Toon shaded fluids

Oddne put this music video on facbook and it's truely amazing.

IS TROPICAL - THE GREEKS (official music video) from EL NINO on Vimeo.

I wondered whether the explosions were actually hand drawn, but I couldn't find any information on how they did it. Anyhow, I decided to give toon shaded 3D fluids a go.



I didn't spend much time on the actual simulation, so it can obviously look much better. But the main thing is that it didn't take any time at all. In order to get a nice smooth result, the mesh resolution has to be quite low, which means that the mesh generation doesn't take long (almost realtime on my old machine). Rendering was extremely quick (3min for 48 frames on production settings and full 720p resolution). To draw that by hand, would have probably taken me a few hours (and it still would notlook good) Doing it in Maya can easily be set up and rendered within half an hour and look really nice.

Movie Magic!

I'm in the middle of making my showreel and I obviously want a nice intro. So I went back to video copilot to see what's new with motion graphics and After Effects. On the blog there Andrew Kramer posted this YouTube clip of an old episode of Movie Magic (air date 1994). It's a bit long but so worth watching.

Almost there!

I haven't blogged for a while. Mainly because I was busy with dissertation. Then I went to Stuttgart, Germany for the FMX 2011, for a week, which was a great experience. Now that I'm back, it's literally the finishing lap in the major project run. One week until hand in date. Unfortunately, it looks like none of my projects is going to make it fully finished. But hopefully a couple of them finish afterwards. I certainly continue to working over summer to boost my showreel. My main focus right now is lighting and compositing for The Little Helper, some of the animation has just been finished and we're trying to get it all out, but render time is an issue.

Some stills:

I also started doing my website http://petestache.weebly.com It's live but needs a lot more work done.