So recently I have wrapped on a new film project ‘Priest’ which is out next year. Also M Night Shyamalan’s new film The Last Airbender is out, so take a look at all the amazing work Industrial Light + Magic did on this, I was initially working on the wave sequence a the end of the film as well as a couple of water shots.
I will be in LA attending SIGGRAPH this year Monday through to Friday, anyone with interest in meeting up to discuss possible work or training, consultation etc. while you’re in town please let me know, my schedule is fairly full however it is a great time of year to meet with people while everyone is all town.
My email address is amckay@allanmckay.com if you need to get a hold of me.
I will also be attending the Autodesk drinks Monday night.
Allan McKay – Industrial Light + Magic – Fume FX Class
This talk is a little old but I thought I might release it, it’s based on a class I held at Industrial Light + Magic earlier this year, it’s more a quick overview of Fume FX and it’s capabilities. I pretty much put the talk together the night before but never the less it’s a pretty interesting talk and covers a lot of useful information on fire and also an insight into cross platforming max with other packages etc.
CG Society Artist Profile : Allan McKay
So recently I did an interview with CG Society on a lot of my background and the work I’ve done, insights into the industry etc. You can view the article here
Digital Pyrotechnics Workshop soon to be announced
So what have I been up to the last 2 months? Most of my time has been spent on developing a new workshop for CG Society for Fume FX 2.0 that is soley focused on creating the most realistic fire possible, and explosions and all things pyrotechnic. I hope this will be the holy grail of workshops, and over 8 weeks I will privately train and mentor the students on creating realistic explosions and other visual effects. This is going to be a really exciting workshop and should be announced in the coming weeks!
Just announced last week, the Hollywood Live Action workshop is currently accepting enrollments! This workshop has been a huge success in the past, primarily focusing on getting people up to speed quickly with all current FX tools such as rayfire, Afterburn, Fume FX, Digital Fusion, Scripting etc. as well as being the only CG Society workshop that focuses on creating visual effects for live action shots, so we cover a lot on matching cameras to shots and creating the visual effects and destruction, rendering passes out and compositing these shots, simulating a real life production environment. Enroll now before it sells out!
A new tutorial today just on quickly discussing fracturing geometry but more importantly getting your fractured geometry into Particle Flow. This is pretty general knowledge I’ve covered before but at least not directly on the topic of fracturing, so I thought it would be well worth while putting something up.
New Tutorials!
Keep your eye out for later this week there will be two new tutorials one on Box Set 2 and one on Afterburn. In addition, later in the month expect loads of material on Rayfire and Krakatoa and other cool announcements!
Here you can find a tutorial for 3d studio max on procedural mapping and modeling
I’m currently in San Francisco working on a new film after just returning from Los Angeles last week where I worked on a new game cinematic with a few ex Blur Studio guys which was a lot of fun
I’ve put together another quick tutorial just discussing layering procedural maps together and piping into geometry etc. You cand find it below
I have a lot of new stuff I will be putting up soon, most of the tutorials I’ve been putting together lately are more technical exercises on using features inside of max, and on scripting etc. However I will be doing a lot of practical exercises, stuff like blowing things up in max, and using rayfire, krakatoa, box 2, thinking particles etc. Loads of stuff to come, but again any ideas for specific things you want to see please go ahead an email me – I have been getting a lot of great emails about great ideas for FX topics, and yes Rayfire is definitely a big one!
New 3D Studio Max Tutorial on Particle Flow, discussing emitting particles to 3D procedural textures to build volumetric patterns for your initial particle emission
CG Society’s Real Flow Workshop just finished this week, and it was a huge success! Thanks again for everyone who participated! A lot of old faces from previous workshops had signed up, as well as a lot of new people too, and the results were amazing!
The next workshop is about to run in the coming weeks, so if you’re interested in kicking ass with Real Flow, then sign up here. Keep in mind that the last workshop sold out within the first couple of days, so it might be a good idea to get in quickly!
VFX POLLS + VFX BOOTCAMP
Thanks everyone who has emailed me showing interest in the VFX Bootcamp, I had no idea there would be so many people as excited about this idea as I am! At this stage I just wanted to gauge general interest, I’ve been sent a lot of emails asking to run it in multiple cities rather than one, as it’s an inconvenience for anyone who isn’t in LA. I’ll keep everyone in the loop about this. Perhaps doing it online might be also an option, but I liked the idea of face to face hands on training over 3 intense days!
I’ve wrapped at ILM & currently in Los Angeles for the coming weeks, after which I will be flying back to San Francisco for a new feature film project. Max 2011 is soon to be released, so some exciting announcements tied to this
Until then – Happy St Patty’s day, and enjoy your hangovers!
So this again is more of a brief how to – but one of the most common questions I get asked is how to lock uv coordinates to particles, so for instance you can have a texture move and stay locked to each individual particle. So I’ve created this very quick example, I’ve then also pointed out how it works with Krakatoa, which is pretty much seamless.
The Last Air bender Trailer
A recent project I’ve been working on at Industrial Light + Magic
VFX BOOT CAMP
I’m toying with the idea of trying to organize a 3 day boot camp for Visual FX in LA for later in the year, which would be aimed at a limited amount of seats being personally trained intensely over 3 days in everything from Particle FX, Fluids, procedural animation, pipelines, scripting and compositing. At this stage I would just like to gauge what interest is out there, I get a lot of people asking about personal training which is hard to do with schedules, but an intense face to face workshop over perhaps a 3 day weekend might be something that a lot of people might be interested in. I’d love to hear your thoughts – so please email me!
Previously I’ve mentioned saving pflow presets which has been a real time saver, but what if you want to delve into building an fx pipeline where you literally put in the controls, the object you want to have your FX applied to etc. all in your own custom interface? This is something that I any many others have been doing for years, building blackboxes for FX.
This video we don’t go too deep into the whole process, however rest assured there will be some more videos coming that do. In this video we more just cover the first few steps of building an interface and choosing a custom object to apply your effects to. As well as building a preset file which we can read into our scene and then modify through our script. This is the first steps in the process, but I’m sure many of you will watch this video and then take this concept and build way further beyond the intended steps using this approach. I can’t wait to see what you guys come up with!
More to come soon on this subject, as well as a few big announcements coming next month so stay posted!
Make sure you’re using the ensharpen codec. Also VLC is recommended as the prefered video player
With the release of 3DSMax 2010 – Autodesk has added in a lot (over 100+ to be exact) particle flow setups, ranging from fire, smoke, earth, water, and in addition – Logos. These contain lots of different set ups, and also conceptual files demonstrating how to create various effects.
I was brought on board to create these earlier this year (2009) for the release. Although with certain limitations such as not utilizing any plugins and not making the scenes too slow in the viewport and copyright on textures or stock footage, it meant they needed to be more sample files to demonstrate how to create a flow for the set up, rather than a full blown production ready sample, at least in some cases. However I believe that pretty much all of these scene files that ship with max are very informative and useful in day to day production. A lot of the key concepts here are the core elements of what I use in building a lot of my more complex effects and flows. Check out this video just discussing how to use them and make the most of your Particle Flow En devours!
