OTHER: NASTY INJURY new vfx shot

Hahahaha. Okay, that was awesome. Great job. Definitely did not see that coming. I was waiting for something with the bike.
 
Ha ha, thanks Rick. I've been testing out a few pieces of software. As you can tell none of these were really planned, we just went out and shot on the spur of the moment. As you can tell by my terrible acting :)

I've been made redundant from work so decided to start up a youtube channel www.youtube.com/user/bubblegummonsters. The ones on there are simple tests, like above. I'm hoping to grow it gradually and start doing what I've always wanted too and that is to make short movies.
 
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I've used a lot of Maya and AE, but I really need to learn some of the tracking tools. I've been tracking by hand and that is just no fun.

Just curious how you felt between PFTrack and Mocha? Would you use one over the other? And Maxwell, did you use that with what you generated in Maya? Were you not happy with Maya rendering?
 
Hey Rick, Luke.

Rick, I love Mocha I just find it's so easy to learn and usually just works. If I had a choice I'd just use that. But it's only good at placing 2d elelments into scenes. The only 3D it can achieve is by skewing the perspective, so you can make flat objects look like they sit in the real world, but if you need to comp 3D objects where you're going to see sides to it than as far as I know you have to use something like PFtrack that can export out a 3D camera for you. You can then import this 3D camera into your 3D software of choice. I think Maya has some tracking software too, I just haven't used it.

I know how it feels to matchmove by hand, and that really is a world of pain. Glad we now have computers to do it for us.

I use Maxwell for two reasons. One is, I find it really really intuitive. It's just so simple compared to say Mental ray.
I'm not the brightest spark in the box and when it comes to connecting nodes just to light a scene, my brain switches off. Maxwell is based on non biased rendering. I don't know the exact meaning of this, only that it is based on the physical properties of light. The great thing about this is that it pretty much does all the hard work for you. You really only have to worry about 3 or 4 slots and everything else like Ambient Occlusion/Radiosity/caustics and to some extent subsurface scattering, are all taken care of for you. My second reason for liking it is that the renders you can get out of it are amazing, you should check out the gallery http://www.maxwellrender.com/gallery/gallery.php. I'd highly recommend it.

Luke, thanks!
I'm glad you mentioned the SFX.
The funny thing about the sound effect was I'd just posted the video on youtube with no SFX.
I was eating some spaghetti bolognese when I realised that it made a great slurping noise, perfect for a dislodged eye. so I quickly rushed up stairs to record it and re-upload the footage with the sfx.
I'm at my parents at the moment and when i came back downstairs my Dad said "why did you just go upstairs with your food"? So I told him it was to create an eyeball sliding out of someones face.
He stumbled for words for a few seconds before replying "You're F@@king weird, you are". :)
 
Thanks for the info on that, as I had wondered about Mocha for awhile and it seems like I just need to start using it (and maybe PFTrack). The paper towel rocket I did in this scene I did completely by hand and I don't want to do that again. Lining up the movements with my pan and ramping certain things, and getting the distances all correct was an absolute pain in the neck:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T8Z3IALdF3k

And as far as Mental Ray, I could NOT agree more. I did a few other scenes with helicopters in this part of the series:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YfXY4-iG3_E

I spent A LONG time rendering these and getting ambient occlusion to work right. It was a pain in the neck. So do you just export your scenes out of Maya and then work with them in Maxwell? How does that handoff work. I do a lot of the animation in Maya, but seriously, I am willing to use something easier to work with than the Maya rendering IN A HEARTBEAT! :)
 
Hi Rick.

Those helicopters looked great!. And I have total respect for you on tracking that rocket, you must have the patients of a saint.
I would say get on to learning Mocha, they've got some great tutorials on their site and it really isn't hard to pick up. The biggest stumble I had was when using the function for clean backplates. I just couldn't get it to work right in till I discovered that Mocha was re-importing them one frame ahead.
But to track things you won't need to use the cleanplate function, it's only used when you have to remove things like tracking markers from say someones face.
And Pftrack is very easy to use, but expensive. If you have Maya I'd say look into it's tracking first and see if it's any good. But the time you spend learning this software (no more than a couple of days) you'll easily gain back from not having to track by hand.


I too use Maya as I animate a lot and I love Maya for animation. I find Maya makes really complicated things easy and really simple things hard. But the great thing about Maxwell, and another reason why I use it, is because it has a Maya plugin. So you still stay in maya and then when you're ready to render you just hit the render button. It also has this thing called fired which is a real time preview. So while you're setting up your shaders you don't even have to leave Maya to see what your renders going to look like.
 
Thanks for the compliment, and thanks for all the help on those tools. I am DEFINITELY going to look at using them for the next project we are doing. Anything to speed up the process is how I look at it!
 
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