Samples of Available Services- Click to Play!

What can I do for you?

Visual effects work can be confusing, and sometimes directors don’t appreciate what can really be done.  I’ve worked on everything from removing pimples on teenage actors faces, to skydiving ninjas filmed entirely on green screen, and even rampaging computer generated dragons.

The overall goal is always the same- to help to tell a story, and to improve the production value of your film as it’s perceived by your audience.  Sometimes small changes, like removing distracting background elements or skin blemishes, can go a long way to making your film look top-notch.  You may have a story element that would be unsafe, impractical, or even impossible to shoot (rampaging dragon torching a medieval village, anyone?)  Or you may just benefit from getting the weather conditions you want, or by getting that night shot during a less-expensive daytime shoot.

I’ve decided to create a longer showreel exhibiting some of the options, set into broad categories.  A lot of these shots aren’t the kind of thing that would necessarily make it onto my main demo reel.  They’re here to help you understand what I offer, and maybe stir some ideas about what I can do for your film.  The reel is long, and it’ll get longer as I think of and add more examples!

In the end, though, your imagination is the limit.

For more information or to inquire about your project’s specific needs, please contact me directly.

Want a slicker, quicker presentation of my work? View online or download a much higher quality copy of my Demo Reel.

The final result - Click to play

Intro

Ok, so it’s kind of hard to think of a clever title for a breakdown like this. Still, the shot is fun, so hopefully that’s enough!

Maya to RealFlow

The dynamic simulation after returning to Maya- Click to play

This shot begins it’s life in Google. I started by searching for photographs of cracked walls, stone, and glass, looking for a fracture pattern that I would like to replicate in my concrete slab.

When I found an acceptable pattern (broken glass as it turned out), I imported it into Maya as an image plane and set to work duplicating it’s pattern in geometry. To do this, I used the Create Polygon tool to create a face over one of the glass fragments, then used Append to Polygon to build out from there. The end result was a good match to the real-life fracture pattern, with each fragment of the real glass being copied by a face in my polygonal mesh. I then broke this apart into individual objects, extruded them to about an inch deep, and centered their pivot points. This was certainly the most tedious part of the shot, taking about 2 to 3 hours of mind numbing work, but it was incredibly easy and gave me a true-to-life fracture pattern for the concrete slab.

The bricks were simpler- I created a cube, rounded the edges a bit, and stacked them into a pattern behind the concrete. I then selected the bricks in the impact area and used Maya’s Solid Shatter to break them into random chunk- I wasn’t as concerned about their pattern being realistic since they’re behind the concrete slab. I also selected random bricks throughout the wall to fracture as well, to maintain a feeling a realistic randomness. These meshes were also center pivoted.

To get the models into RealFlow I exported as an .SD file using the plugin provided with the software, and it worked fine. Inside RealFlow I made all of the objects into Rigid Body dynamic objects and left their mass and other settings alone. I used the Attachator script from Dynamic Boy on the NextLimit scripting page to create Fixed constraints automatically to one key object. I then created a gravity field. The purpose of the Fixed constraint is to hold the wall chunks into their proper places as a wall until a certain amount of force is applied to them. The object that I attached them to I simply moved out of the way of the collision and turned off dynamics for, to prevent it being affected by the scene’s gravity. Next, I selected the constraints and set the levels of force that I wanted to apply to the break them apart from the wall- I had them much weaker in the center and progressively stronger as they reached the edges. I also set a release frame on the center constrains so that they would fall at a given frame even if they hadn’t been shoved aside- I didn’t want any individual faces still hanging around erroneously after a long simulation!

The particle dust in Maya- Click to play

Finally, I learned that it’s useful to select all of the objects and scale them from 1 down to 0.99 or so, preventing them from touching each other as soon as the simulation starts. This helps lessen the chance of errors, and you can simply scale them back to 1 when you export to Maya.

The actual explosion was simulated by slamming an extremely massive sphere into the wall. The final simulation ran over night, and had no problems. I used the propagation solver with time steps set to about 20. I then exported the .SD files back into Maya.

Finally, in Maya I used the original reference image of the fractured glass textured onto a plane as an emitter for cloud particles. I textured these with some noise, made them very transparent, and emitted a large number of them on each frame. I was only interested in the alpha channel, which I would use in AfterEffects to create the dust. I left the geometry on with a Use Background shader on it so that it would be properly occluded in the composite.

Render Passes and AfterEffects

In order to get the image I wanted in After Effects, I decided to render a depth pass, an ambient occlusion pass, a motion vector pass, and a beauty pass. For the 2Dmotion vector pass I used the LM2MV_v2 shader from La Maisson, allowing me to save significant Maya time by rendering the motion blur in AfterEffects using re:VisionFX’s ReelSmart Motion Blur plugin (I don’t go anywhere without it!)

In AfterEffects I simply pieced all of the various passes together and added some stylistic touches to make it look more “filmic” (or “muddy” in a less impressive term). I increased the contract in the color correction, and added a bit more blue and green. I added the explosion using stock footage from Detonation Films HD, which I luma matted. I added a bit of vignetting, and some vignette blurring, as well as a touch of optics compensation to fisheye the image a bit. I also added some light rays using Trapcode Shine, and some light wrap. Finally, I added a lens flare and some grain in Nuke (I like their lens flare and grain effects much more than stock AfterEffects- if you can afford Knoll’s Light Factory for AE it’d be perfect, but I don’t own it yet.)

The final beauty pass from Maya- Click to play

Depth map pass - Click to enlarge

Ambient occlusion pass- Click to play

Conclusion

The final result - Click to play

I decided to attempt this shot because I just bought RealFlow and was excited to explore it’s capabilities. One of the things I noticed quickly was that RealFlow has a fantastic rigid body solver, but I could find very few impressive examples of it in action. Having attempted shots like this previous in Maya, I knew what a pain it could be, and decided to see how RealFlow could handle it. The results were very impressive to me, especially given that I had literally just received my license for the software earlier in the week and had never used it before. With it’s strength and ease of use, I feel entirely confident that the program is capable of handling even the most complex rigid body interactions, and look forward to trying much more impressive shots in the future. Maybe a collapsing wall or tower for “Dragon Hunter II”…

To request a bid for your project or for any questions please use my contact form.

Using Maya camera projections to create an environment from simple photos

Afghani Aerial Ambush final shot- Click to play

Introduction

I’m a fairly competitive person, which so far has been good for me in learning VFX. When I see a really amazing shot in a film or on television, I don’t have the brains to realize “That was done by teams of dozens of highly skilled artists, with every imaginable resource available to them.” Instead, I usually think “Hey- I could do this!”

So just a few days ago I was reading in FXGuide (a fantastic site, if you’ve never visited) about “Quantum of Solace” and discovered that some of the dogfight sequence was generated entirely in CG. In looking at the photographs and later reading about the same sequence in Cinefex, I realized “Hey- I could do this. Or at least do a no-budget, cheap facsimile of this that will in no realistic way compare with the original!” And so another weekend wasting project was born. I hope you enjoy reading about how the shot was made as much as I enjoyed making it.

The footage of the men running is courtesy of FXPhD, which is another fantastic resource.

Projected Environment in Maya

The Maya scene as a playblast- Click to Play

The key to the whole shot is camera projections. I could have done this in Nuke and probably had a lot easier ability to manipulate the shot quickly, but I decided I wanted to use displacement to try to make the ground plane feel like it really had rocks and shape to it. That meant using Maya.

The first step was to select a stock photo of a mountain that I thought could be interesting to have a helicopter crash into. I then pulled that photograph into Maya as an image plane and created a polygonal plane at the base of the mountain in the photo. Using the photograph as a a guide, I then used the Sculpt Geometry tool to pull the plane into the basic shape of the mountain- the closer you take the time to get to what would appear to be the real shape of the mountain, the more accurate your projection will later be. If you have footage, it would certainly be easier just to matchmove it and build base geometry from the point cloud in PFTrack.

A test of the environment mapping- Click to play

Once I had the mountain basically matching in shape, I projected the original photograph from the camera that I had been using as my viewpoint during the modeling. I then pulled the photograph into CrazyBump and generated a quick normal and displacement map, which I also projected onto the geometry. The displacement map has a tendency to pull the shape of your mountain up and into the background, which obviously breaks the illusion of the projection, so you have to do some test renders and push and pull the base shape to get something works properly.

The background mountains and sky were basically a freebie- I just mapped my original stock photo onto a sphere and stuck it in the back. I have a tendency to get lazy, I’m afraid.

Once my environments were set up I simply imported a stock model of an Apache, created my camera, and animated everything as I liked it.

I rendered several passes from Maya to work with in the composite, but nothing to extravagent- there was a sky pass, a mountain pass, a chopper render, an ambient occlusion pass for the chopper, a pass for the cockpit, a reflection pass for the windows, a pass for the tracers, and a pass for the broken glass after the bullets strike.

Compositing in AfterEffects

The comp was actually fairly straightforward. I just imported all of my various passes, plus some stock explosion footage I purchased long ago, and three bluescreen shots of guys running. I then assembled everything and began the process of making it all match and look as I wanted it to. I exported a .MA with the camera and a few key locations (helicopter, crash site, machine gun site, location of the running people) from Maya to AE in order to allow me to place things properly. The smoke and sparks were created in AE using Trapcode Particular. The running people were placed into the shot in 3D using the camera and location information from Maya. I added a little bit of camera shake to the whole thing, plus some lens distortion, chromatic aberration, grain, and color correction and voila.

The final shot at higher bandwidth- Click to Play

Conclusion

This is certainly on a much lower level than what was seen in the Bond film, but the techniques are the same. I found that you really need a lot of resolution- the Bond guys were shooting their projection plates on IMax stock, and I certainly didn’t have anything near that resolution. That left me having to hide quite a bit.

The technique works really well, and gives you a fairly high degree of camera freedom, as long as you don’t leave the cone of any of your projecting cameras by too much. Using multiple projections for the appropriate angles would work much better. The use of displacement to add realistic detail to the environment was pretty effective- none of the rock detail you see in the final render was modeled at all.

To request a bid for your project or for any questions please use my contact form.