Australia, Siggraph One Sheet

Here the one sheet for the presentation Dan Bethell and I held at Siggraph 2009 in New Orleans: "Venomous Cattle For Australia".

Australia, Baz Luhrmann, 2008

Lots to learn on the Australian outback epic. Doing a texture and animation reference shoot together with the guys from Animal Logic and a herd of very live and not always cooperative cows. Then some on-set survey and data aquisition work and experiencing first hand why it often makes sense to do stuff during shooting that you know won´t make post production easier.
And, of course, post production itself: My first gig as CG Supervisor included overseeing the development of RSP's inhouse crowd system "posse". It turned out nicely and will be a pretty flexible platform for all kinds of related and different work - hope to present some of the cool stuff you can do with it in the future. The majority of the cattle extension shots were done with it (not the stampede, though - that's Framestore). Shot bidding, coordinating work with 3rd party vendors, overseeing 2.5d set extension work in Nuke, deciding on technical approaches etc. and all the time keeping an eye on disk space and render farm usage. - Fun!









More info here: VFX World
Cattle extension and environment shot breakdowns: RSP

The Spirit, Frank Miller, 2008

My second job as CG Supervisor (running in parallel with work on Australia) involved, apart from the usual general production pipeline work, making sure we could deliver a bunch of full cg city shots as well as a whole set of digital set extensions.

Unusual for a VFX production was the amount of creative freedom - allowing us to develop stylized looks for the scenes. One sequence involved splashing lots of cg blood around in a Japanese tea room - while not shown in this form in cinemas, it might make it onto an unrated DVD.

Lot's of info here: CG Society, VFX World
Shot Breakdown: RSP

The Ruins, Siggraph One Sheet

For everyone who would like to have a peek at the one-sheet for my Siggraph 2008 talk during the "Rigging outside the Box" session, here is the link to the pdf "Large Scale Foliage Animation for The Ruins". There is more material available for everyone with an ACM account.

It details the same system I presented at the Digital Media Festival 2008 in Sydney.

The Ruins, Carter Smith, 2008

Carnivorous vines with an appetite for fit teenagers are the main cg character in Dreamworks' horror movie 'The Ruins'. I worked as an R&D TD creating solutions for the animation pipeline. These included a new maya shape implementing Kochanek-Bartels splines used for controlling the vines and implementing parts of the layer based animation system for leaves (allowing you to combine different kinds of procedural animation with hand animation).

A system I designed to integrate Maya nCloth into the skeletal animation workflow allowed artists to resolve leaf on leaf and leaf on ground collisions. Other tasks included procedural rig building as well as integrating the animation layer system with a separate solution for massive amounts of background leaves.

There is an in-depth articles here: VFX World

Special Effects: The History and Technique

You can now find a small interview with me on crowd simulation in the second edition of Richard Rickitt's excellent book Special Effects: The History and Technique

10.000 BC, Roland Emmerich, 2008

When MPC started pitching for work on 10.000 BC, I was asked to start the development of a long-hair and fur pipeline named "Furtility". I worked on the software design of the system, developed a prototype and implemented hair dynamics solutions using the testcase of a charging mammoth.

As I moved to Australia I didn't stay on after pre-production, but the R&D guys and TDs at MPC did an amazing job completing the work!

There are nice articles about the production: FX Guide, CG Society and VFX World