Animation and Datagate

These upgrades are becoming nearly monthly and I'm pretty okay with that. I feel, art dump or not, the work posted here should still be representable and not to be taken too lightly. It's still a representation of how serious I take what I try to achieve.

During the past three weeks I've spent most of my time working on a 15 second animation that is supported by two different 100 frame attitudes and during the same time I created a rig for a character provided by my teacher -Colin Morrison- using video tutorials provided by Perry Leijten. The difficulty in this rigging assignment was creating several dynamic rigs for multiple separate meshes that needed to be influenced. Below is are two screenshots of the rig.

Back of the character. Both guns, the head and the sword are dynamic.

Front of the character.

As for the animation I tried to delve a little further into rendering and compositing. I decided to stick to my rendering habit of using Mental Ray and not render out too many passes for each frame as I was using a renderfarm at my education. It still took 18 seconds for each frame, amounting to 1h30m for a 390 frame animation. Rendering more passes would have increased render time by 500%. After this I imported the .exr sequence into Nuke PLE, where I learned that this version gives artifacts in the shape of random blocks both in the viewport as in the renders.

Nuke Personal Learning Edition viewport artifacts

So after finding out about this I decided to just install the trial license for Nuke 8.0 since I already used the Nuke 7.0 license a little over a month ago during my application for an internship at Grid-VFX. The result was, obviously, much better. After a little fun with some of the nodes I exported as a .mov with the h.264 codec and uploaded it. If you prefer vimeo here is the link to that one.

And then there is Datagate. A course project created in 14 days by a team of 12 people. It's difficult to explain what it exactly is but it comes close to a path traced real-time investigation game forcing the player to come to a solution outside the game since it doesn't offer a win or loss condition inside the game. The website for this can be found here. I'll post the download link on my blog if we decide to make it universally available... but I won't leave you with nothing. So, see below for two in game real-time images for reflections and refractions.

Kind regards,

Pim