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!
I recently did an interview with CG SWOT on some of the current things I’ve been up to, you can check it out here:
Or direct download link here which goes for roughly an hour just discussing some of the recent things I’ve been doing as well as some of the things I’ve been doing in the past, enjoy!
Last Real Flow Workshop for the year!! SIGN UP NOW!
Just announced this week, and commencing July 1st, this will be the last Real Flow Workshop for some time, this workshop has been a major success, and due to the popular interest from many people, as well as the now released Real Flow 5, I wanted to run this workshop one last time so this class will fill up very quickly, so get in fast!
The workshop covers many great subjects associated with Real Flow, primarily used as a way to get people working in a film production pipeline on Real Flow fast. The work coming out of artists after completing this workshop has been very impressive and I’m very keen to see participate in this workshop with all of the upcoming students!
Sign up now for July 1st Real Flow CG Society Workshop! CHECK IT OUT HERE
Quick update
So this has been an extremely busy past 3 months, after wrapping at ILM I’ve been working on Priest alongside a lot of ex ILM, Pixar and Orphange folk in San Francisco on what looks to be a really impressive film. I’m in the middle of wrapping up on the final sequence of the film, after which I plan to take some time off until August to focus purely on training and a couple of new business ventures.
So part of this will be to focus on expanding this website with loads of new Real Flow, Thinking Particles, Maya, Houdini and Rayfire tutorials. There is a lot coming, and my focus will be 100% on doing this and running CG Society CGWORKSHOPS for the coming months. So stay tuned, and thanks for your patience!
So big things to come! For all of those who have emailed me over the past couple of months and not received a response, please be patient I will get back to you the first chance I get, once this film has wrapped and I’ve recovered from one hell of a big wrap party!
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!
Wrapping up on The Last Airbender for Industrial Light + Magic over the coming month and I will be officially be setting up in Los Angeles as my base city to work out of. So for future reference if anyone needs work done or consulation/supervision I will be based in LA and a lot more accessable! Over the coming weeks I have a lot of new great announcements to be unveiled, and a load of new content both for 3D Studio Max and Maya, so expect a lot of new stuff soon!
CG Society Real Flow Workshop #2
The CG Society Workshop Real Flow was a huge success, it sold out in less than 24 hours after it was announced! And it’s currently in week 3 of 8 with all the students creating some amazing work!
Because the workshop sold out so quickly, there’s already been a lot of enquiries and a waiting list quickly building up that is nearly already at maximum. So for anyone interested in participating in the next Real Flow workshop and missed out last time, you can sign up now for the waiting list so that you will be assured a place in the next one which will be announced in April. To sign up email Biljana at CG Society asking for a place in the next Real Flow Workshop. Email her here
3D World Magazine + Digital Media World Fluids Articles
A lot of you might notice the past few articles I’ve been contributing to a lot for 3D World Magazine in London, take a look at the past few issues and the current one out at book stores right now. I also have completed the fluids overview series for Digital Media World Magazine, reviewing and comparing the fluids for Maya, Max and Houdini.
Day Breakers
Day Breakers is released, this was a co production between my studio Catastrophic FX and Kanuka who headed up all of the major visual effects (go Kanuka!). What made this production interesting was the fact that we were 5 3D artists (2 seniors, 2 juniors and one animator) working collaboratively between Houdini and 3D Studio Max seamlessly. Our budget for this entire show was beyond tight, and yet we managed to pull off a lot of major FX sequences for the film without any overtime or any real stress. I personally created all of the digital fire for all of our FX sequences, as well as supervizing one of the big sequences in Day Breakers. We created the visual effects back in 2007, however the film had been delayed until 2010. I haven’t personally seen the film, however it was a fun opportunity to work with a lot of close friends back in Australia on probably the tightest project I’ve ever worked on (I’ve worked on tv commercials or tv channel ID’s that had bigger teams) so it was a real collective force to get this film out the door!
