dERIVATIVE – The Making of the Film

Made of shapes, colours and a bit of story, dERIVATIVE is a short film I’ve directed for a wonderful Mixpoint Studio in Prague. It follows through a row of visual transformations and is likely to be more a work of motion design than classical CG animation. The project was a months-long effort and this time I had a chance to personally craft every single pixel of the final film – what has really helped me is a compositing-centered workflow which I’d like to talk about in this tutorial. 

Render Elements: UVs

Continuing on the topic of AOVs with another brief anatomic study. This article closes my series on post-render image manipulation, I believe and hope that understanding of other AOVs like Z-Depth, Direct/Indirect Lighting passes or World/Rest Position can be easily derived from the principles already discussed, common sense and the Internet. And the following video could serve as a good example of utilization of these principles.



Now let's take a look at the UVs...

Storing masks in RGB channels

Base image for the examples in this article

Finally returning to posting the original manuscripts of the articles I've written for 3D World magazine in 2014. This one was first published in issue 186 under the title "The Mighty Multimatte".

Bit Depth - color precision in raster images

Last time we have been talking about encoding color information in pixels with numbers from a zero-to-one range, where 0 stands for black, 1 for white and numbers in between represent corresponding shades of gray. (RGB model uses 3 numbers like that for storing the brightness of each Red, Green and Blue components and representing a wide range of colors through mixing them). This time let's address the precision of such a representation, which is defined by a number of bits dedicated in a particular file format to describing that 0-1 range, or a bit-depth of a raster image.

Pixel Is Not a Color Square

Continuing the announced series of my original manuscripts for 3D World magazine.

 

Thinking of images as data containers.

CTU's Faculty of Mechanical Engineering video

Double no: No, I didn't forget about the next part of a typography article and No, I didn't lie claiming it will take a while... And while a while continues, here is a piece of recent work I accomplished with the guys at DPOST Prague.



Czech Technical University 150th Anniversary from DPOST Prague on Vimeo.

Aside from wearing both Director's and Art-Director's hats, I've spent quite some time with hands on material here, taking the 3D work into Houdini to design the cubes effects, animate and render.

CG/VFX showreel 2013

Here goes my new demo reel showing some projects I had a pleasure to work on in the span of the last few years. I shifted focus from compositing to more 3D/VFX work compared to the last reel from 2008. There are also more of the interesting shots left behind this time, but I do believe in brevity when it comes to presentations.


3D/VFX show reel 2013 from Denis Kozlov on Vimeo.


A breakdown following:

Showreels retrospective - part 3

Today I'm finishing my little restrospective of showreels. This one from 2008 differs from the older ones in a way that it shows for the first time what I've learned about putting a demoreel together by then. I believe it was even included with one of a Computer Arts magazine's issues.



Demoreel retrospective part 3 of 3 - 2008 from Denis Kozlov on Vimeo.

Compared to the previous one, it is shorter, better structured and unified, with contact data (not valid by now except for email) clearly stated at both ends. Sure thing it helped a lot to have a couple of feature films I had worked on premiered, so I could eventually include those shots. But interestingly enough, those shots already existed when working on 2007 reel – overall, skillwise I was a lot the same person. Still it is hard not to spot the difference (a big one being that I am still not ashamed of this video).


If curious, you can find details about the particular shots in the breakdown.

Music: Jeff Beck - Grease Monkey

That's it – next week the plan is to finally release a new 2013 demoreel – the current one.