Siggraph 2010 was held in Los Angeles, CA this year at the LA Convention Center. This was my first Siggraph conference, so I went with high expectations.  However, I was left a little disappointed. The first day as I drove in, I was a little worried since the parking garages were fairly empty. Apparently, the turnout was very low this year in comparison to a few years ago and this is of course understandable, given the present state of the economy. The job fair was pretty bad (not many companies showed up), but the exhibition was alright. Chaos Group had a big booth showing off their V-Ray renderer, which is supposedly the best one-click renderer now. I haven’t actually used it yet, so I don’t know, but the demos looked great and fast. I’ll likely migrate from Mental Ray eventually if it makes sense. Pixologic was demoing some new features in Zbrush which looked pretty wicked. I checked out Pixar’s booth where they showed the Renderman shaders for creating the heaps of garbage in Toy Story 3. Next Limit had some pretty nice simulations using Realflow.

I also attended a special Side Effects Houdini event on Tuesday night at the Cooper building. The venue was great. SideFX showed off some new features in Houdini 2011, specifically the new voronoi-based fracturing system, particle fluids solver, and hardware rendering improvements. Digital Domain talked about how they used Houdini to create some very nice fire and fluid effects in Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief. Framestore NY stepped through their process in creating ground fractures in the current movie Salt. Lastly, Motion Theory illustrated how they accomplished some neat fluid effects for a Disney commercial, “World of Color”.

Overall, I felt a little disappointed in the conference this year. But I also didn’t have access to many of the talks and presentations. I heard the Behind the scenes of Avatar and Making of Tron were pretty awesome. I also only attended for 2 days, so it might have gotten better afterwards. Hopefully the economy picks up next year and we’ll get more people. The conference will be in Vancouver, Canada next year (the first time it is outside of the USA).

Updates to this website have been long overdue. I haven’t added any new files here for a long time…a bit lazy I suppose, but on the other hand, I’ve been enormously busy with my final thesis project. It’s due next week so I will be updating the site will all new content I’ve done over the last year, including renderman, particles, and fluids work. I wanted to make a nice intro title sequence for my vfx short film called Orthia. Here are some quick tests I’ve done last night.

link to hi-res HD version here

I’m emitting a ton of particles from a texture emission and then they are being pushed up by a 3d fluid as a field source.

Particle pushing with fluids seems to be the new thing these days. Check out this awesome Audi Filter commercial where they used 50 million particles – not sure how they managed to render that exactly. They used Ice in Softimage XSI to achieve this effect. Check out the Making of Audi Filter video also.

Here’s another animation I made. I used a free shatter plugin for Maya called ShatterPlus. So far, its the best shatter tool I’ve used, but only works with a 32-bit version of Maya. It takes a while to fragment the peices since its a manual process, the but the results are definitely worth it. This tool is a blessing if you’ve ever tried using the built in solid shatter tool in Maya. After breaking up the chucks, I wrote a small python script that randomly transforms the pieces in 3D space.  It then sets the keyframes over time.  Check it out:

link to hi-res HD version here

Finally had a chance to visit Point Reyes National Seashore this past weekend after a very long time. It’s about 1.5 – 2 hours north of San Francisco. These pictures are of the lighthouse and surroundings.

At the end of each spring semester, the Academy of Art has their annual spring show which showcases the best student work. We produced some really great Visual Effects and Animation work this year. If anyone lives in San Francisco, definitely check it out. It’s open house for all, but hurry since the show closes on June 11th, 2009.

For our second field trip, the school rented a RED One Camera and we shot a few plates in the Marina district of San Franscisco. There has been a lot of hype about the RED so it was really nice to be able to mess around with it. I have to say, it can be quite intimidating at first with all the options that are available on it. The great thing about the red is that you completely bypass any film processing as the files are stored digitally onto either a harddrive or memory card. We shot a few items at high frame rate at 160fps.

This was the first field trip in my VFX Cinematography class. The location is Treasure Island in between San Francisco and the East Bay. We used a 35mm Film Camera and we also had a Panasonic HPX 500 digital camera. This was the first time most of us ever used a 35mm camera so this was quite a treat.

I just learned today that the VFX house, The Orphanage, in San Francisco is officially closing its doors. It was a real surprise considering the amazing work they’ve done, like in Iron Man. Seems the economic downturn is hitting everyone hard this year. There are  several instructors at our school who work at the Orphanage, so it is really sad news.

Read more about it here at co-founder Stu Maschwitz’s blog.

My classes began today. After some last minute changes, here is my schedule for this semester:

1. Particle Effects 1
   This will be taught in Autodesk Maya. Hopefully we’ll get into nParticles which is a new particle system in Maya 2009. We have a new instructor for the class: Markus Burki, currently a visual effects animator. The last movie he worked on was “Monster vs. Aliens“.
2. VFX Cinematography
   Taught by Kenneth Ferro (who is amazing btw), this class will teach lighting and cinematography with respect to VFX. It’s great for those pursuing a track as a VFX supervisor. We’ll be using a few high-end cameras like the RED One 4K camera. We’ll be shooting some stock footage for the school as well as work on some class projects. I’m looking forward to this.
3. Nuke 2: Advanced Compositing
   We have a great instructor for this class – Kyle McKulloch who currently works at the Orphanage in SF. A few of the movies that he worked include Iron Man, Live Free or Die Hard, and The Last Mimzy. The class will touch on of all the advanced features in the Nuke compositing package. Ultimately, I will be working on some of my thesis shots.

I found this maya plugin that seems to work reasonably well for importing a BGEO sequence from Sidefx Houdini into Autodesk Maya.

You can download the plugin from here: http://www.houdinistuff.com/

The instructions provided in the readme file can be a bit confusing.  Here are the steps I used to successfully load a Bgeo sequence from houdini:

1. Save the bgeo.mll file into your plugins folder and load it in maya.
   
2. Open the command line editor and run: mBgeoReader
   
   
3. This will create a new poly object called mBgeoReader. Check in the outliner window.
   
4. Select the object and go to the attribute editor.
   
5. Enter the Path to the bgeo files.
   
6. Done. You can pan through the timeline to see the animation sequence.

I haven’t yet tried exporting a Bgeo sequence from Maya, but the import worked successfully. Some problems that you may run into are attributes like velocity that aren’t  transferred into the Maya scene. At least I haven’t been able to during my test run. If there is a way, let me know. Without the velocity attribute, I wasn’t able to produce an accurate motion blur in Maya.

It may be a good idea to turn off any attributes in Houdini before using the ROP output note to create the bgeo sequence. This should increase performance in Maya. Lastly, use the geometry cacheing in Maya to speed things up if needed.

It’s been another busy semester as usual. I’ve worked on a few projects this semester which I will be posting to the portfolio section soon. In my Visual Effects class, we worked on a greenscreen character replacement, matchlighting, HP commercial, and a UFO project. Here are some screenshots: