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Element 3D

My 2 Year Anniversary

W.I.W.O: Week 33 & 34 – Kubota Truck Launch

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

A double journal entry this time. I’ve had a pretty exciting past 2 weeks!

I spent a lot of this time working on animated content for an upcoming Kubota Truck Launch. The Animated content was created for a 40 metre wide screen!

All the animation was done using Video Copilot’s Element 3D plugin. I thought this project would test the plugin to it’s limit but it would render these massively large animation files without any issue…although I was doing a lot of this work with a beastly GTX 680, which may have had something to do with it!

I worked primarily on a ~90 second animated sequence for the main Kubota truck launch. I look forward to sharing some of the work after the launch!

 

I also helped create animated content for another upcoming ‘Go For Gold!’ corporate event, this time completing all the 3D animation in 3DS Max with Vray.

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In this past week, I also attended the first ‘meet and greet’ for Pause Fest, Melbourne. It was interesting to see the showreel of clips that will be featured in the upcoming festival at the end of the year, and I also bumped into my first year 2D animation Teacher, Megan Nairn, who amazingly still remembered me! I created 4 2D animations for her 2D animation subject.

 

In week 33, I also celebrated my 2 year anniversary with my girlfriend, Ivy, and enjoyed some time off!

My 2 Year Anniversary

 

I’ve used some of my time off to start a few new personal projects – more info on that soon!

[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).
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Digital Lode - Tony Robinson's London Games Unearthed

W.I.W.O: Week 31 – Tony Robinson, Element3D and a Stereoscopic movie

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

Early this week Alf Kuhlmann received a DVD copy of recent hour-long documentary – Tony Robinson’s London Games Unearthed. The show looks at the history of East London – the site of the 2012 Olympic games. A few months ago, I worked for Alf on a few sequences for the Documentary.

[image title=”Tony Robinson’s London Games Unearthed – Zeus Sequence” width=”544″ height=”386″ align=”center”] http://thelode.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/Zeus_Title.jpg [/image]

 

We created a 3D statue of Zeus and animated the 13 metre statue in some live action sequences with Tony Robinson. We then had to make the Zeus model crumble into a pile of rubble. It was a lot of fun! This week was the first time we actually got to see how our sequences were used in the final documentary. I edited together just the sections featuring our Zeus model & made a new project page in my LODE portfolio about the project.

[image title=”Tony Robinson’s London Games Unearthed – Still Frame” width=”544″ height=”304″ align=”center” lightbox=”true” group=”wiwo2012w31″ icon=”zoom”] http://thelode.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/ZeusSCreenshotB.jpg [/image]

This week I have been helping Alf a bit on a big product launch for Kubota. He is creating the animated content for a massive screen that will be on stage. We are using Element3D for the 90~ second sequence – this is the first time we’ve tried out the plugin and there have been many quirks and bugs, particularly when trying to create 3D models from Illustrator or Vector paths.
Video Copilot have just released an update for Element3D so we will install it on monday and hopefully that will address these issues. None of the bugs are show-stopping; the plugin is very powerful and we can find workarounds to get our final renders out, it just takes a lot of time at the moment trying to troubleshoot these glitches!

[divider_line_padding] The remainder of my week has been spent working on the 3D stereoscopic animation for the VSEEC. This project is now in the final compositing stage and i’m hoping that this coming week will be the final week needed to get it completed. On Friday I watched almost the whole animation in 3D (for the first time!) and it is looking pretty good! Very excited to see the final result on the extremely crisp projectors at the actual museum.

W.I.W.O: Week 29 – Poster Designs & trying out Element3D

By Current Projects, What I'm Working on (WIWO)4 Comments

Had a lot of fun this week! I finished up 2 projects for Moonee Valley City council; promotional material for the Push Start Battle of the bands & Fling Fest short film festival.

Here’s a quick preview of the Battle of the 60’s themed bands poster!

[image title=”Battle of the Bands Poster Design by Michael Wentworth-Bell” width=”544″ height=”765″ align=”center” lightbox=”true” group=”wiwo2012-29″ icon=”zoom”] http://thelode.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/BOB2012_Poster_Preview.jpg [/image]

The poster was finished in photoshop, using smart objects to link with Illustrator. It was a very helpful and powerful technique. I hope to write a quick tutorial about the workflow I used to create this poster, because it was very flexible, and a lot of fun!

This is how the Fling Fest poster turned out.

[image title=”Fling Fest Poster Design by Michael Wentworth-Bell” width=”544″ height=”765″ align=”center” lightbox=”true” group=”wiwo2012-29″ icon=”zoom”] http://thelode.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/Fling-Fest-Purple.jpg [/image]

This poster was the first time I used After Effects to generate images for Print. The Lens flare, light rays and glows were all created in After Effects, and rendered out at 16bit for A2 Print resolution, over 700MB a frame!
I usually create 3D imagery for motion, so it’s a lot of fun to actually create 3D for stills. You can ‘cheat’ a whole lot more – creating effects, textures, shadows, light and other details in the compositing stage instead of having to do them in a 3D program so they will render and move correctly.

I’ve also spent this week expermenting with the new Element3D plugin from Video Copilot. Want to reserve a whole blog post to this plugin, but in short, it’s the most revolutionary and powerful plugin to be released for After Effects. It makes the new CS6 3D engine completely reduntant. This plugin changes my workflow enourmously and gives a lot more creative freedom to all After Effects users. Been a very exciting week!

I’m looking forward to next week, where i’ll be visiting the Adobe Creative Suite Melbourne Roadshow and celebrating my birthday!

Until next time!

[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]