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July 2011

Movies out now

So Transformers 3, and Priest are both out at Theaters – I was FX Lead on both of these films, which was a lot of fun as well as had it’s challenges. I’ll definitely put up more information soon on some of the work I did as well as hopefully more of a in depth breakdown on some of the VFX. You can also check out the latest cinefex which covers a bit of the vfx contributions from myself and the rest of Spy’s team. I was primarily brought on to destroy the train at the end of the film, creating a pipeline for making the trains buckle and tear open, massive cg explosions and fire, as the train derails and blows up. I also animated and blew up two motorcycles and oversaw a lot of the 3ds max side of pipeline and the max fx artists.

Transformers 3

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kHRf01Gjosk

Priest

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z52ry2FBhyY

Industry Giants event 2011

I attended IG2011 this year, it was a blast to participate, I held a master class covering a lot of topics, mainly to do with FX and also a lot of the FX work for Priest, I also was on a panel alongisde John Carmack and a lot of other big name presenters but what I was really excited about was a key note I put together on how to fast track your career, build a name for yourself and make yourself 10x more employable. I will put up some more information on this soon as it’s been something I’ve spent the last year and a half working on primarily, and I plan to release a lot more information soon! I also did an interview for the event which should land on youtube soon.

CG Workshop – Fume FX Pyrotechnics Workshop

So this has been a massively successful workshop that CG Society is running for a 3rd time. It’s an 8 week in depth workshop covering a lot of Fume FX material, primarily used in film. Actually a lot of this is based on the work I did in Priest (I can say that now the film is out) so most of the explosions and actual shots from Priest are what this workshops based around. Lots of advanced content – but the best part is that students work with other students and collaborate together, and are instructed personally by me for 8 weeks. Usually it sells out pretty quickly so you might want to jump on it right away.

Sign up to the 8 week workshop at CG Society!

Gary Davis blog update

Gary Davis over at Autodesk has put together an article recently covering a lot of the particle flow presets I created for Autodesk for a previous release of Max. Not everyone knows these presets are there so he wanted to shed some light on these, as well as show some ways to implement them.

I created these for Autodesk back in 2010 – which was a lot of fun to put together, however I was limited to not using any FX plugins, which unfortunately for a lot of FX work in max is necessary to create film quality effects. In addition I had to ensure the assets could play in realtime so none could be too overly complicated. So that was the only unfortunate thing about this project, as if having access to afterburn, fume etc. would have meant these assets could be much higher quality. That still being said they’re very useful, and of course can still plug right into a lot of the above mentioned plugins to take them to the next step.

Check it out at Gary Davis’ blog!

siggraph 2011

I will be holding a master class for siggraph later this year, more information to come! Also speaking at other events later in the year!

Currently in New York – I will be back in Los Angeles .. July 20

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Fumer

San Francisco April-June

Hey everyone! It’s been a while since my last update, it’s been killer busy the past 4 weeks. GDC was a big success, and currently in the middle of wrapping on a few commercials before I jump up to San Francisco next week for Michael Bay’s latest film So anyone in San Francisco, feel free to hit me up for a beer!

Maxscript: Fumer version 1.0

This is a very work in progress script, it will have dozens more features, however I disabled most of them just to knock this out quickly. It’s essentially a window to be able to add your fume and then tick what you want sim’d and it will simulate away. Similar to the previous fume script I released, but you actually have control over what specifically gets simmed. Later I’ll be adding more features to this, lots and lots. Just I killed most of it for practicality right now.

Download Fumer V1.0 here

**** UPDATE**** I made one little tweak to the script (completely forgot to tell it to render your stuff once it’s finished simming!) So if you got it yesterday, grab it again now as it’s fixed.

CG Society Digital Pyrotechnics Workshop

FYI: Time running out to jump on this

So this is the second run of the Pyrotechnics workshop. We ran this at the end of last year and it was a big success selling out very quickly. I really enjoyed it and it was really amazing to see what all of the students were able to do during the workshop!

A lot of people are asking whether if they have core fundamentals whether they might want to do this workshop. I will say that they almost do not cover the same material at all, the Pyrotechics workshop is definitely very unique and advanced, it’s 100% all from actual film productions, so it’s very on point. And of course it’s 8 weeks with me personally training you. Check it out!

Texas – Industry Giants Event

I will be speaking at Industry Giants event in Dallas, TX end of June, more information to come! But I’m sure there will be a lot of drinking to be done in good ol Dallas, so lets all meet up!

I’ll be doing an overhall of my site soon, well just making it easier to manage all the videos and maxscripts etc. as well as other stuff so lots to come, but most likely end of May once things quiet down a little.

New York City – end of April

I’ll be in New York City April 28-May 2nd, just as a heads up. Anyone in town want to meet up, just crack open a beer and I’ll find you. or optionally you can email me at amckay@allanmckay.com

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New York City – End User Event Video

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.

Attending VES AWARDS?
I will be attending the VES Awards in Hollywood next week, so anyone attending please let me know perhaps we can organize for drinks afterwards. Best of luck for everyone who has work submitted. I pushed my votes through over the weekend.

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- Los Angeles, CA

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Overtime vs Productivity Pt. 2 – Out Now

Overtime vs Productivity Pt. 1

Overtime vs Productivity Pt. 2

Is it worth it working extreme hours all the time, day in day out – more importantly are you actually getting that much done during that time?

Foreword
Since the first half of this article came out, a few things happened. The article was really well received and circulated through almost every major studio in LA, London, Sydney, New York, everywhere. I received more than a hundred emails which were almost entirely positive, surprisingly not only from artists but also from studio owners, producers, supervisors and alike. The article was translated into Spanish & Japanese and distributed further and a lot of interesting stories streamed in over the coming weeks about various radical changes and new work protocols.For those who have not read the first part, please click here

Now, there were a few people who did misinterpret the meaning of the article, and I expected that. I did receive comments about “You’re right Allan, this industry sucks, we’re worked too much” which wasn’t really the point of the article. I think that that’s entirely up to you whether you want to put up with OT and bad working conditions.

But the stories that have come in about changes to studios have been really rewarding to hear about.One of my favorites was actually one I witnessed first hand which a studio I was at arranged for a lady in a pink ape suit to come in and sing her own variation of You are my sunshine to everyone in the studio to boost morale, the lyrics I’m not sure if they were specifically customized to us but basically were that we’re appreciated for our hard work and efforts and keep up the great work. Now I thought this was great, as it really takes peoples minds off of work and gets everyone to laugh for 5 minutes, and probably costs $150 to arrange.

Plenty of people have contacted me to say that there has been drastic changes in day to day work, as well as how they handle a lot of their planning and scheduling etc. How to treat their team and reward them to keep morale up etc.

Continue to the Article to Read More…

Please contact me if you’re interested in translating this article to other languages.

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FX Workshop + Fume FX 2 Auto Sim Script

Fume FX 2.0 Auto Script v1.0

So this is more a 5 minute thing I wrote for my own uses, however I posted this on a few forums and a lot of people have gone crazy for it. So I’m releasing it publically for anyone who needs it. It’s written ‘as is’ but I find it useful for production.

Basically set up your container with all the correct settings you need (I have had one or two people run the script right after making their grid expecting it to do something magical for them, so keep in mind you SET UP YOUR CONTAINER and then once you have everything how you want it, ie. simulation, wavelet, retiming and rendering all set up. You can run the script, and it will initially simulate your container, and then run the wavelet and retiming sims and then render it. Which means rather than hitting sim several times at each phase, you can run the script and it will simulate each phase for you and then render it once it’s done. Which means you can go get that beer at the pub that you’ve been craving all day. (or focus on other shots without needing to baby sit this one).

Download AutoScript v1.0 here

Get Hollywood Live Action Workshop

So in the past two months both CG Society and I both have had a LOT of traffic requesting the Hollywood Live Action Workshop which I designed last year run at least another time.

So for those of you who don’t know, this workshop focuses over 8 weeks hands on with me, on simulating a real production environment, conceptualizing your effects, building all your hold out geometry and matching your camera. Building the effects and projecting footage etc. and compositing elements to make your final shot. Essentially replicating what you do in the real world day to day. This is one of my favorite workshops as I think this is real world knowledge that really does train you for working on high end films, and so far we’ve had a great amount of people both experts in the field and some more budding artists all attending, and some of the bigger names too such as Mir Vadim (creator of Rayfire) and various other guys from Ubisoft and other studios all doing the workshop.

The workshop focuses on Fume FX, Afterburn, Fracturing, Scripting tools, Compositing, painting concept art, camera matching, dynamics, rayfire and a heck of a lot more

So we’ve just announced the workshop today -a lot of spots are already taken because of the general interest leading up to it. But if you want to attend the workshop go over to CG Society and sign up! This will be a really exciting workshop and I gaurauntee all of you will take a lot away from this!

Hollywood Live Action FX Workshop

Now serving Los Angeles

After almost a year of living in San Francisco while I was working on The Last Airbender, and Priest at ILM and Spypost. I will now be officially relocating and setting up permently in Los Angeles. This has been a long term plan that is finally coming together, with plans for later this year to move Catastrophic FX and a lot of my resources over to LA as well.

This to me is a very exciting time, as I will be shifting all of my resources together and setting up a small studio to collectively build a team of solid FX artist and compositors to push through high level production work and work as a support system for other visual effects facilities throughout their productions.

There will be a formal announcement coming in the later months, but I did want to share this news, as now I will be based in LA and I will be looking to pull together 3D resources and also help with other vfx studios if there need be any VFX or supervisional work!

For the remainder of the year I while setting everything up, I will be focusing solely on freelance work, so anyone needing FX drop me an email

Any questions or need for vfx services feel free to contact me at amckay@allanmckay.com

Teaser Trailer for Priest!

So one of the recent films I completed, Priest – has now got a teaser trailer available. This film, I think by far is my best work yet! Obviously once the film’s out I’ll be excited to cover more indepth the work I created for this, however in the meantime check out the new teaser trailer located here!

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SIGGRAPH + ILM Fluids Talk + Updates

Update + SIGGRAPH 2010 – Los Angeles, CA
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!

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Update, Interview & Final Real Flow Workshop!!

Interview with McKay at CG SWOT


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!

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