Wow, I can’t thank you all enough! Lots of people donated, which was a wonderful surprise, since it was the first OpenVisualFX contest and I wasn’t sure how good the turnout would be. You all really came through, and thank you so much for that! The Maryvale Christmas party was great, and we got everything we needed just in time! (more…)
Hi everyone! The holiday season is here, and regardless of what you celebrate, we can probably all agree it’s a wonderful time to spend with friends and family. Every year at this time, a few friends and I volunteer at a local Los Angeles girls orphanage to throw a Christmas party for the girls there who either don’t have families or won’t be able to be with them during the holidays. For most of these girls, it’s the highlight of their year. (more…)
In a pleasant turn of events, it just so happens that both Ton Roosendaal and Andrew Price are here in Los Angeles for a few weeks, both working on different business-related things. With Colin Levy now a local resident, we all couldn’t resist getting together at a local Taiwanese restaurant for a fun evening. (more…)
I’m not sure if this was my 4th or 5th Siggraph. I’ve been attending the conference since I began using Blender professionally, invited by Ton to help work the booth and chat with people about using Blender for visual effects. Siggraph become one of the highlights of my year. I’ll be completely honest with you, though – I’m probably not the best person to write about Siggraph. I do not take full advantage of the convention. I don’t go to talks, don’t attend the parties, don’t get to visit every booth on the exhibit floor, and I don’t pick up a Pixar teapot. (more…)
Finally, I’ve finished this up and I’m getting it out there! The first Natron tutorial for OpenVisualFX. If you haven’t heard of Natron, it’s an open source compositing program very similar to Nuke. In fact, it’s similar enough that if you know one, you know the other. I wanted to come up with a fun scene with some relatively standard compositing work, the kind of thing an artist at a professional studio is going to be doing all the time, and the TNT television show The Last Ship gave me the perfect opportunity. (more…)
Wow. Sometimes you think something will be easy and automatic, and then reality steps in and yells “Nope!” right in your face. This is one of those common things a compositor runs into almost daily – using a vector pass from a 3D program to add motion blur in post. Using a vector pass speeds up the 3D rendering and lets the compositor make adjustments to the motion blur without having to re-render any 3D elements.
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A few months ago, I was excited to once again contribute to 3DArtist magazine. This time I was asked to write a piece involving set extensions, which of course means matte painting. I hired an actress and headed right out to shoot something that could be open to lots of different creative interpretations! The printed article (and what was offered for download) was limited by space, but I thought it was a fun tutorial so I really wanted to go over all the details here on the blog and take it even further. (more…)