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. 

FLOW – The Making of the Film

FLOW is a short art film I’ve started mid-summer at Mixpoint – a post-production house which kindly bears with me as their resident CGI director. Few images like those Juno photos got me seriously captivated at the time; I was also deep into commercial tabletop photography with their thick, vividly textured imagery of mixing liquids of all sorts – a grossly overlooked form of art. On top of that, there’s been a bunch of technical stuff I was looking to play with for ages, so here’s the resulting mix, shaken and stirred for your viewing pleasure (and then over-compressed beyond any of my control):



And below I’m diving into the making-of details:

Render Elements: Normals

This time let's do a brief anatomic study of a Normals output variable. Below is my original manuscript of an article first published in issue 188 of a 3D World magazine.

A typical Normals element rendered in screen space

Packing Lighting Data into RGB Channels

 

Most existing renderers process Red, Green and Blue channels independently. While this limits the representation of certain optical phenomena (especially those in the domain of physical rather than geometric optics), it provides some advantages as well. For one, this feature allows encoding lighting information from several sources into a single image separately, which we are going to look at in this article.

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".

On Wings, Tails and Procedural Modeling

Project Aero: Procedural Aircraft Design Toolkit for SideFX Houdini

I find Houdini a very powerful tool for 3D modeling. In fact, this aspect was largely motivational for me to choose it as a primary 3D application. And talking procedural modeling I mean not just fractal mountains, instanced cities and Voronoi-fractured debris (which all can be made look quite fascinating actually), but efficient creation of 3D assets in general. Any assets.

Evaluating a Particle System: checklist

Below is my original manuscript of what was first published as a 2-piece article in issues 183 and 184 of a 3D World magazine. Worse English and a bit more pictures are included. Plus a good deal of techniques and approaches squeezed between the lines.

Part 1

Most of the 3D and compositing packages offer some sort of a particle systems toolset. They usually come with a nice set of examples and demos showing all the stunning things you can do within the product. However, the way to really judge its capabilities is often not by the things the software can do, but rather by the things it can not. And since the practice shows it might be not so easy to think of all the things one might be missing in a real production at a time, I have put together this checklist.

Flexible enough software allows for quite complex effects 

like this spiral galaxy, created with particles alone.

Procedural Clouds

I've been playing around with generating procedural clouds lately, and this time before turning to the heavy artillery of full scale 3D volumetrics, spent some time with good old fractal noises in the good old Fusion.

On Anatomy of CG Cameras

Anatomy of a CG Camera

The following article has first appeared in issue 180, and was the first in the series of pieces I've been writing for a 3D World magazine for some time now - the later ones should follow at a (very) roughly monthly pace as well. These versions I'm going to be posting here are my initial manuscripts, and typically differ (like having a worse English and more silly pictures) from what makes it to the print after editing. Try to enjoy.

Two Killer Tips for Mastering Any Software

RTFM. Please.

At different stages in the career I've been paid for working in Houdini, Nuke, 3DSMax, XSI, Fusion, Maya, Shake, Blender and After Effects among the other applications. I've been using Lightwave, 3D-Coat, Combustion, Rayz and so many other things. Not even mentioning programs like Photoshop, Corel Draw or Inkscape here. Of course I'm not the master in most of them, but I think I'm OK with learning new software, and here are the two tricks I know.