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…)
At work this week, I came across a problem I wasn’t sure how to solve. I would never call myself a Blender expert, especially in the area of simulations, and even more especially when dealing with cloth or soft bodies, so it didn’t surprise me that I couldn’t figure this out. Thankfully, the magical hive-mind of Twitter came to the rescue. More specifically, a Blender user from Bulgaria named Syziph. (more…)
The 2017 Creative Arts Emmys happened last week, and CoSA VFX, where I work, brought home some wins this year! (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…)
David F. Sandberg is a rare breed in Hollywood – a director who does his own visual effects. In fact, he’s a one-man film studio! Have a look at his Youtube channel and prepare for a crash course in filmmaking. Seriously, I’m not kidding. It’s some of the most inspirational behind-the-scenes clips I’ve ever seen. (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.
(more…)
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…)
If you’re going to use Blender in a professional environment, especially to compliment your work as a compositor (as I do), then moving your 3D scene from Blender and into The Foundry’s Nuke is more or less a necessity at some point. Thankfully, this has gotten much easier than it used to be. (more…)
As we continue exploring ways to stabilize footage, we’re going to take a look at a plugin for VirtualDub called DeShaker. I’m betting you never heard of VirtualDub, right? (more…)