Saturday, October 31, 2015

Small teams, big projects

When 3D animators get together in small teams, it may not seem possible or much harder to produce something as amazing as say, Pixar or Dreamworks. Every now and then though a small studio can show that they are very capable.


Just remember, dreaming big should not be limited by small teams.

Monday, October 26, 2015

Render target

                            Here is a render target mocked up with a few layers of a scene:




This render consists of; colour map, diffuse map, specular map, environment map, a pre-made vignette filter, explosion effect, dust layer and scratch layer.

By adding all the parts together, I can quickly test how the layers can be used, arranged and approved upon. Some post processing such as motion blur will be added in compositing as it is too  time consuming to add in the layers when rendering. 

Saturday, October 24, 2015

Handy Maya tutorials

 Found a large selection of handy mini tutorials and full explanations for Maya.


Take a quick look.

Tuesday, October 20, 2015

Render Testing

Building up the scene for the 5 second advertisement has been full of small struggles and issues, from things rendering slow or incorrectly to overblown light.


I want to add dust particles and a shock wave, but I'm trying to figure out how best to go about it, then onto render passes.

Saturday, October 10, 2015

Facial Animation in Star Citizen

Video demonstration of Star Citizen's Facial system

A small update to the game "Star Citizen" running on CryEngine, this video looks at techniques applied to create a real-time virtual character believable, from blend shapes to bones and rigs, to blood maps and wrinkle maps. Multiple techniques are shown and actively demonstrate how important the sum of the parts are when creating realistic characters.


                         Here is the final real-time result. Impressive work

Friday, October 9, 2015

Modern day animation in games


Here is an interesting look at animation on a modern gaming engine, in this case Square Enix's Luminous Engine. It demonstrates some of the techniques involved to blend and collide animations to great effect. Seeing what goes on under the hood of a real time gaming engine and how it handles variables will give you an idea of just how much work can go into modern games.

Wednesday, October 7, 2015

Pack shot for advertising

An upcoming project is to design a 5 second advertising short of a product of my choice. I have chosen to create my own imaginary product to sell.

5 Second Short documentation




Saturday, October 3, 2015

Spare Voxel Octree Global Illumination


Not too long ago, John Carmack of Id software ( now Occulus ) stated that sparse voxel octrees were the start of the future of real time graphics. Years later and this technology is finally coming to fruition, albeit currently in the form of lighting rather than being used directly on models. Sparse voxel octree global illumination as shown in this video demonstrates the incredible potential of this technology in real time applications. This will allow a significant bump in lighting quality, accuracy, lighting grades, shadow quality and light reflection/refraction. Potentially this will allow all light sources to always cast bounced light on the correct surfaces. 


The above picture also demonstrates the use of SVOGI very well, showing that light bounces are much more natural than the usual static or baked lighting that usually gets used in most real time applications.


Here is the same scene lit with previous lighting models. As you can see it appears far less natural than the SVOGI image, failing to capture how light bounces, scatters and bleeds into shadow.

Here is some documentation provided by Crytek on SVOGI