Comments on: Creature FX Volume 1 Released

By: Allan McKay

Allan McKay — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 09:05:13 +0000

thanks mate!
No you’re correct, for blade trinity (blade 3) we used Thinking Particles 2 for all the vampire ashing effects. The pipeline worked, however it wasn’t really very procedural or flexible. I did build my own pflow version which is similiar to the Creature FX DVD shortly after, the idea being that one system triggers and controls the entire effect, rather than how we did it on Blade which was each and every layer was a separate effect, smoke, fire etc. etc. Plus the entire thing was sprites back then which looks a bit dated by today’s tech.

Creature FX Vol 1 isn’t really based on blade, more orientated towards the pipeline for the new vampire movie Day Breakers which comes out in January. Which uses both Fluids and Particles for the effects, it aims at designing the fx for the character, but also setting it up in a way that if you need to make changes later on it’s easy to adjust and all of the layers intuitively update. More importantly it makes for easy application to multiple characters, so if you had to burn up 200+ vampires in a show, you would be able to realistically do this with just a few FX artists minding all of the shots. So its a mix of approaching how to build a solid workflow for the entire vampire burning or bad guy death effect that you’re after, but also make it as flexible as possible. But also building the render passes, compositing the layers, and all things from start to finish, which gives everyone a broader overview of a real production environment.

There will be more in the future, however I wanted to cover this one first as it seems to be a popular topic, I’ve worked on dozens of game cinematics and feature films where the bad guy turns to stone and falls apart, or explodes into fire and ash etc. etc.

I hope that made sense!

RE: Blowing up a low poly sphere, well if you saw the latest afterburn video I put together, I had some teapots dropping bombs As long as the theory is sound I’m sure some people can make some kick ass sphere bombs! haha

thanks again mate (and Mohamed too!), I appreciate it. If you have any ideas, requests etc. for anything you’d like to see covered let me know!

-A

By: Cardinal

Cardinal — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 08:25:55 +0000

Allan, I really admire your talent. Excellent, high-end stuff all the time! Compared to tonns of other learning material out there, your tuts are crisp, detailed and show really advanced technics. And what I like the most – you build you lessons on the serious real-production examples. Great to see how the real PROs work, It’s great you’re not goin’ for “I will show you how to explode a simple lowpoly sphere, and then it’s up to you how to do the same with an Empire State Building with all the crazy details!”

By the way, I’ve seen a few shots of the Blade movie on Cebas’s site featuring Thinking Particles as the main plug for creating VFX in it.. Now that I see your amazing videos and read about Creature FX dvd – I see that there’s no TP there at all – only Particle Flow! Could you please clear this up? Looks like Cebas exaggerating things at te least..

Thank you for your great tuts and truly amazing VFX.. Good luck to you!

By: mohamed

mohamed — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 14:29:46 +0000

thanks a lot allan for sharing with us your knowledge
i learned a lot from your dvds ,they are the toppest for all in field of catastrophic fx

keep it up man ,and rock on 3dsmax