After 5 months of being hard at work I can present my newest reel with work from Star Trek: Into Darkness, The Lone Ranger, and Star Trek: Secrets of the Universe.
It’s been a great ride, and now ready for more!
Macro: A Neon Christmas
After taking a break from everything these lasts weeks and moving to San Francisco, at least for the holidays I saw this video and I wanted to share because I’ve been leaving the blog a little a side :D
This is totally my kind of shots, I’m a sucker for the slow-motion-macro look and I always enjoy them. I’ve been always finding excuses why not to do one, but eventually I’ll get the right one to work on.
Also, who doesn’t enjoy a good behind the scenes and breakdown!
Cheers to Neon for rocking it with this little piece, you made my day :P
More @ nestorprado.com
Final project of my Masters Degree.
Full detailed breakdown can be found HERE
http://www.behance.net/gallery/The-Control-Room-(Plus-Breakdown)/5739127
HDRI Giveaway Day
Today I had some fun with my Nikon D7000 + Nikon 10.5 mm Fisheye Lens and the manfrotto QTVR with 360º Tactical VR.
After that I’ve spent the afternoon assembling these HDR panoramas and testing them out. So here are three interior HDR’s that I give to you if you want them :D
Interior 1: Montgomery Hall Classroom
[DOWNLOAD Unclipped HDR Panorama]
Interior 2: Montgomery Hall: Byte Cafe
[DOWNLOAD Unclipped HDR Panorama]
Interior 3: Montgomery Hall: Parking Lot.
[DOWNLOAD Unclipped HDR Panorama]
It was nice to try it out and learn the best workflow for shooting with these elements and then being able to build the HDR spheric panoramas in a quick and efficient way.
Enjoy! And if you use them and want to photo-reply or send your results feel free to do so!
UPDATE: Nov-03
This is a little test with the environment 2 that I made this afternoon.
New Trends in CG Lighiting
It’s nice to read something that gives you assurance on your beliefs, and when it comes to CG lighting… I couldn’t agree with this interview more…
I always try to stress this to people that I talk about this too and although it might seem obvious, people who are beginning to learn this art form aren’t fully aware of what they are really learning. It’s not about how this program works or what hacks I have to do to light an egg to match it to a live action one. It’s a lot more than that. And learning the tools that closely and more accurately mimic the behavior is a must, but in any case it is only the beginning….
Some quotes from the article that might make you interested in reading it:
[…] is there a difference between the way live-action DPs approach lighting and what we do in the computer?
(On the question: what do you look for in a lighter?)
For full CG, I’d look for good artistic sensibility along with the technical skills you look for in any lighter.
Pixar’s Jeremy Vickery told me that he’d like to get to the point where he could recruit people with a background in cinematography or illustration, not CG software.
I could not agree with this more:
Lighting workflow wants to mimic live-action cinematography more closely. Fewer CG cheats will be required, and you will want to constrain yourself to what’s possible on a real set. In other words, you won’t want to place your area light underneath the floor and turn shadows off: that sort of thing.
So it was refreshing to read this article and I hope you find it useful as well.
Cinefex for the iPad, the wait is over.
Ever since I saw the first magazine apps for the iPad I dreamed of having a Cinefex magazine app for it. I thought it made so much sense. Since the beginning Cinefex has been THE vfx related magazine. It always has great insight on the years biggest VFX productions with in depth interviews with some of the greatest VFX supervisors and crews of the industry.
The thing is while the information in this magazine is priceless and insightful you still want to see the finished result and those breakdowns that we all love. So the iPad really would give that possibility of beautiful images and breakdowns that the user can experience in a great device.
So in the last issue of Cinefex I saw that they were preparing the iPad app and I was really excited about it. And just yesterday I saw a post that ILM posted on their facebook page saying it was finally out. Of course, I had to see for my self and got home and downloaded it.
Now I’ll do a little review about the app :D
When you open the app this is what you get. All the covers of this amazing magazine sorted by year. There is the available column and the my issues column that represent the issues you’ve downloaded.
Once you click on one of your issues (after buying and downloading it) you acces the contents. The first page is the cover of the magazine and if you tap on it you get the menu bar that we now explain.
- The first icon will return you back to the Cinefex home screen
- The arrow icons will help you cycle from one page or the other but you can also do so by swiping across.
- The watch icon is the history that saves the pages you’ve just visited. I guess it can be used like a bookmark-ish kind-of feature.
- The next icon is the one you see on the previous capture. It is an index of the articles so you can directly go to an article of your choice
- The last icon of this bunch is to see an expanded view of the magazine contents. Let’s see the next capture to get a good grasp of what this means
As we can see in this view, this allows us to see all the contents of the magazine. At this point the magazine is structured in a very simple way. There are the:
- Ads: which are a single page and some of them with interactive content such as promotional videos or showreels in the cases of studio ads
- The articles: which are basically a cover page, the text article itself, and the images and breakdowns that are mostly mentioned in the article text. The Text bit is the long piece you see in the image above. You basically read through it by scrolling up and down until you finish it and move on to the images and breakdowns.
- Another feature of the magazine is the search feature that allows you to search for contents within that issue of the magazine.
This view is a combined view (not what you actually see on the magazine) of the images and breakdowns part of the article. There are some images that you can cycle through the various stages of production of the effect, and in some cases even see some lovely video breakdowns that are always welcomed.
And that is about it! So in my opinion this totally what I was looking for! The issues are cheaper than the normal tri-monthly magazine that normally runs about $12.50. The electronic issues are $5 dollars or you can do a yearly subscription to get all of them for $19.
Lastly you can see the video that Cinefex has put together explaining the App. Oh and by the way Issue 127 is FREE so just for that it is worth downloading the app and the issue and seing the amazing effects created for Captain America, Cowboys and Aliens, Anonymus and Harry Potter 7.2! So enjoy thanks to the Cinefex team!
LCMT: Light Contribution Management Tool v 3.3 vol. II
Here is the second part of the LCMT series! For those of you who didn’t read the first post, LCMT is a little utility tool that helps lighters in maya manage the contribution of the lights or light groups in their scenes.
It also lets the artist easily create render layers in maya with these different light groups and/or lights.
This next video shows some more of these capabilities. Specially managing the light contribution of the different lights in the scene and the render layer creation phase.
I hope you find this helpful and hope that you might want to know more about it or even try it. If so go on to the LCMT v 3.3 page and read all about it’s functionalities and advantages that are current implemented in this release.
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!
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/
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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