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For those who were under a rock today and haven’t had the chance to read this, it is one of the best articles about Rendering techniques and the state of the art in terms of rendering.
So head on out to FXguide.com and read this awesome article:
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The train has come…
It’s been a long long time since I’ve posted anything. I’ve been very busy lately but today finally I’m proud to present the project that I’ve been working on for quite some time now!
It is a VFX shot envisioned by me a some months ago. With the help of Kevin George and Ross Macaluso we’ve brought that idea to life in this minute and a half sequence.
If you want to see the complete breakdown go to:
http://www.behance.net/gallery/The-Train-is-coming-%28VFX-Breakdown%29/3588107
I hope you like it and I’ll be writing some more stuff hopefully in these next weeks!
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This is a trailer of a Short Film, done by a VFX studio in Barcelona. It’s a quite little shop in terms of comparing them to other studios from other countries where VFXs are taken more seriously. For this project you’ll see the credits are 6 artists, without counting concept art and Sound design.
Nonetheless this is an amazing piece of work that proves the point that it isn’t always about major studios, but good artists that come together with a clear goal in mind. Make something that will blow your socks away and keep you wanting more!
So enjoy this trailer and I hope to see more stuff soon!
Info about the studio: http://www.biglazyrobot.com/
Info about the short itself: http://www.k3loid.com/
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This is the Renderman Portfolio I’ve been able to build up after 10 weeks of taking the Introductory Course for Grad students at SCAD tough by Malcolm Kesson.
There is some interesting stuff on it on how to build your own RSL shaders and the different advantages that Renderman gives you in terms of render times versus other renderers such as mental ray.
Take a look if you’re interested!
Happy Holidays!
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Steve LaVietes visit
Today I had the chance to see Steve LaVietes at SCAD. We got this e-mail yesterday that he would be in to talk a little bit about Katana.
He is one of the main developers of Katana. He has worked at Sony Imageworks for over 12 years and the thing is that he is a former Student and Professor at SCAD. He had a ton of annecdotes about his years as a Student/Professor and also about his professional life. But more importantly he had a ton of knowledge to give us about Katana and VFX pipelines and what his opinions were on where it’s all going in the VFX industry.
Katana is a “Pipe-line / Lighting tool” (in my words, don’t take this as a fact) first developed in-house at Sony Imageworks and then converted into a commercial tool by the Foundary with the help of the developers at Sony, and of course Steve was a huge part of that.
The important thing that got stuck with me after this informal presentation that lasted 2 hours, was when he was talking about the renderers they where using. One of the things that Katana is going to be a big deal is that it integrates with different renderers. So then he started talking about the Arnold Renderer developed by a company in Spain called Solid Angle (there site is down at the moment so…). It has also been co-developed at some point with Sony Imageworks.
Basically the Arnold renderer is a Brute Force Ray-Tracing Renderer that gives some amazing results and that some studios have already switched to. One of it’s developers can be seen giving a presentation here. The fact with Ray-tracing there is no pre-computation so lighters can spend more time actually lighting and having quicker results than waiting for pre-passes, deep-shadow passes, point-cloud baking to be finish to actually see a result.
”[…] An hour of a Lighter is “$40” an hour. An hour of CPU time is “10 cents” […] “
-Marcos Fajardo , Solid Angle
So basically, what I extracted from all this is that, there is going to be some migration to ray-tracing renderers such as Arnold when wanting to do photo-realistic, or physically-based renders, in full-CG or VFX-driven features. Which is kind of let me a strange feeling after beginning to learn RenderMan an knowing some of it’s advantages. It kind of gave me a paradigm shift on the concept I’ve built about RenderMan in this first three or four weeks of learning the basics of it.
Oh well… you have to stay on top of things, that is for sure. For more info just go to the Foundary’s website on Katana which is supposed to be released shortly.
http://www.thefoundry.co.uk/products/katana/
Have a good one! See you soon!
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It’s been a while since I posted anything… that’s because I’ve been on vacation and also because I’ve moved to Savannah, Georgia in the US to study a MA in VFX at SCAD. So I’ve been a little busy.
Now while I was reading my pile of posts from google reader I found this video that shows the first rendered computer sequence created by Ed Catmull one of the most influencial minds in Computer Graphics (Founder of Pixar). The great thing about this rare video is that it shows the result, the making of, and a series of animation tests. And this is back in 1972. So if you’re interested in computer graphics and you want to know how it all started take a good look at this video.
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Yep! I’m glad someone said that!
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Great Vacation Short Films
Lately I’ve been enjoying my holidays before I move to the US to study a MA at SCAD. I did a trip with a great friend of mine that was 24 days long and more than 5000 km. (3,106.856 mi.). We filmed some stuff and did over 800 photos.
So I want to show you some guys that have done an amazing trip and have created 3 short films about their awesome trip.
MOVE
LEARN
EAT
So that’s pretty much what I have to say! They speak for themselves! Mine is not as awesome as these three little pearls but this is a nice time of year to see the experiences of people all around the globe!
So just be happy and try to make the most of your holidays!!!!
Ness
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EBOY @ OFFF 2011 Barcelona (Episode 3)
The EBOY Lecture was Saturday June 11th in the Roots Space at OFFF 2011 held in Barcelona.
There is no better way to describe Eboy than to let them do it themselves:
eBoy is Kai Vermehr, Steffen Sauerteig and Svend Smital.We create re-usable pixel objects and take them to build complex and extensible artwork. And we make toys.
Basically that is it. But don’t let the simplicity of their own description fool you! Eboy does some amazing and elaborate work that has given them the authority to be the leaders in pixel art.
In there lecture at OFFF 2011 in Barcelona, Eboy talked about their beginnings as a company, as how they used pixels to do their work, not because it was trendy or cool, but because it was the only way to go back then in 1997. They wanted to create images only for the screen so that’s why they adopted the pixel as their main tool to create art.
They went through a timeline of their works, explaining different projects, different concepts such as PAUL© or eCity©
This type of style is what fist gave them their fame
Here are some examples of the creations they making using these technique and how from the parts that they create they can build massively-detailed pieces of pixel art:
Their works are always transforming, growing, and as they say, they see their final pieces as a “snapshot” of an on-going project. They also create some pretty funky animations with their style
So it’s safe to say that EBOY are the fathers and GURUs of this form of art!
This completes my three episode series on the artists I saw at the OFFF 2011 in Barcelona. Hope you liked it and maybe even got a little inspired like me!
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Marian Bantjes @ OFFF 2011 (Episode 2)
Today I want to talk about how Marian Bantjes inspired me deeply. Her lecture at the OFFF 2011 was Friday, June 10th in the ROOTS space.
For me she was unknown, I hadn’t seen any of her works before but I still went due to the importance a lot of the attendees to the OFFF festival told me she had. So I got my self a pretty good seat and prepared to be Inspired! She began her lecture by letting us all know how great her new shoes were! I can’t comment on that because I’m not much of an expert!
She introduced herself, and explained some of the works she was most known for. The first one was the Saks fith avenue “Want it!” campaign which you can find all about in her web (by clicking the photograph)
It was very interesting the concept that she developed, making the typographic work of creating the shape of the fashion item the word was evoking. You can see it in this other capture of her work:
One of the other works she showed (and was pretty proud of) was a poster she did for a band called “The National”. This work received the first ovation from the assistants to the lecture.
This poster is ment to be seen in three conditions of light. The first one is how it looks in daylight, the second one is how it looks in black light, and the last one is how it looks in total darkness (It glows in the dark basically!). I have to say that it’s a pretty darn cool poster!!!! So thumbs up from this end.
She talked about other projects but she finally ended up talking about a book she created. It is called “I wonder”. Written, designed and typeset by her (this last, due to her extensive 10-year background as a typesetter). It was inspired in the early illminated manuscripts , and her fascination for them.
For me this book is a work of art in itself. It’s full of detail and very carefully design to encompass the articles written in them. The articles are some re-written previos articles for a blog she wrote for and some are completely new. Each one of them personalized with it’s own theme. This is the cover :
What fascinated me about the book was all the work and thought that was put in it. Every page is carefully and specially designed by Marian for this book. Instead of doing some recompilation of previous works she designs a whole new collection of amazing and intricate designs. You can read all about this beautiful piece of art by clicking the image of the book. I got myself a copy because it’s one of those books that it’s a must have in my opinion.
Well that is about it! I was really lucky to get to see this lecture and discover this amazing designer from whom I knew nothing about before this festival! So thumbs up for this reason!
See you tomorrow in the next episode of my experiences at the OFFF 2011 in barcelona!
