Speed Racer to Mummy

So Speed Racer has finished and I'm really glad I got the chance to work on the film. I Met a lot of great people on the show and now after a two week break I'm back at DD working on the Mummy 3. The show has a really strong pipeline and the VFX are going to be fun. It's great to meet all the new people on the Mummy show...and there are a lot of familiar faces from Racer working on Mummy which is nice.

Speed Racer: New Trailer

New American Speed Racer trailer.
Also check out the new European Speed Racer trailer. This movie is going to be awesome.

rockitdontstopit

Oh My! My good friend Sheima has compiled her work at rockitdontstopit.com. Sheima's sense of style and design has always been a real inspiration to me. Ranging from mograph, collage, film and everything in between she never fails at defining and branding her personal flavor into every project...also check out her blog!

Interview: Christian Bloch

For Mymentalray I interviewed Christian Bloch. Check out the article here.

Interview: Joep Van Der Steen

For Mymentalray I interviewed Joep Van Der Steen. Check out the article here.

My Mental Ray 2.0 Launches

I'm excited to see that My Mental Ray 2.0 has launched!! Woohooo! The site looks really great and I know it will continue to grow into a great resource for all of us lighter/shader people out there.
Check out all the new site features here!

DD

Today marks my first day working at Digital Domain. I'm excited with the opportunity and feel lucky to get to work on Speed Racer!

Good bye Buck!

Today is my last day as a full time dude at Buck. It's been blast and I'll miss being around everyone all the time. I wish everybody the best and hope to work with them all again soon.

MYMR: 2.0 to launch soon!

I've been lucky enough to help with some of the interviews that are going to be released with the new My Mental Ray site. Keep a close eye out for an amazing new website and resource.

Buck: Fuel spots

We just recently finished two more Fuel ID spots!

The Sakrifice spot was really enjoyable to work on.... a fun combination of 3D and 2d. My first time doing frame by frame cell stuff in Photoshop in CS3.

Also on motionographer!! Woohoo.

View a high rez version on my portfolio.

New Design Section

I've added a new design section to my portfolio. As time goes on I find myself spending more and more time on design so and I hope to include these works in my portfolio now.
I've started off by featuring our game Kleek. We are getting very close to it's public beta release which we plan on doing early January 08'. The project has officially been under development for over a year now and each day it gets more and more exciting.

My Portfolio Re-Design

I've updated my portfolio....not all the links are working yet but I just felt like releasing because I'll be updating it for many days to come.

Saturday and Amazing

It's Saturday morning and amazing. After a grueling 3 month project the clouds have seemed to have lifted and I'm sitting at home drinking my coffee and listening to the birds chirp without a worry of failed renders...paradise..mostly. The project that we have finished is still secret but hopefully it will soon be released to the public.
Last night I got a chance to meet up with my old bosses from Iceland, Mark and Claudia. They've pretty much been globe trotting working on VFX for various upcoming films and now working on the VFX for another Clint Eastwood film. Sounds like fun. We ate at this place in the Hollywood Hills called Yamashiro which has great food and a view unlike any other of Hollywood/LA Basin. So on the docket this weekend...tonight and engagement party and tomorrow a bowling party... hooray for work free weekends!

Master Zaps Hair tips

Master Zap explains how to render fur related scenes well here.

I'm an Uncle

Yesterday my wife's sister gave birth to a baby boy Maxwell!

Shave and Haircut: Shadows (Mental Ray Hair Primitives)

Wow Mental Ray Hair Primitives. What a change of pace. Wish I would have learned this 3 months ago. My new friend Doug (who is a master cg artist) spent a few days testing shave and haircut and has completely changed my outlook on how fur needs to be rendered...it's with hair primitives! Here are the major technical points are your shave globals, your light's shadow settings, and your mental ray globals:

Render Globals:
Change renderer to mental ray. Use Rapid Hair adjust the anti alasing settings down to get faster render time

Shave Globals:
Once you've switched to the mental ray renderer in the shave globals you will now have the option to change to "hair primitives" this essentially switches your hair to geometry at render time. I assumed this would make for really high render times but has massivly improved render times, though you have to pay closer attention to your light's shadow settings.

Light Attributes:

I only light hair primitives with spot lights. Once you've made your light, go to your attributes -> Shadows, check use depth map shadows. Scroll down down and expand the area that says "mental ray" here you will see attributes that deal with shadow maps. Enable shadow maps. I believe this overides your depth map shadow settings so you have to set a new shadow resolution (256 or 512 will give you soft shadows, 2048 4096 will give you sharp shadows). I've worked with shadows samples between 1 and 4 (I up the samples if I am getting bands), and I work with softness levels between .001 and .01 (this seems very sensitive).

This is a quick rundown, I'll flesh this out further once I have more accurate results. Though using primitives has taken what was once a 3 + hour render down to about 23 minutes with very similar (even better) results.

Shave and Haircut: Shadows (Mental Ray Buffer)

Ok probably the most important thing I've learned over time is about Shave shadows. Much of this is probably really obvious...but here's a quick rundown for Shave and Haircut Shadows using the buffer:

Geo Shadow - The geometry that the hair is attached to is casting shadows on the hair if this feature is turned all the way up. For some reason for quite some time I always thought this attribute affected how the hair casted shadow on to the geo under it...I was very wrong. So if you want to create a rim light pass for the fur, you would want to put a light behind your geo and hair and turn geo shadow all the way up.

Self Shadow - Hairs casting shadows upon themselves, that one is pretty straight forward.

How to avoid a major flickering problem when rendering with the buffer - If your throw a light into the scene (without properly setting up the shave shadow attributes) and animate the hair moving around you are most likely going to get a flicker/jitter/shimmer render. I've typically been working with a spot light as my key light. After creating my light with a scene that already has hair, I select the light then go to the shave menu ->Shadow -> Add selected lights. This will create a new attribute in your spot light. If you enter 1500 into the resolution and 30 into fuzz this will give you a good starting point to avoid those flickers. Joe Alter suggested those numbers himself and they've been working great for me.

Getting Hitched!

Tonight Laurie and I are heading out to the East Coast to get ready for our big day on August 18th. Looking forward to taking some time off and seeing old family and friends. There won't be too many graphics updates in the near future but there will be a monster on the not too distant future...so stay tuned and stay in touch.

All the best -

Bill....

BUCK: Beast

Chris Lee in action here designed this fun piece for a fuel spot at Buck. Not too much 3D in this piece but I did get to help transform Chris' designs over to the 3D character. Toon shading again in maya with thin clean outlines. Enjoy

Buck: Gravity

We recently finished this piece Damn Gravity for fuel tv. I personally really liked it because of it's unique graphic style and character animation. The character, skate ramp and props were done with maya's toon shader and outlines, all rendered on separate passes. I rendered out the outline pass when the character was un-smoothed to give it a rigid offset feel....the toon shading was rendered with the characters smoothed.
Actually not too much 3D rendering work here, a lot of great design, and hand drawn stuff.