trying to get the best match between the 3D scene and the 2D footage. Here hoping next month will see some early compositing done.

Car Park Robot part 1

Early October I started thinking about a moving camera VFX shot to which I would add a CG robot. I decided on a simple panning shot of a car park. The shot begins with a bipedal robot starting up (I imagine it as a car), pulling out of its parking lot. The camera pans to follow the robot as it walks off.

Satisfied with the idea, I went off to shoot my video footage using my camera phone, then proceeded to matchmove using SynthEyes, and was happy enough to get a nice 3D camera solution. I downloaded a free mech model provided kindly by Michael Kingery (aka Legato895). I quickly rigged the mech model, started experimenting with a walk cycle, and finally merged the model into the 3D scene with the 3D camera solution I got earlier. Here is a viewport grab.



It was all pretty rainbow and butterflies thus far because I spent in total only around 2 weeks of on-and-off effort while teaching the VFX class (I can do this because all my students are now working on their own projects; I usually spend until lunch time directing them what to do next and have most of the time after lunch to work on this mini project). But then I realized I could not rely solely on shaders to get a good mech look. I needed some textures, hopefully with minimum effort. So I checked the UV unwrapping of the model and found nothing. The model was not UV unwrapped.

The pretty rainbow went away, bringing along with it all the butterflies.

The next 3 weeks, until today, I have been unwrapping the model piece by piece. I took such a long time because I am not a skilled UV unwrapper. Another reason is because the model was triangulated and it seems that 3DS Max Relax Tool for UV unwrapping works better with quads. Finally, the model itself has modeling quirks that make UV unwrapping more complicated. I found myself making minor modifications and cleaning ups just to make the unwrapping process easier. Right now I only have the feet left.

I use checker pattern to test my unwrapping. Notice only the feet has not been properly unwrapped.

Let's see what I can do in the coming month :)

Tornado

Here is an effect shot I finished recently.

My goal was creating a still image to be used in promotion material for CG Protege, the animation school I am currently working for as VFX instructor. In my mind, the still image needs to achieve 2 things:

• Just with one look anyone can tell that it is an effect shot, not a regular photo.
• The image should look good enough to invite interest.

I find the first requirement difficult. I cannot go the route of invisible effect shot: an effect shot in which I composite an object we see daily, say a car, so that viewers cannot tell that it is an effect shot. I thought tornado is a good solution for this requirement. I made it "in your face" even further by adding lightning. The second requirement is somewhat easier. As long as I am careful with quality control, the image should be interesting enough. I hope I achieve these. (Feel free to tell me what you think in the comments.)

Here is the breakdown.

I used 3ds Max and FumeFX to generate the tornado. I used 2 FumeFX simulations: one for the top part of the tornado, another for the funnel shape at the bottom. I rendered the passes using 3ds Max Scanline renderer. I used mental ray renderer only for the lightning glare. Finally, I used Nuke for compositing.

Dream Defenders Reel

Last year I worked as a member of the VFX team for the animated series Dream Defenders. It is an original series developed and produced at Tiny Island Productions (the animation studio I am working at).

My responsibility was creating the necessary VFX elements for the shots assigned to me. In some cases I had the freedom to create a new VFX look (in 3D) based on 2D design paintings (usually effects for the monster of a particular episode); in other cases I simply used existing VFX templates and adjusted the timing for repetitive effects (such as the main characters' blasters). Dream Defenders is a stereoscopic 3D series, so I almost always created the effect elements in 3ds Max (exceptions are 2D elements that I can cheat in compositing such as interlace lines and animated noise for hologram effect). I then rendered the elements in layers and put them together in Nuke. In Nuke I mostly did color grading and color correction.

So, here is a selection of VFX shots I worked on. Feel free to leave comments.

Opening Image

Hi there,

My name is Denny and I am currently working as visual effects (VFX) artist at an animation studio in Singapore. I am starting this blog to share my working life with anyone interested out there.

The way I paved my career so far is perhaps atypical. I changed fields from academic computer science research to programming/software development to 3D animation. I would like to stay in 3D animation for good, but I think I still want to try different specialties in the field. I hope I can share my experience, thoughts, and works with you all in this blog.

If you have been to my old blog and want to go there, you can still do so. Now I call it "PersonallyDish". In case you wonder why the change, I have been thinking hard about what I want to do with my career.
On one hand, I realize that other people (my colleagues at work, my students at CG Protege, my friends and family, as well as other people from industries related to computer graphics and animation) expect me to follow the usual path to develop my career. For example, from late last year until this April, I marketed myself as VFX artist. Unsurprisingly, other people from CG (computer graphics) industry ask me about lighting setup, compositing software, simulation tools, shaders, et cetera. I can have good conversations about these topics, but I find myself internally conflicted. That is because...
... on the other hand, I honestly think being a VFX artist is but a step in my journey. I do not see being VFX artist as the goal of my career.

So, after a few months of not being sure what to do with my old blog, which has a mix of personal and professional things, I decided to start anew. Not just a new blog, but a new thinking behind it. This blog is not about computer graphics and VFX; it is about things I find important from work.

(Meanwhile, I can now continue writing personal writings at PersonallyDish without worrying about how they will affect my professional image, which is also important to me.)