Graduation Full Speed Ahead

I hope you had a wonderful Christmas Holiday and a Happy New Year. Resolutions for this year are to work more efficiently, graduate and start my career in VFX. My holiday was great. I spent the first week finishing my specialization dissertation to actually fully finish my Specialization Phase and just over a week ago I finished my final course for my study, which was writing a short academic paper on stuff related to CG. Although I officially haven't received any grades for these courses yet, I'm fairly positive I've passed the both of them. This effectively means that I'm in the all clear for graduating and, obviously, I've already started thinking about all the possibilities. There's so much time in 5 months. That's like... almost 150 days. Doesn't sound like that much anymore.

Anyways, I've uploaded the finished live-action short to both my YouTube and Vimeo channel. There's a million things I would have done differently and looking back at the work I've done I'm hardly satisfied. But I guess that's the thing with studying. You learn by failing to apply the things you've learned. I thought I was making some really smart choices during the process. In hindsight, some of these proved irrelevant or just plain wrong. Below is the YouTube short and below that the Vimeo one. I dislike seeing it, though I do feel a sense of pride. I can't deny, managing to stay motivated through five months of working solitary, often 80 hours a week, and actually working directly off of a planning I made at the start, does feel really good.

YouTube

Vimeo

The dissertation, written along the project, is about 25.000 words strong and touches all workflow components that were part of the live-action short. Each chapter is introduced by a short theoretical analysis of the discussed component, succeeded by a practical approach. These practical approaches are supported by illustrations taken from the work-in-progress of the live-action short. In case you are interested in reading this dissertation, I can send it to you through private mail. Below are the Abstract, Table of Contents and Introduction.

Then in the meantime I'm killing time with photography, recording footage, playing this game called Starbound and working out (losing the weight from Christmas). Starting tomorrow I'm going to following tutorials on how to create custom effects in Houdini and probably some Nuke matte painting combination techniques. I'll keep posting all the results here.

Below is the video I recorded today. I'm really trying to keep everything as natural as possible because I'm starting to get really sick of all these modern movie post-processing effects. I like it way better when it's just colored naturally. Orange people and teal backgrounds are weird.

Birds and rain

That's it again. There's a lot I can't say about my graduation project, but that'll come in due time. I need to discuss and determine many things before I can start detailing this project. There's certainly an application for Houdini Effects and Nuke Matte's. That's for sure.

Kind regards,

Pim

ps. I'm having a little problem in Nuke where my nodes boxes and pipes disappear from my node graph. All I see is text. The picture below illustrates what I mean. This happened after installing Nuke 9.0. I have since uninstalled everything and re-installed just Nuke 8.0, which seemed to work for a few days, but the problem has returned. I'm pretty sure it's a graphics card compatibility issue, but I can't find anything about this on the web.

Resolved! The issue only occurred on my laptop, which has two graphic processors. The problem was caused by w7 not prioritizing the Nvidia processor, thereby forcing Nuke to use the Intel processor.

pps. Let's make it a habit of incorporating everything remotely interesting.

Cinematographic breakdown of Prisoners
Cinematographic breakdown of Inglourious Basterds
Collection of awesome shots by Matthew Scott
Professor Kliq - Wire and Flashing Lights - Plastic and Flashing Lights