Grimm - Season 1 FX

End User Event 2012

For those of you who don't know this event it's called the EUE. http://enduserevent.com/ It's an event held in Utrecht, Netherlands.  It's decribed as having a "mini Siggraph" with 250 of your best buddies, held in a pub, and has none of the commercial stuff, but all of the talks.

I was just announced as the next speaker for this conference and Im stoked to be a part of it.  I'll probably be speaking on redering skin with Vray or a nuke production pipeline or working with hair-farm.  If any of you live out that way, register for the EUE- I hear it's a blast!

GRIMM - Tarantella

Check out ther latest effects my team did for Grimm. The fluid work on this one came out great!  Check out the fox dude too.  We did some beaver characters in this episode along with some more subtle acid fluid effects.

Grimm - Of Mouse and Man

Another great episode from my Grimm team. Way to go gang, this one looks fantastic!

Game Ogre

Game Ogre bitches!   Some great creature work from my Grimm team...

Happy Holidays - Gingerbread Wishes

Happy Holidays!

Just like they replay Rankin and Bass each year, I'll post gingerbread wishes again this year. Have a great holiday everyone, no matter what it is.

GRIMM Episode 107 'Let Your hair Down'

Worked on another Grimm episode.  Man, doing realistic skin full frame HD is tough, but I like that way Monroe came out.  Check it out...

GRIMM Episode 106 'Danse Macabre'

Hey, look- there's a cool new episode of Grimm airing Thursday night at 10 pm. Im not saying I had anything to do with it, but something tells me it's gonna be pretty cool.   How would I know this?  I don't know.  Maybe cause they came up with this awesome techinque using crowd systems with a pre-cache technique for simulating hundreds of rats?  Maybe cause they managed to integrate computer generated rats, right next to real rats?   Something tells me it's gonna be hard to pick out the real rats from the cg rats.

Anyway, a little bird that's been working late over the past few weeks tells me it was all worth it.  Here's a link to a teaser video on the Grimm website.

RED Epic-X Arrives

We got our new RED Epic-X cameras today. (Sorry for the crappy iPhone photos.) The camera head is so small it fits in a case smaller than a lunch box.  The menus are all supposed to be on the screen for quick changes to the camera settings. (The Red one had this little joystick which tended to loosen and fall off)  It's all stored on solid state chips and it has a high dynamic range feature called HDR-X which givs you even more latitude.  And did I mention is captures 5K resolution?

I know it seems lame to get excited about a camera, but digital filmaking has been taking leaps and bounds over the past few years and I think RED has been a big part in driving the prices down and technology up. 

Now that I've learned Nuke, I'm excited to do some tests with the Epic-X's HDRX technology and high speed cpabilities.  After I'm done working on this TV show in December, I'll try to do some tests and post my findings.

Jingle All The Way

Bent Image Lab recently did a half hour stop motion Christmas special for the Hallmark channel.  Here is an article about it along with the trailer.

I supervised a team that did digital set extentions of the town. I also did a couple small effects shots for show along with the generation and compositing of falling snow.  Your kids are gonna love this one. Get them the Plush animal and interactive storybook to go along with it.

Click here

HDR Images for Vray Lights

I love using Vray lights for soft shadows and reflections, but often they look very artifical and fake.  Adding and HDR image to your area light make your stuff look so much more natural.

Here's a reflection in a car with a simple white Vray light plane. 

It's nice, but the light gives a perfect square of light.  No hot spots, and perfectly clean edges.  Now take a look at some examples of using HDR images of some studio lights.

The great part is that they are HDR, so you can turn them up and down to adjust the hot spots and intensity.  I published my top 6 favorite HDR images for use on Vray lights up on Turbosquid. ($10)

I use these images on every project I work on.  I captured a bunch of stage lights and use them on Vray lights to get much more realistic reflections and lighting on my CG.

 

http://www.turbosquid.com/HDR Studio Lights

Starfucker Music Video - Bury Us Alive

I helped my friend Josh Cox with a shot or two on his debut music video.  The song is called "Bury Us Alive" by STRFKR.  Thiago Costa did the massive particle simulations at the end.

Sellwood Bridge Collapse

I took some redcam footage of the sellwood bridge fromt he east side, and I removed most of the bridge so i could have it collapse, caused by an inial explosion at the concrete pilon.  here are a couple of the tests.

First test where everything just falls all at once.

Here I've now got things timed out, but I need to remove the bounciness of the bridge and make it fall apart more.

 Worked on the sim more and started working with Fume to see what I get. A good start, but much more work is needed.

The Ant Attack!

Something I was messing around with.  Have to thank my friend Austin for the animation.

SIGGRAPH 2011

Siggraph was in Vancouver BC this year, so me and fellow Ex-Autodesk employee, Jon Bell, decided to drive up and check out the exibition hall.

I think the highlight of the show for me was seeing the guys at Thinkbox Software.  They weren't on the show floor, but they had a suite at a hotel next door and they were giving demos of Krakatoa, Frost and more.

A few snapshots from the show floor at Siggraph.

Stretchy Bones

Someone asked me the other day how to make a stretchy bone in 3dsmax.  I tried to explain it quickly and I made it overly confusing.  I then stopped and made a simple scene to explain the concept so i thought I'd share that with all of you.

Starting with a fresh scene, make a bone and finish it with an end bone. The End Bone: The end bone confuses some people.  I was told by the Autodesk engineering team that to have a bone, you need a start AND and end.  Otherwise, you don't know where that bone ends.  Even Maya's joints work the same way.  Each bone is made up of two joints.  This works great for making a bone stretchy since the distance between the 2 joints will be used to make a bone stretch and squash.

Add 2 point helpers. Using your Align tool, align one to each of the bones. One will simply act as a root for the whole system, the other the animated position for the stretching.  It's good practice to make a root bone for everything you do.  Link the first bone to this point helper.  It's always good to do this otherwise your system is a parent of the world, which cannot be moved.  Turn on auto key and animate the other helper so that we can test our stretchy bone as we go.

Now, Position Constrain the end bone to the moving helper. At this point the end bone should be following the point helper.  The root bone is not doing anything though.  To fix this, add a Look at Constraint to the root bone, and have it look at the moving point helper. This gives it an up axis that you can control, also making it like a simple IK system.

Finally, open up the BoneTools dialog and scroll all the way down to the Object Properties rollout and un-check Freeze-Length. If you want, you can set the squash option so the bone apears to deform with the stretch.  Squashy bones will work in conjunction with the Skin modifier and will help simulate effects like flexing muscles.

Search Engine Queries Summary

I looked at what people are searching for when they end up at my blog and I found one of todays top search terms to be insightful.

I think it was this guy I work with.  I could see him typing that in his browser.

Phys-X Dynamics in 3dsmax

So, Autodesk throws another plugin into the 3dsmax package. (as of 3dsmax 2011 Subscription)  Let's understand it, rant about it and move on...

This is what they do.  Don't be mad at Autodesk.  They just buy things now.   Then again, how could you not be a little upset.  I used to be there, working and talking with programmers to see how we could make a great toolset. But making original tools is expensive. Design, specs, testing, documentation, it tallys up quick. If we just keep buying these other peoples plugins, it'll make for a better tool in the end? Right? No.  Wait, what they really mean is, "if we keep buying these plugins, people will think they are real features and buy this product" all so the shareholders make money.  Wait. People don't really buy it becasue of those transparent attempts at features do they?  No, they buy it to stay current.  I want to be current all things like Open EXR, HDR files, FBX compatibility, maybe if were lucky some breakthrough in texture mapping.  We mainly upgrade only not to be left behind. 

Im all for them buying plugins and calling them features.  Max would still be clothless if it weren't for buying plugins.  I have to say.  That cloth is still very usable in production. Caching cloth to point caches helps too, but it still has a pretty good basic toolset.  Hair and Fur however (Shave and a Haircut origin) was a great idea, but the lack of max like user interface just killed it.  That with some seperate undo system and a hit or miss renderer and it left the market open to newer tools like Hair Farm, which is integrated very well.

Getting back on point, Phys-X is a bit different since it was developed by nVidia.  I could only speculate why they integrated it, probably because a developer over there thought it might be cool.  After autodesk thought it only natural to push this dynamics technology on the max users just like they did with Havok many years back. Phys-X is eveywhere and im sure its a plan to strong arm the video card\game  market.  Dont get me wrong, Im ok with all this. Matter of face this little physics demonstration can be quite usefull. (and I still own ADSK stock) 

The results I've seen from Phys-X already in Particle Flow Box#2, and Rayfire, it looks pretty usable.  (After buying a copy of Rayfire, we were told to download this plugin from Nvidia's developer site to use it with Rayfire!)  Many of you are probably skeptical about using game physics for anything other than realtime, but It does have it's place.  Im only writing this post since I recently needed to drop a shipping container, and have all 4 walls slam down and Phys-X worked for me like a charm. 

The 3dsmax Phys-X Workflow

Lets just spell out the intended worklfow of this plugin.  We have a scene we want to simulate dynamics for.  We take a set of objects, set up some dynamics properties and constraints and run a simulation. Once we have what we like, were done. Right?  The part many developers forget to think about is working with clients.  The client may like 2 different simulations many file versions apart.  You might be asked to "split the difference" and other tricky requests. I use point cache modifiers for this with cloth, but for objects? (Point Cache Space Warp modifier maybe?)  Maybe the animation layer system would work for creating different "takes" of the shot, but I ain't got time to test out that crap. Someone let me know if you can save dynamics animation to animation layers.

The Toolbar

Phys-X is pretty straight forward.  You use the toolbar buttons to assist you in adding constraints and property modifiers to your objects. As far as I can see, dynamics can only be turned on at a certain frame.  There doesn't appear to be a way to have an object stand still until its gets hit which was my first instinct of what it should do. 

Constraints

Constraints are powerful.  Make 2 boxes with a constraint and start messing with the parameters.  You will quickly find out that the coordinate space of you boxes is important.  And with max, that coordinate system is based on which viewport you created the object in. (Make a dummy in each of the 4 viewports and compare the local Z directions)  I always try to make "rig type" and object in the perspective view since it matches the world coordinate system.  Objects build in left and top viewports will be rotated 90 degrees to each other. (first 2 mouse inputs give you x and y, the last gives you the z.)  All I can say is to take care and think through the constraints and their coordinate.  The limts also work from the coodinates point of view so don't expect the transform gizmo arrow to stay within the constraints pie graph in the viewport.  It takes a little fiddling to ge the right axis limited.  Watch out for mirrored objects too.  The axis might appear flipped.

 The Timeline Issue

This is where a little design intervention could go along way.  The timeline in Phys-X is seperate from the 3dsmax animation timeline.  I'm sure there is a reason, but it throws off the common max user.  Makes the tool feel "broken" even if it's acting as intended.  I always feel like it hit the "back to start" button on the max timeline, and then have to do it again on the Phys-X toolbar.  

Dropping a Shipping Container

So I had an opportunity to use this just last month on a canadian lottery spot.  It needed a shipping container to be dropped on a guys lawn.  With it limited set of features Phys-X was still a good choice for this type of effect.   It makes keyframes. You can slide them around, re-time them and even save them off with 3dsmaxs  save animation tool.   Getting the scale was the first thing to do.  A small box dropped on teh floor moves faster than a gigantic box, landing on a lawn.  I linked all my objects to a dummy and scaled it til I got a good fall within the frame count I was given.  Dropping a box that's flat with the ground is boring and very symetrical.  I tilted the shipping container in all three axis to let it's corner hit first and got a great result.  The sim I used in the end wasn't very different from the first one I did. And of course I did this on simple boxes and linked the real mesh to it.

 I didn't get a chance to finish the shipping container drop for the commercial.  It was yet another job where not enough time was really given to finish the effects the way I really wanted them to look. When I started writing this post, I made another version of the dropping effect, but this time I tried to finish the job by denting the shipping container and adding a "flex" effect to make it look like real metal hitting and bending.  That version will see the light of day only through this post.

www.visualart.be - Particle Flow Water Examples

Just stubled across a cool blog with some great particle flow water examples.  Check it out his blog here.

http://www.visualart.be/?p=324

What the LUT?

Since we're all now working in a linear workflow with RAW data, (right?) you might start hearing more about something called a LUT.  

A LUT is a color profile that can be applied to footage to see it as it should appear in your final result.  Think of a LUT as a "lens" which you look at your work through.  LUT stands for Look Up Table. There are 2 types of LUTS.  1D LUTs and 3D LUTs.  Since we don't want this color space baked into the file, we use a LUT to see the image as we will deliver it.  Therefore, It's important for 3d rendering and compositing to see the final look of the footage as it is intended to be seen, with the LUT on top. 

A 1D LUT can be thought of like the "curves" tool in photoshop.  It can affect the brightness and contrast, but doesn't really shift colors around. It bends the luminance information of an image.  sRGB or Gamma 2.2 is a 1D LUT.   rec709 is another 1D LUT and is very similar to sRGB but the blacks are lifted slightly. Cineon files also use 1D LUT to get the logorithmic data to something viewable. 

Now for the 3D lut.  Imagine you have an image, and you plot the colors of that image in 3D space using Red for Z, Green for Y and Blue for Z. Now, imagine that you apply corrections to shift those 3d points in space, affecting red green and blue differently.  Now, if you took the original colors, and compared it to the shifted colors, and got the difference, that would be a 3D LUT. Now, of course it doesn't capture every color since that would be impossible.  instead, it captures a "look up table" of those values so it can be applied to any other image and give similar results. The data in between is interpolated.

3d max can load a 1D lut into the viewer so that the renderer and material editor can be viewed properly.  This file format is a .lut file and is an Autodesk file format that comes from their hi end finishing systems like Smoke and Flame.  Vray can load a 3D lut into it's VFB (Virtual frame buffer) and it supports .cube files. Bring up the color correction controls by pressing the left most button in the Vray VFB.  From there you can load a .cube file.  Make sure to turn off the sRGB button and turn on the LUT button to see the correct results.

 LUT Examples

Here are a few examples of LUTs and what each does to the image.  The left is from Nuke and the right is from Vray- just to show how the results are the same.

RAW R3D

First lets start with a RAW linear image to remind everyone what it looks like before any adjustment. This image is from the RED camera in it's original R3D format. 

sRGB

This image has the typical sRGB 2.2 gamma applied.

AlexaV3_EI0800_LogC2Video_Rec709_LL

This LUT can be downloaded from the Arri Digital web site and is designed for use with the Arri Alexa camera.

 http://www.arridigital.com/technical/luts

HD Vid to Print

This LUT i downloaded from the Light Illusion web site.

 http://www.lightillusion.com/freeluts.htm

Log to Print

Another LUT I grabbed from the Light Illusion web site.

 http://www.lightillusion.com/freeluts.htm

 The hard thing about some of these is knowing what the input color space was when it was made.  The last one from Light Illusions might not be using the proper input color space since the RED camera  doesn't give you a cineon source.  I changed the input source in Nuke until I got something I liked.

When I write a blog, I usually know a lot about the topic.  This topic is different.  Since I started reasearching LUTs I've gained a lot of knowledge, but I still have more to learn.  First of all, finding LUTs is pretty hard.  There is also a lot of LUT formats out there.  Many of them don't work in 3dsmax or Nuke even though the file extension is supported.  I feel like Im writing this pre-maturely, but I've learned enough to pass on a working knowledge of LUTs and that what this blog is here for.