Tag

3D animation

Boost - Red Royale 3D Animation

3D animations for Boost Juice

By Current ProjectsNo Comments

I had a heap of fun over the past couple of weeks working on these 2 animations with Alf Kuhlmann for Boost Juice!

I’ve added more information about these videos to the Portfolio section of my website. There is a dedicated page for the Red Royale video and a page for the Pure Eden Video.

[image title=”Click this image to read more about the Red Royale Video” width=”544″ height=”306″ align=”center” lightbox=”false” group=”GIS” icon=”link” link=”http://thelode.com.au/portfolio/boost-juice-red-royale-promo-video/” link_target=”_self”] http://thelode.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/Boost_RedRoyale_02.jpg [/image] [image title=”Click this image to read more about the Pure Eden Video” width=”544″ height=”306″ align=”center” lightbox=”false” group=”GIS” icon=”link” link=”http://thelode.com.au/portfolio/boost-juice-pure-eden-promo-video/” link_target=”_self”] http://thelode.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/Boost_PureEden_03.jpg [/image]
February 25, 2016
Love0
The Riparian Project 3D animation

The Riparian Project DIY Kit 3D Animation

By Site NewsNo Comments

I’m very excited to be able to share one of my favourite LODE projects from early 2015. This 3D animation was created to detail The Riparian Project’s goal of shifting grazing practices to improve river health.

Envisioned as a looping continuous video without edits, it shows the negative effect livestock cause to rivers and the knock-on effect this has on the entire ecology downstream and in the surrounding environment. By erecting fences along the river to keep livestock out, the river can repair itself and the land around it. Solar powered water troughs allow the livestock to still drink from the river from a safe distance.

This was created for Jen Rae’s PhD exhibition: Art & The Anthropocene on Thursday the 14th of May, 2015.

It will now be installed at the Yea Water Discovery Centre where it will loop continuously.

You can find out more about the Riparian Project on the official website.

I was involved with this project and took the initial script to an animatic, asset creation, animation, shading, lighting, rendering, compositing and the audio soundtrack.

I completed this project in May 2015 and used it as a qualifier for the fantastic new Alembic implementation in Autodesk 3ds Max 2016. You can find some more videos about the production process for this animation on my Channel.

October 23, 2015
Love1

Last days – Raylight’s XrayUnwrap 2.0 crowd-funding campaign

By SoftwareNo Comments

The popular Italian videogame developer Raylight SRL are currently in the final 5 days of their crowd-funding campaign for XrayUnwrap 2.0.

Raylight have released a lot of their IP in the form of essential workflow plugins for 3ds Max and Maya. All of their tools are ‘best in class’ for their particular tasks, and are extremely fairly priced. I am a huge fan of their Rattle plugin, in particular, and use it almost daily in many animation related tasks.

[image width=”544″ height=”306″ align=”center” lightbox=”true” icon=”zoom”] http://thelode.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/Rattle_Plugin_3ds_Max.jpg [/image]
Above – Using the Rattle plugin for 3ds Max in production.

XrayUnwrap is a robust UV mapping tool for 3ds Max and Maya. Raylight are seeking crowdfunding to develop and release a vastly improved XrayUnwrap 2.0 to the public. They have a number of perks available to project backers, including free copies of their new UDIM plugin for 3ds Max. Their Dual Quaternion skinning plugin “XrayBlendSkin” is also free to anyone for the duration of the campaign.

 

If you’re at all interested, check out the promo videos, updates and images on their XrayUnwrap 2.0 indiegogo page.

 

June 30, 2015
Love0
3D animation Drone footage

Adding 3D animation to Inspire 1 Drone Footage

By Current Projects, What I'm Working on (WIWO)No Comments

I had a lot of fun at Reel Pictures working on a project shot on the Inspire 1 Drone. We added 3D animation to 4 aerial shots of a 3.5 acre subdivision in Gisborne, Australia.

The aerial footage was shot in 4k by Eye Of The Sky using their Inspire 1 drones. The footage turned out great and amazingly no Lens correction or rolling shutter removal was necessary to get a camera track. The drone’s camera is controlled independently of the drone itself and is locked on a Gimbal so there are no vibrations. Tt also has great auto-focus and auto-exposure.

After tracking the footage we made the estate come to life, adding the boundary lines, fences, structures, roads, trees and animals. This was a fun job and a good opportunity to test out the new Alembic playback-graph feature in 3ds Max 2016. Also made good use of the Animators Toolkit (ATK).

Portfolio item

You can read more about this project in my LODE portfolio.

May 25, 2015
Love0
Lana_Lights_Goosh_Featured

“Goosh” shown at Lana Lights 2015, Italy

By Personal ProjectsNo Comments

Goosh was unveiled at the Lana Lights projection festival 2015 this weekend. I created “Goosh” in collaboration with Alf Kuhlmann and Erin McKimm. It is an illusionary architectural projection bringing the disused Zuegg jam and juice factory in Lana, Italy to life as it is filled with Jam.

You can read up more about the event and our artwork on the Lana Lights website.

You can view a live recording of the show below and find out more about this artwork on my portfolio page (coming soon!).

April 26, 2015
Love0
RealFlow Demo reel

RealFlow showreel – Reel Pictures

By Current Projects, My PortfolioNo Comments

Check out our first RealFlow showreel! This demoreel is a compilation of all the fluid simulation projects we’ve produced at Reel Pictures, Melbourne over the past 6 months.

I worked on every sequence together with Alf Kuhlmann – the Director of Reel Pictures.

The first project is the ‘Wonder of Gold’ – an AV Installation for the Perth Mint, Australia.

The AV is presented on a large 12×2 metre wrap-around screen and involved many different RealFlow simulations, some fluid simulations running over 30 seconds long.

Find out more about Reel Picture’s work on the Wonder of Gold project here.

The second project featured is a series of animated videos created for Amtek. These are looping videos for interactive gaming and again required many different types of fluid simulations.

Very diverse, very varied, very fun to produce! (And a little bit complicated when you need fluid sims, fire, falling nuggets, etc all to LOOP every 5 seconds).

May 2, 2014
Love0

W.I.W.O: Week 35 & 36 – Melbourne Zoo Underwater Exhibit

By Current Projects, What I'm Working on (WIWO)No Comments

I’m creating 3D animated content for an exhibit at the Melbourne Zoo! Reel Pictures & Mal Padgett design are putting together an update for a 6 minute large-screen video about Australia’s coast and recycling. I’m helping to create 2 minutes of animation for the exhibit.

The video must go live on the first week of school holidays (very, very soon!) but we are confident we will finish the content in time. I’ve spent the last week or so creating the underwater environment.

I have saved a lot of time thanks to a tutorial created by Michael McCarthy- 2011 Autodesk 3DS Max master and one of my many heroes in this industry. For a recent tutorial, he created an underwater enivornment that looks fantastic and renders extremely quickly using Mental Ray. I have used this idea as my starting point for our underwater scene. It’s my first project using Mental ray in a very long time, and i’ve been reminded how good mental ray actually is. It hasn’t been developed properly in a few years (though that may change over the next couple of months), and I still believe vray is far better, but mental ray is proving to be a much better solution for this particular job.

 

I’ve also spent a few days over these last 2 week helping Alf Kuhlmann put together a new website for Reel Pictures, the first update in a few years. The new Reel Pictures folio is only just started, with many more projects to be added and finished, but already there is so much awesome work on there.

I’ve also created an updated poster design for Moonee Valley City Council’s Fling Fest Event.

[image title=”Fling Fest 2012 Poster Design by Michael Wentworth-Bell” width=”544″ height=”757″ align=”center” lightbox=”true” group=”wiwo2012week35″ icon=”zoom”] http://thelode.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/Fling-Fest-2012-Poster-Design-Michael-Wentworth-Bell.jpg [/image]

I created the artwork for this poster in Photoshop and 3DS max and rendered it with Vray and After Effects. It was a lot of fun and i’m going to create a new page on my portfolio for this project soon.

The next 2 weeks will be quite busy with the Underwater animation job, but it’s a lot of fun (lots and lots of Particle Flow Simulations) and I can’t wait to see how it turns out!

[divider_line_padding] I try to create a quick journal entry at the end of each week that covers the projects, events and highlights of the past 7 days. These weekly blog posts are known as the ‘WIWO’ Series
(What I’m Working On).
[divider_line]

 

September 8, 2012
Love0
Michael Wentworth-Bell - Birthday Dinner

W.I.W.O: Week 30 – Siemens, Adobe Roadshow & my Birthday!

By Current Projects, What I'm Working on (WIWO)One Comment

I’ve just started working on a new 3D animation for Siemens. It’s a fun project with a very short deadline (for 3D animation) but I am excited about it! I am working on this project for Alf Kuhlmann (Reel Pictures). The animation centres on Fed Square and luckily we were supplied with an accurate 3D model of the entire Federation Square site. It’s very cool!

The file we were given originated as a CAD model which is both good and bad. Good because it is a very true-to-life representation of Fed square with correct placement of structures, individual triangle tiles(!), pavement blocks, etc. Bad because it was imported as well over 60,000 individual polygon objects into 3DS max! CAD models are designed for accurate construction of a real structure, not 3D animation! It took the better part of a day to combine/merge all the pieces and cleanup the whole model, but it was worth investing the time because the model is now quite nice! I spent the rest of this week preparing the shaders and queued up some test renders for this weekend.

Here’s a few quick renders of the whole model at this early stage in production.

[image title=”Fed Square animation – Michael Wentworth-Bell – complete view ” width=”544″ height=”306″ align=”center” lightbox=”true” group=”2012week30″ icon=”zoom”] http://thelode.com.au/site_assets/image_uploads/FedSquareAll.jpg [/image] [image title=”Fed Square animation – Michael Wentworth-Bell – Overhead view” width=”544″ height=”306″ align=”center” lightbox=”true” group=”2012week30″ icon=”zoom”] http://thelode.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/FedOverhead.jpg [/image]

 

Earlier this week I attended the Adobe Roadshow at the Melbourne Convention Centre. The first 45 minutes were quite underwhelming and I thought it was going to be a massive waste of time! The free coffee and biscuits during the break were nice though, as were the partner booths displaying new tech like the Cintiq 24HD, but the best part of the day was the 2 ‘video breakout’ sessions after morning tea. These sessions were held in separate rooms 3 levels above the main show, and the attendance for these sessions was much, much less (around 100 people instead of 1000+. but they were truly unmissable, hosted by Karl Soule and Jon Adobe, 2 adobe Evangelists. Karl runs a few video production blogs and hosts many ‘how-to’ videos on tv.adobe.com. They covered a lot of new features in CS6 Production Premium. Many of these tips were focused on Media Encoder, Audition, Prelude & Speedgrade and they highlighted new features that I was completely unaware of.

Adobe Media Encoder CS6 - New Features

 

 

The most exciting part was at the end when they demo’ed a research project using Premiere Pro. This is a feature that may be released in a year, if it works. It was called ‘Premiere Pro – Edit Anywhere’. It allows 2+ Editors to work on the same sequence together from anywhere in the globe! all the source media (typically over 1TB of footage) is kept on a central server. The effects processing and compositing is done using the server, so the editor receives only the input and output frames as they edit and perform compositing operations. It’s very fast and secure! Karl said that the editing experience would remain responsive as long as you had a minimum 1.5Megabit internet connection.

For someone like Alf, this feature would be awesome! He often works on up to 30(!) Swisse Advertisements a week, collaborating with 2 editors remotely (one is in Portland). this feature would save a lot of time that would be spent transferring Gigabytes+ of source footage via FTP, courier, or airplane (sometimes quickest on a tight deadline).

At this stage, Adobe were talking of releasing this as a software solution only, so it would be up to the customer to setup the server hardware and security. This is a good move, allowing big studios to set up their own international network exactly how they want it, but i hope Adobe offers a subscription-style cloud server model for smaller shops that might only need it for an occasional job.

 

This was the week I finally launched a preview of my website (and the official facebook page) this week. Very exciting! I am still working on portfolio items, tutorials and proper body copy of the site as well as business card, letterheads and stationary design before I launch the website proper.

Finally, this week I also celebrated my birthday and had a great few days of celebration, including an epic dinner with my Girlfriend Ivy at the Melba Restaurant, Melbourne.
[image title=”Michael Wentworth-Bell – Birthday Dinner” width=”544″ height=”408″ align=”center” lightbox=”true” group=”2012week30-light2″ icon=”zoom”] http://thelode.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/MichaelWentworth-BellBirthday.jpg[/image] [divider_line_padding] I try to create a quick journal entry at the end of each week that covers the projects, events and highlights of the past 7 days. These weekly blog posts are known as the ‘WIWO’ Series
(What I’m Working On).
[divider_line]

July 29, 2012
Love0
Swisse Logo - Olympic Partner

What i’m working on – 2012 – Week 26

By Current Projects, What I'm Working on (WIWO)No Comments

My post is a bit late this week! I’ve been working again for Alf at Reel Pictures this week. He has started producing over 3 minutes of animation for a SWISSE corporate video. The extremely lurcrative health supplement company will be moving abroad in July and will use this Corporate video for presentations, shows, and eventually online.

[image width=”460″ height=”198″ align=”center”] http://thelode.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/SwisseLogoOlympics.jpg [/image]

 The entire corporate video is to be animated in 3D – we’re using After Effects & 3DS Max. It is a very big project that must be completed in an exteremely tight deadline, so there will be a few long hours on this job.

I look forward to showing the finished product!

[divider_line_padding] I try to create a quick journal entry at the end of each week that covers the projects, events and highlights of the past 7 days. These weekly blog posts are known as the ‘WIWO’ Series
(What I’m Working On).
[divider_line]
July 1, 2012
Love0

What i’m working on – 2012 – Week 25

By Current Projects, What I'm Working on (WIWO)No Comments

I’d love to use my Digital Lode website as a way of sharing the projects i’m currently working on. Starting with this post, I will be aiming to create a quick, weekly blog about whatever project i’m currently working on.

This has been my first year out of uni and I have been working as a contract 3D generalist & Motion Graphics artist. So far, i’ve worked on jobs that last a couple of days and a few that have lasted weeks. I thought i’d make my first ‘What i’m working on’ (WIWO) post about a job i’ve been working on for around 6 weeks now; A stereoscopic 3D animation for the ‘Mission to Mars’ space experience at the Victorian Space Science Education Centre.

The Mission to Mars program allows secondary school students to spend a day simulating a trip to Mars. At the start of the journey, the crew watches a 12 minute briefing video which was shot, edited & produced by Chris Joiner and The Pod. I have been contracted by Alf @ Reel Pictures to help convert parts of this briefing video into Stereoscopic 3D. This has been a challenging, but really fun job!

The briefing video contains a lot of 3D animated content; showing the Ares space rocket launching from Earth and hooking up with the Mars Explorer spaceship. The Mars Explorer travels to Mars and the Mars Lander makes touches down on the red planet. There is about 6 minutes of content that needs to be re-animated and composited in Stereo3D.

At this stage in the project a lot of the animation is complete and I am now rendering & Compositing many of the scenes. I have included a couple of preview photos of how it’s looking so far – to view these images, you’ll need a pair of red/cyan 3D glasses like these.

[image title=”Ares1 Spacecraft – Orion Crew vessel detaching” width=”544″ height=”185″ lightbox=”true” group=”WIWO-Week25″ icon=”zoom”] http://thelode.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/S3D01.jpg [/image] [image title=”International Space Station in Earth’s orbit” width=”544″ height=”306″ lightbox=”true” group=”WIWO-Week25″ icon=”zoom”] http://thelode.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/S3D02.jpg [/image]

These are just the first preview shots, but I am pretty happy with the results! I have learnt more about the art/science of Stereoscopic 3D on this job then ever. The briefing video will be projected onto a 5 metre-wide screen, and will be viewed from a distance of 6.5 metres. With this information, we are creating the Stereo3D content to match that screen, which means, if you view these 3D images on a 5 metre screen and stand far back, it’ll look perfect! on a tiny screen, the 3D effect can ‘hurt’ a bit, or you may see some ‘ghosting’ around the edges of objects. The animation will be projected using a special projection technology from Germany. The VSSEC is one of the few places that are using, it’s not ‘active’ (most 3D TVs) or ‘passive’ (RealD at the movies) glasses, it’s something else, but it apparently looks awesome!

I’ve been using 3DS Max and Vray to create the 3D animation. It took about a week to setup a very solid 3DSmax -> Vray -> After Effects Stereo pipeline but it is now working well. I’m using a few Stereoscopic tools that ship with Vray to create the Stereo images. There are a few features that I think are missing from the Vray stereoscopic toolset and I have made a few feature requests on the Chaos Group forums. Vlado, the creator of Vray has replied and said he aims to add these features, though they might not be finished before my project’s done. Still, that’s what I call insanely awesome customer service! You can try and make a feature request for Max or After Effects, but the chances of getting a response, let alone getting your feature even half the way you want it, are very thin.

So this is the project i’ve been working on this week. I’ll still be working on it over the next few weeks amongst some other jobs that may need quicker attention. I hope I can post some new and improved Renders as I get seriously deep in 3D compositing!

[divider_line_padding] I try to create a quick journal entry at the end of each week that covers the projects, events and highlights of the past 7 days. These weekly blog posts are known as the ‘WIWO’ Series
(What I’m Working On).
[divider_line]

 

June 21, 2012
Love0