Hasta La Motion!

Its been a while since I’ve had a chance to check in with this community! I checked in once maybe back in late October, and decided to come back quickly before the year is up to wish everyone happy new year, and thanks for all the input from all the professionals here adding in their two cents and guiding each other.

I originally started on this site back in school, learning compositing, and coming here for extra critique, and adding my own views to others with questions. It was such a wonderful community, and being able to talk to so many professionals actually in the industry first hand and to pick their brains about everything vfx related was such an amazing opportunity, I had to become a sponsor.

Since then, I now am a professional in the industry (by definition), I work doing motion graphics and visual effects together in a nice oreo cookie of awesomeness at Electronic Arts, making a good wage (and making sure of it thanks to VFXWages), and getting able to explore my creativity. I would consider myself a success story to VFXTalk as through this community I have taken the knowledge passed down to me from the greats on this site, sifted through all of it, applied what I’ve gleaned to my own career and have made something awesome of it.

So it was most discouraging to have this site brought to my attention:
http://vfxsoldier.wordpress.com/2010…cg-censorship/

These are costly mistakes that I feel will ultimately ruin this site. I hope that from the ashes of this though, a new site will be created after the apparent merger with sputnik and that we have all learned valuable lessons from this incident.

I will continue to be a member of this site, and continue to provide critiques and guidance where I can despite these recent incidents, as I feel an obligation to give back what I took from here and hope others do the same. 😎

Good Day to All,

I’m an experienced artist for almost three years and my contract with a company just expired, I am now searching for a job abroad, and will be needing a job this coming January. If any Employer have read this and will be needing extra hands, I am more than willing to be of service, Roto is indeed my specialty and Paint, like wire, and rig removal is my forte.
Thank you so much, you may all have a wonderful day.

Truly Yours,
Gray.

Hi,

I require some guideline to model an Eagle.

This is first time going for organic modeling.

where can i find blue prints for eagle and how render feathers to get a photo realistic look.

I need to model some sea animals also.

Your replay be a great support.

thanks in advance.

[NEWS=”http://www.cgnews.com/wp-content/uploads/daft_punk_thumbnail.jpg”]29261[/NEWS]Excitement was at a fever pitch for the premiere of Walt Disney Pictures’ TRON: Legacy on December 17th, and it is thanks in no small part to Daft Punk’s new video, “Derezzed.” The first track off the French electronic artists’ TRON: Legacy soundtrack, “Derezzed” features the retro bling—light cycles, black-and-neon grids, gladiator games—of 1982’s TRON classic brought to life by modern-day VFX accoutrements. The Mill NY team worked closely with Partizan’s Warren Fu to create the hypnotic landscape.

“We are all big Daft Punk fans and fans of the original TRON, so the project was a must!” says Rob Petrie, our Lead CG Artist. “We had a lot to accomplish in a small window of time—63 shots within four weeks.”

Working closely with Warren Fu, the Mill team set about creating a look that pre-empted the original film: meaning CG circa 1979. “With CG today we have all the latest technology at our disposal, something which was not the case when the original TRON was being made,” Petrie explains.

“So we took an almost simplistic approach when it came to the rendering and lighting of the CG elements and kept referencing back to the original movie to keep a retro feel throughout.”

The video was shot over one day in L.A. on green screen. A mechanical horse was shot on gimbal. And Olivia Wilde, who stars as Quorra in TRON: Legacy, was on hand for her cameo.

All composition was done in Nuke, a popular tool for handling CG in feature films. “Because of the volume of shots, the Nuke pipeline was very appropriate,” explains Andrew Proctor, Lead Nuke Artist on the promo.

Co-Heads of CG Ben Smith and Yann Mabille, who VFX Supervised the project, add, “We had up to 10 people working on shots simultaneously, so we could see many shot iterations fast. We had a great team jumping on shots and blasting them out for review.”

That team rolled up their sleeves and spent a week getting rid of green screen and compositing new backgrounds into the shots. Petrie notes, “We decided to create certain shots in full CG to help make the edit—the offline was done in-house—as dynamic as possible, and really build tension leading in to the final impact of the joust.”

“‘Derezzed’ was a huge team effort,” say Smith and Mabille. “Warren was amazing to work with as both director and designer. He practically lived at The Mill for three weeks, and did a lot of 2D elements himself. He was formerly Lead Concept Designer at ILM so he was very hands-on and really understood the process. We couldn’t be happier to have been involved!”

RELATED LINKS
www.themill.com

Hi there,

For a commercial job we want to blend a 3D simulation of an avalanche to a matte painting. But to make the transition smooth we want to analyze the motion of the rendered simulation and offset/distort the mattepainting accordingly for a few frames before it stops and the picture is 100% matte-painted still.

So we need a tool/technique/trick/plugin to analyze the motion, much like any motion blur plugin will do, and generate a displacement map, st/uv-map or whatever from it to distort the final result.

The 3D guys are trying to get a motion vector pass from it, I figured this might help, but it’s not sure that’ll work.

I don’t expect any approach will generate a clean result, but I hope for a good basis to paint on top…

Hopefully my question makes sense, since it’s hard to explain.

Thanks