I had been wanting to start my own company, and figured it was a good start after picking up a small contract from a company called Solutions by Design (near Fresno, CA). They are a media company that focuses primarily on dental practices. A couple of years back, they got into 3d modeling and animation which they began outsourcing to various small companies and contractors. I handled everything from project management to developing assets and rendering. So that more or less has been keeping me busy. I am also working on some new ideas and websites. Over the winter holidays, I went to NY to visit my parents with my girlfriend. It was so nice to take a break from the computer(s). For both of us! Now that I’m back to SF, I got some more exciting work – high end motion graphics work for the same company (sbd). I’m gonna be doing some intro and transition sequences for a video they are producing. I’m also doing the sounds effects and music. I’ll post some screenshots when its finished. In the meantime, here are some screens from the work last year.

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).

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

]]> http://www.sateeshmalla.com/blog/2010/05/pushing-particles-with-fluids-and-shatterplus/feed/ 0 http://www.sateeshmalla.com/blog/2009/02/the-orphanage-is-shutting-down/ http://www.sateeshmalla.com/blog/2009/02/the-orphanage-is-shutting-down/#comments Fri, 06 Feb 2009 06:45:51 +0000 Sateesh Malla http://www.sateeshmalla.com/?p=2633 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.

• The Sky is Falling
• Day 2 Night – Las Vegas Reloaded

Check them out in the porfolio section. I’ll be updating the rest of them soon.