After watching vexille

Ive decided to try and recreate one of the worms that are so amazingly represented in one of the best films Ever.. vexille. these metal monsters absorb any loose metal, realy just a play on object instancing, a real pain to get the life transparency ramp to work in teh right way for seperate dust dynamics. anyway vid=

\/ This project as a whole was a great experience and insight into the reality of animation, working for a client requires a lot of changes and hard stylistic decisions-but the workflow and heavy timetable (provided by matt the organisational genious). As far as creating and outcome goes we completed the project in the full but only due to pure determination and not enjoyment... as the project was extremly creativly stifling.

Working in a pair was great, and me and matt fit each other like gloves...on gloves ^_^. with matt doing animation - camera - setting up renders. while i could do all the things i enjoy personally. The fact that we both worked on different parts of the animation process meens that we could put the best of what we knew to use.

To be honest im in two minds about the final piece its succesfull in filling the clients needs but stylistically i find the clients choices sickeningly tacky. "weve polished a turd"

Anyway it was a good insight and ill be glad to get on with more creative projects in teh near future.

The clubscene here was a pain to render, with 1 hour per frame, in the end we took 1 frame and zoomed in on after effects, the lighting came out succesfully for such a simple scene probably becuase of the leather spec and bump on the sticky club seats :/

the bouncer was one of the last things created simply a texture designating the glow on the door with matts animation this scene succesfully filled the clients wishes.

Helicopter, my favourite scene.. The scene has rain dynamics that react to the heli's surface- lightening- and the heli has moving blades that react well with motion blur/ This scene is a great ending shot in my opinion.

the first image here is of the austin powers scene, it shows the main character G in the spinning glowing red environment i imagined would be suited to the lyrics, the background spins round reflecting well on the floor. The second image was a real problem to render as the paint effects glitched and forced maya to render in vector :( in the end matt cleaned the scene and luckily it rendered, it used the same background technique as the car scenes, this plus matts use of the camera is great in showing the passage of time and realy softens the scene, the dog here is a 2d image on a plane half a stylistic choice and half time constraints.
Again the car scene includes G ghostriding which is something the client was intent on.
The last image here is one of my favourites it shows a boot full of drugs in G's car, the drugs look great in the opened boot and although first i was going to use something special like subsurface scattering to give the effect of packages, in the end the speculart i used managed to get the same look, the only problem is the brown tape on the drugs is a little poorly uv mapped, but isnt noticable.

these are the ice scenes, island scenes and the quick poker table scene, the ice scenes have falling snow and crumple paper speculars to give the right effect. which came out perfectly although the snow isnt as apparant as i would have hoped. The second shots of the island are quick and simple, the water is an ocean shader with a cartoony ramp. again lighting moddeling and texturing done by me animation done by matt, the poker scene was hard to get looking good with such simple objects and in the end i just tried to make the table look as soft as possible.

In these scenes as usual i filled my role as the lighting texturing and moddeling guy although moddeling for dj and G was done by matt ^_^. the lighting came out soft and cartoonish which is one of the few ways that during this project i could put some creativity in, the car scenes backdrop could be rotated to reflect day/late evening (morning) and the stage scenes explosion was easy to implement through mayas presets in visor. the explosion was put in mainly for the client though.

this video is for the pouring champangue mini scene, The biggest problem here is that maya does nOT have liquids, to get liquids in maya you need to use seperate programs, this isnt a bad thing.. but downloading and learning RF4 is too much for such a simple scene.so insteadi created the effect of bubbles pouring out of the bottle.

This is the playblast for the final helicopter scene and shows off the particle system, each raindrop hits teh surface of the helicopter and splits into five smaller raindrops, because the raindrops are seriously low poly spheres render time is still managable, even enough to use 3d motion blur.