| Visual Effects discussion in New York End User Group 2010 |
| I was asked a little over a month ago to speak at the Autodesk End User Group event in New York. It was pretty last minute so I didn’t have time to prepare anything too thorough, however the event was a lot of fun and it was the biggest turn out they have ever had in the history of the event which has been going for 15 years. Thanks everyone who attended, it was great meeting all of you!
This visual effects video covers briefly training bits and pieces on Rayfire, Krakatoa, Fume FX, Particle Flow, Thinking Particles, but more importantly a lot of workflow tips and other useful information, plus a Q&A at the end. You can download High Resolution video here (700mb) Go ahead and click ‘like’ in Vimeo if you dig the video, I will find it interesting to see whether people find this sort of videos interesting. Thanks guys |
| Emails | ||
Since the second half of the overtime vs productivity article was released I’ve gotten a lot of email that I haven’t been able to respond to yet. So if you emailed me and haven’t received a response, I’m working on it! If it’s urgent please feel free to email me again and I will do my best to reply.
. - Los Angeles, CA |
Posted on January 24th, 2011
Did you like this article? |
8:11 pm
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Paul Hellard and Tai Komatsu, Allan McKay. Allan McKay said: http://vfxsolution.com/allanmckay/2011/01/nyc2010/ VFX talk in NYC Krakaktoa TP rayfire Fume FX workflow pipelines [...]
6:24 am
This would be a great video if you’re unsure about VFX and some of the packages used. There are some interesting pipeline techniques mentioned.
Although if you’re looking for something more specific I would recommend Allans dvd’s as they are more specific to the topic at hand.
12:29 pm
Wow, that was an awesome talk! Thanks a lot for posting this, and also for all of your excellent free resources!
I was hoping to find info on how your using smooth groups on the faceted fracture pieces to hide the ugly seams of the fractures. You show it at the end of the video during Q&A, but with the lights on I can’t see what your doing. Is this smooth groups built in to RayFire or one of the other fracture plugins? I tried applying various smoothing modifiers to a group of fractured objects and got some interesting results but nothing that took care of the ugly seams.
I should add that I use a free object fracturing maxscript called Fracture Voronoi v1.1 from scriptspot to cut up my objects. I have messed around with all of the fracturing scripts on there, but this one works the best. Also, it seems to handle textures a lot better, because it automatically puts textures on the new internal fractured faces created during the cutting process. So if you have a stone texture on a pillar object and fracture it, each chunk will be textured with the stone texture on all faces.
The only method I have found to get rid of the fracture seams is to set visibility keys for the pre-fractured object to hide and the fractured object to unhide at the moment the simulation begins. Yet this has artifacts, for example when fracturing occurs at one end of an object and propagates towards another end, the seams for the entire object would be visible from the first frame of sim. The only way to then get rid of that artifact would be to render out a separate sequence of the prefractured object and then use masking in post to blend in the seams over time so they look more like cracks forming.
Also should mention in the spirit of sharing info, I use a free plugin to simulate which works a lot faster than the built in reactor tools called pulldownit. I think people should check it out as I have found it pretty useful!
Thanks again!
2:19 pm
First I would like to thank you for making this available to all of us.
We don’t see actions like yours anywhere. I don’t know how the industry works but you are one of a kind. What I see is a lot of secretism around this kinda subjects. You asked if this kinda stuff would be useful or if people would be interested, well I think we WILL. More than learning tutorials, workflow tips are the ones that only who is involved in the business knows and receiving information and tips like these are more than useful, they became indispensable information. It’s too bad that other artist of the area don’t do the same as you, I think we all would earn from that – newbie and wanna be speaking.
The industry is so vast but sometimes it seems so far, you make it familiar to us. A huge thanks I really loved the presentation and the tips of course. I’m sorry for asking this but it seems to be a constant question around forums but usually no one with experience talks about it. It’s about the use of Max in the industry. How is it going? Growing compared to Maya or Houdini or are these different territory’s?
Just some doubts that I see that a lot of people has, including myself.
Once again, a huge thanks and I sincerely hope I can join you at Fxphd.
Cheers