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April 21st, 2010

Tutorials! Fracturing! Afterburn! New Workshop! Box 2!

Written by amckay

Topics: 3DS Max Tutorials, News, Uncategorized

Hollywood Live Action Workshop announced!

: Hollywood live action workshop

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!

ENROLL NOW AT CG SOCIETY

Fracture Tutorial

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!

Particle Flow and Fracturing Geometry from Allan McKay on Vimeo.

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April 5th, 2010

Procedural Maps & Modeling Talk

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Written by amckay

Topics: 3DS Max Tutorials, News, Uncategorized

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!

Procedural Maps & Modeling Talk 1 from Allan McKay on Vimeo.

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March 15th, 2010

Particle Tutorial and new Real Flow Workshop

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Written by amckay

Topics: 3DS Max Tutorials, News, Real Flow Tutorials, Uncategorized

Emitting from 3D Texture Volumes Tutorial

New 3D Studio Max Tutorial on Particle Flow, discussing emitting particles to 3D procedural textures to build volumetric patterns for your initial particle emission

Real Flow Workshop #2

NEW REAL FLOW WORKSHOP – SIGN UP NOW!

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!

Allan McKay

- Los Angeles USA

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February 16th, 2010

Particle UV Tutorial + VFX Boot Camp?

11 comments

Written by amckay

Topics: 3DS Max Tutorials, News, Uncategorized

Locking textures to particles with Krakatoa

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!

poll by twiigs.com

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February 2nd, 2010

Happy 2010!

3 comments

Written by amckay

Topics: News, Uncategorized

Los Angeles bound!

Hi everyone and happy new year!

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

Creature FX Volume 1 DVD Review up at MaxUnderground

Creature FX Volume 1 physical DVD being sold through Turbosquid check it out!

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!

Check out the trailer here

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December 9th, 2009

Newsworthy Items

4 comments

Written by amckay

Topics: News, Uncategorized

Real Flow Essentials CG Society Workshop

So the big news of what I’ve been working on for the past 3 months! The Real Flow Essentials CG Society Workshop has finally been announced! This workshop is aimed at both expert level and intermediate FX users, or anyone in general looking to break into Real Flow.

This workshop is multi-platform, so whether you’re a Maya user, Max user, Houdini or XSI etc. As long as you have Real Flow you’re able to participate in this course. This workshop runs over 8 weeks, during which we cover a lot of information on how Realflow works, but also how to optimize and speed up simulation times, various tricks to get better simulations and utilize much of its dynamics, as well as various industry techniques to help advanced all users and ready them to jump into real visual effects shots confidently.

The workshop has only been announced for a few hours of posting this, and last time I checked there were 18 positions of the 35 already taken, so Imagine this 8 week course will fill up very quickly. So get in while you can!

Christmas Special – all four DVD’s for $199!

A bit of a shameless plug, but for those of you interested in purchasing any of the training DVD’s of mine, I have for this month only (until end of December) selling all four advanced training DVD’s together for only $199! Click here for more information

Autodesk Masters

Joe Gunn has been nominated to join the ranks of the masters. Some of Joe’s recent work includes working on the LA destruction sequence for the new movie 2012. Joe’s most recognized for a lot of his rigging and cloth/hair DVD’s, tutorials and classes as well as much of his great work he’s performed in New York and LA. Check out the Autodesk Master’s nominee’s here!

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December 3rd, 2009

Want to write your own FX tools?

5 comments

Written by amckay

Topics: 3DS Max Tutorials, News, Uncategorized

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!