Nuke Time!!! Or should I say compositing time!

So, after years of wanting to do it, I have got around to starting to learn compositing and I am doing it on Nuke. I have given myself around 8 months to become reasonably proficient in it. I am using several different resources for the purpose. Most important ones are:

• NCCA Digital Effects notes
• Digital Tutors
• fxphd
• cmivfx

Apart from these organised and targeted sources, I am also looking at several blogs and am following several artists who share their work-flow on-line.

I also have some books that I am planning to follow. From the top of my head I can think of the following:

• The art and science of digital compositing: Ron Brinkman
• The VES Handbook
• Fix it in Post: Jack James
• Rotoscoping: Benjamin Bratt
• Matchmoving: Dobbert 

EGO FX: Part 01

So getting on with Ego now. There are 36 days left and I need to do the FX and render stuff out. This is the FX shot list for the project:

Let's see how I get on with it :)

Crowd Simulation - Part 1.1

Just did another simple test with a higher number of agents. This scene has 1200 agents and Maya is already beginning to strain. I guess my method is not very scale-able then.

A platoon with 1200 agents

Crowd Simulation: Part 1

Eventually I have got the time to get on with my crowd simulation project. I have 7 days to go on the project, so, I won't be able to add in animation. At the moment I am trying to achieve some believable behavioral animation. I am trying to simulate a medieval fight scene.

Here is the output so far. In this screenshot you can see there are two kinds of agents. The front rows are foot soldiers and the back portion consists of horses, which will hopefully have riders on them soon.

Formation with different agent types

First of all I started by defining a basic human agent.

Basic human agent with primitive geometry

 I would have gone on with just using cubes, but the app I am using requires a bone structure

Basic human agent with rig attached to it

Instantiating the agent to start building a crowd:

Creating instances of agents

Here I have gone on and added some variation to the population field. The agents are more dis-organised and have a randomised orientation

Adding variation to the population field

Now I go ahead and add variation to the model itself. This is being done at two different levels:
First, I add variation to the overall agent scale. As you can notice in the screen-shot below, the overall size of the agents populating the scene has some variation.

Agents with added variation in the overall scaling

At the next level of variation, variation has been added to the individual body parts. The head and the stomach pieces show variation in the next screen-shot

Variation added on a per-bodypart basis

Next I tried out having different types of agents populating the same population field. In the screenshot below, the scene has, a human, a car and a horse crowdEntityType

Population field populated with different types of agents

Next I started working with formations. The screenshot below illustrates a rectangular formation of horses. Some randomness and variation has been added into the orientation and columns and rows of the field to break the even-ness

A formation of horses

The example below illustrates placement along a curve.

A formation driven by curves

As the last thing tonight I made a formation of horses facing inwards. The rider may be preparing for an attack in this situation.

Sony Games Modelling - 5

Putting everything together now. One more pass at set dressing and then I get into texturing this. Not really looking forward to it.

Work in progress

Sony Games Modelling - 4.1

Work in progress update. Added some Houdini rubble to my scene.

WIP with rough rubble

Sony Games Modelling - 4

For the past couple of days, I have been concentrating on the drill design and also have been looking at the composition an bit. I also went in and did some clean-up, deleting unwanted nodes and naming everything.

Here is a work in progress image:

WIP - Drill Detail