Posts for 'CGI'

This is so totally cool! XD

A little while back, do you remember me saying I volunteered to help out as a VFX artist on a pilot TV episode? 🙂

Well, at the end of last year, after I spent 2 months locked in my bedroom animating various 2D and 3d things, we officially finished it. In December I flew over to Melbourne to meet the other production crew and watch the finished cut of the episode. The whole experience was awesome… I should write a blog about that. XD

Anyway, while I was away in Japan, after several months under wraps, the finished pilot episode finally got approved to be shown to the public!! ^_^

So without furthur ado, here is the pilot episode to the Australian TV series Welcome to the Cosmos!

If you get the time, please rate it on YouTube and spread the word around.

I really gotta say. It’s a total buzz seeing your own work finished and up on screen. It definitely makes all the effort totally worth it. XD

In any case, in the weeks to come, I’ll see if I can write some more posts on some of the shots I made and how I went about doing them. 🙂

Enjoy! 😀

Apologies for the lack of updates. I still really have no idea what to put on this thing that wouldn’t be better off on UberGames or my Twitter. XD

So it’s been a pretty quiet few weeks. Easter blew over quite nicely. I spent the long weekend in front of my Xbox eating chocolate easter eggs, and going to the gym doubly so since then hehe.

Anywhoo, aside from my work on UberGames (which is going slow and arduosly for the time being… more on that later ; ) ), I’ve been at the reins of LightWave recently, working on a small personal project as well as gearing up for some more work on Welcome to the Cosmos.

So the first thing I’ve been working on is a small bit of modeling practice… a 3D mesh of a ship from Star Trek Voyager, the Type 9/12 speedboat shuttle. 😀
It’s something I’ve been wanting to try for a while, and hopefully it’s not going to be too hard to do. At the moment, I’ve laid down the main shape of it using Subdivision Surfacing in LightWave, and am busy refining the edges and adding more detail. Once that’s done, I’ll start to freeze it off, optimize it and then start texturing it.

But, I’ll need to put that aside for now, since a more pressing bit of CG work has come along.
I’ve been commissioned now to create a temporary shot for WTTC that can be used in any of the promotional screenings of the episode before the main edit is complete. The shot in question is one of the ones later on in the episode, and it takes place over one of the cities in Australia. Krell has just ejected from his ship and is plummeted down in front of it. At the moment, all we really have is a really rough storyboard animatic, so the final look is still probably somewhat up in the air.

Even though it’s a temporary shot, I’d like to try and put as much effort as I can into it to see how polished we can make it. 😀

From this point though, it’s going to require a bit of research, and a bit of resource collection. I’ll see if I can continue to post updates to it here as I go.

Anyway… that’s all for now hehe.

Hmmm… last of all… I’m still wondering. Just putting work up here, I’m probably not using this blog as effectively as I could. I might do some scooting around and check a few other blogs too… XD

Hello again! I’m already 2 days into my holidays and enjoying it very much! It’s been pretty busy so far, so I thought I’d post a bit of an update on what’s going on.

Last weekend was RFLan #24. As far as RFLans have gone, I think this was quite possibly the best one yet. Thankfully, we toned it down a bit since last time, and only roughly 230 people came instead of over 300! We thoroughly planned to power and networking systems this time, and as a result, we had absolutely no issues whatsoever. Because of this, I was luckily able to get a lot of quality game time down! I played mostly Left 4 Dead and TF2, as well as made a few new Steam buddies.

Next up, I’ve spent a bit more time working on my main shot for Cosmos. It’s taken a day or so of work, but it’s definitely taking shape now! Since my last update, I’ve refined the animation much better, remodeled some bits of the patrol ship, changed some of the colours, as well as added some more visual effects. It shouldn’t be too much longer before I can lock this in for a final render!

If I get time after this, I’ll see about writing up a bit of a brief of how I’m doing all of it. 🙂

Finally, I figured I probably should announce this on my blog now, it’s one of the main reasons I made it hehe.

I’m going back to Japan again!! 😀

It’s all my father’s crazy planning, he wants to go check out the town I worked in last year since he loved the photos I have of it. So we’re going back for 2 weeks, one of them being a ski trip, and the other being a week of playing around the country… mainly Tokyo. I’m very happy about this since it’s already been more than a year since I last went to Japan.
I’m also trying to see how feasible/expensive it would be to travel down to Osaka from Tokyo so I might be able to catch up with all of the friends I have down there. 🙂

In any case, when I go, I intend to ramp up the number of blog posts I do here to document everything I do over here hehe.

Should be good. Gotta start packing!

w00t! And so the holidays begin now! 😀
Over the past 2 or so weeks, I’ve been pretty much solidified on getting SteamerCard to work properly so it would stop cramming my email inbox with thrown exception errors, which thankfully… I’ve succeeded. Moreso, SteamerCard just hit 100 users on Facebook! Gratz to my friend Stephen’s hard marketing work no doubt. XD

Anyway, so with that totally out of mind (for now), I’m migrating to a new project. I’ve known of this project for 2 years… but it’s only recently started to come to fruition.

‘Welcome to the Cosmos’ is a science fiction television series that will be released over the internet. It basically revolves around how 4 normal humans are accidentally swept aboard an intergalactic space ship that was passing over Earth during a botched mission. It is currently being shot in Melbourne, and will be released in full 1080p HD. There is also an official production blog online which can be viewed from http://www.welcometothecosmos.com/

I became a good acquaintence of the director of WTTC a few years back when I volunteered to do some animation work for another of his projects, and so this time around, he asked me back to see if I could help out with some of the computer generated sequences. Naturally, I jumped at the chance. ^_^

So now, I’m a CG artist for an online television series… cool. From the looks of it, the stuff I’ll be doing is mainly animation and compositing work, and quite possibly a little bit of 3D modeling. Naturally, it’s all going to be done in my platform of choice, LightWave 3D. ^_^

Thankfully, the majority of the 3D assets have already been created, so I don’t really have to stress over those. The two major elements are a ‘scout ship’ and a ‘patrol ship’. The production quality of these 2 assets is ridiculously high, as they have both been made by very high-end LightWave artists who have previously had work featured in such prominent shows as the new ‘Battlestar Galactica’.

Scout ship by Alain Rivard

Patrol ship by Fabio Passaro

So… starting from these holidays, I’ve been assigned the task to create several fully CG shots involving these ships. The shots will need to be in 1080p and will need to be able to stand under heavy scrutiny hehe. Sounds somewhat tricky, but I’m down for the challenge. 🙂

I’ve already started work on the first shot, which I’ll post a little tidbit here. 🙂

At this point, I’m still working on refining the motion of the scout ship, so I don’t think this shot is anywhere near complete yet hehe.

In any case, I’m very glad to have been given this chance to contribute. I’ve always wanted to put my 3D skills towards a professional production of this magnitude, and so I’m going to try my very best!