New Job

Well, I got a job a Nickelodeon. This is exciting. LA here I come. Going to be working on a show called Robot and Monster. Going to be driving down next week, get settled and then I start. This will be awesome.

Nickelodeon Test Completed

I finished my test for Nickelodeon. It was fun and amazing. I've never worked with an FX rig before. They really hyped it up like this would be something that would be nearly impossible to finish. I completed all aspects of it as best I could and even add some feature of my own. The feature I added was the functionality to have the geometry land on any surface. From what I saw of their videos, the particle instance had preset rest positions and only worked when they landed on a flat surface. I came up with a way to orient the instance to land on any surface and complex geometry. This gives the rig a much greater flexibility. This was a by product of figuring out how to make the instance ease in to it's resting pose, which proved to be the really difficult part of the exercise. I first went out using a preset position that the instance rotated into, but this seemed pretty unnatural. Zach mentioned that it would be better to find the instance orientation and then rotate that into a predefined vector. He then showed me how he would go about doing that with geometry. It seemed like a workable idea so I adapted it for use with particles. It works almost perfectly with flat surfaces and is pretty darn close with complex surfaces. The premise is that you know your rotation vector. This must be turned into a point relative to a origin. Then you find the axis to rotate said point into a predefined vector, in this case the collision normal. Using the "angle between" command in mel you can get the axis, angle, and euler values of your rotation. Which tells you how far you have to rotate your object to get from where you are to where you want to be. The only thing that would make this effect better is to query the velocity at impact and make sure that the instance always rotates in the direction of the velocity.

At any rate I hope they love what I like what I've done and are impressed with my skills.

Nickelodeon Test

So my explosion is still rendering. But more importantly I got a call from Nickelodeon and I'm working on an FX test. It's a debris rig with nParticles. Fun times. Very technical with lots of mel scripting. This will be fun. Have a week to work on it and I have most of it down in the 1st day. It's been a really fun challenge so far.

Rendering

So right now I am rendering the explosion scene. It's taking a long time. 5+ hours per frame. Working on rendering several passes at once into a single exr file. I hope this will streamline the compositing. Once it's out i can working on it in Nuke. So next week... maybe.