It’s finally live! I’ve been struggling with this animation for way too long. Hopefully I finished it the way I wanted from the very beginning.
The point was to practise some procedural destruction via TP ( at that time I worked on TP3) and FumeFX. There is also a full tank rig, but  it’s all covered in dust Rendering was handled in FinalRender3, it worked quite well, at the end of animation u can see some GI flickering, I really had no time to crank up the settings to get rid of it. And finally, I had a chance to work for the first time with Nuke by comping this piece. It’s just awesome software for this kind of comping, also way faster than AE – especially when multichannel EXR workflow comes at the party I’ve attached Nuke’s script screenshot to show u how I approached it – let me know if there is something done the way it’s not supposed to, I brought all the habits from AE.

Big thanks goes to to guys from Box Postproduction for great feedback during production and for borrowing SOME renderfarm power. Greatly appreciated.

Enjoy!

Youtube
Vimeo

QuickTime h.264 166MB

Nuke’s script screenshot hires

Few months ago I’ve been messing around with some complex TP setup so that it mimics kind of wave going along deforming surface, but never really finished it nor showed what came out of this.
Lately I’ve finally finished the Tank project that I mentioned in previous post ( it’s being rigged with sounds right now ! ), so it’s time for something else to get busy with.

This setup let’s u align particles in the direction specified by the helpers that are within given radius from the particle. You also get adjustable influence falloff and radius visualization feature.
I’ve attached two custom scripted Operators that are required for this 3ds scene to run, scene itself and a tutorial. Actually it is my first video tutorial ever, and I must admit that it’s quite a challenge to do this right. I’ve forgot to explain few things there, and also it’s quite chaotic Hopefully someone will benefit from this one.

Here are two samples that I put together in January, just to get the idea of the effect that I’m after.

Tas

Aligner tutorial – QuickTime h.264 80MB

Aligner scene file – 3ds Max 2011 TP4 x64
CrossAlign – scripted operator for computing cross vector from two input vectors
P3toAlign – scripted operator for creating Alignment value out of three input vectors

sample1
sample2

It’s been some time since my last post, which means that I’ve been working on some interesting (hopefully!) stuff. I’ve been researching a procedural building destruction system in TP3, and I must say that it’s working pretty well. Over time working on this, I’ve shot some footage for further 3d integration of my scene, but in the end I end up with whole 3d scene. This is first time I’ve put together this system and rendered to check how things work and look.

Of course it’s early test and much work is still ahead, but u can get the idea of how it’s gonna look.

Now it’s time for a little break on French glacier, so expect some updates next month on this project!

Cheers,
TAS

tank1.mov 16MB

So! I’ve finally got my hands dirty on scripting, precisely, Max Scripting. Few dvd’s from CG-Academy, and U’re ready to go. The idea about this script came during production of my personal project. I needed some quick way of animating wheels on my jet, when it is taxing on the airfield. Hopefully I will post some stuff from this animation, right now it’s a deep WIP status

Cheers!

http://www.scriptspot.com/3ds-max/wheel-align

www.tas3d.com/scripts/wheel_align_v0.1.ms

Cheers!

fur1.mov

Here are three setups done in TP3. The first idea came out of nowhere, just wanted to get a interesting effect of wall desintegration. It’s not quite what I had in mind, but setup worked pretty well.
Next two setups comes from amazing AD done by Oktobor. As they said in makingof, the “wow”effect you get by simple transitions on many objects, in a little time offset + some randomization . Of course different setup for each shot. Pretty cool idea – U got it right Octobor!

wall1
wall2
wall3

That was a real adrenaline kick! I really needed this one. It’s fairly easy to make a parachute jump in a tandem. You don’t need any mediacal examination nor authorization. 15 minutes “tutorial” on the ground and you’re ready to fly. Everything went smooth, untill we reached altitude of 4 klicks and doors were opened. Then time starts to go 2x faster and there is no turning back. And don’t worry about the moment of exiting the plane, guy behind you will make this decision for you

Video and photos,

Cheers!

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This time I’ve been working on something much bigger then my current skills. I wanted to create an effect, where a crowd of people is doing some simple action – jogging for example. I wanted to use Massive for this, which is industry standard in producing crowd simulation in film.

First of all, I had to get familiar with PRMan. Scripting isn’t my upside, so it’s gonna be quite a challenge to master shading and lighting in Renderman. After few days of learning this amazing renderer, I already knew how powerful it is. Workflow of rendering agents from Massive is pretty tricky. I have managed to render some passes via Massive render script that is generated during simulation (beauty pass), and some other in Maya, by bringing RIB archives in my scene (occlusion and shadow passes). But still, shading agents is a totally mystery for me. It look so flat, even if I apply displacement maps. If someone have some experience in this area, please drop me a line!

I’m still workin on this one…
Here is my first try.

www.tas3d.com/video/crowd.mov 18MB

Cheers

I have been testing FumeFX for something else then fire/smoke simulation. As you can see, it also works great for ink sim. This effect can be pushed even further, if played with time scale in FFX grid options. Rendered with Krakatoa.

Anyway, that was just a quick test, with some eye candy resuls.

Greets!

Quicktime 3MB

I’ve finally finished this project! Actually, it’s been going quite smooth through the production process. At first I just ran some tests on simple model of balloon ( previous post), then I was ready to move on.

Getting a HD camcorder (HF-10) was the next step, so I could shoot some footage in my city. All the 3d job was done in 3ds, only cloth simulation was performed by Maya’s nCloth – has some nice features Animation was moved between apps by point cache files – nice and easy. Tracking process was fairly simple, because it was only nodal pan. Vray handled the rendering process, all in 720p at decent rendering times ( only one machine with Q6600). Oh, and there is a bit of FumeFX, it was quick setup, I didn’t have any more patience for this project

So, here is Vimeo link for final animation and Making Of. Also links for direct download from my host.

Enjoy!

Balloon crash – Quicktime 23MB

Making of Balloon – Quicktime 13MB

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