Dave and Goliath - Sydney based 3d Animation, Visual Effects and Visualization

Neat Video, Render noise reduction.

Dave — Fri, 25 May 2012 02:03:56 +0000

I have recently being using Neat Video and I have to say I supremely impressed with the results. It works great on video footage as I would expect and it also works REALLY well to clean up renders that have had to low subdivs on reflections etc… The video below is an example that was rendered in Max/V-Ray and you can clearly see on some shaders the subdivs were to low. I ran it through Neat Video which cleaned/removed 98% of the noise in the reflections. See for your self below:

[See post to watch Flash video]

I have now used it on a couple projects (one were it saved our a**) which I can not show just yet. I will however post them up when I can.

You can check Neat Video Here. We bought the version for OpenFX hosts (Fusion in this case) for $199USD which is WELL worth it!

Cheers,

Dave

Suzuki Grand Designs TVC

Dave — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 04:29:55 +0000

Towards the end of last year we (Our Vision) were engaged to create a Grand Designs inspired TVC for Suzuki who are sponsors of Grand Designs Australia. As usual we had a tight timeline to turn it around in. The animation went from previz to final in one week, over the next week we rendered an comped.

We used our own animation rig on the car that I wrote sometime ago which let me animate it very quickly. The rig I guess is a cross between simulation and straight animation which lets us have total control over all parts of he car.

[See post to watch Flash video]

Below is the first render test we did with animation on the car. I actually preferred this camera animation but we thought it was a bit much for the subject matter and in hindsight I think we were right.

[See post to watch Flash video]

You can see all the work Our Vision has done for Grand Designs Australia and the Suzuki Grand Vitara TVC on Lifestyle channel.

Links:

Mass Effect 3: Eye Candy

Dave — Mon, 20 Feb 2012 21:25:30 +0000

I came across the new Mass Effect 3 trailer (below) by Digic Pictures. As usual the work is VERY high quality, in fact it is hard to fault it in just about anyway. You can check it out here:

Here is the first one that was released as well:

If you have the chance take a look through Digic’s site it is well worth it.

Cheers,

Dave

Cortex

Dave — Mon, 20 Feb 2012 00:28:54 +0000

I thought this was worth a mention.

The guys at Ephere have been working on an exciting project that looks quite promising. What looks like a node interface for creating plug-ins for max has the potential to make the SDK even more accessible to artists and TDs. I am assuming the plug-ins it creates are using their .Net wrapper for the SDK. I have to say that it is great to see these guys continuing to add great products to max. I really like that they seem to also focus on making it easier for TDs to be able to solve problems, there .Net wrapper (which the Autodesk’s .Net wrapper is based on) has made my life MUCH easier. I have been able to bust out new tools and plug-ins much faster (perhaps 2-3x) than using the standard SDK.

Check it out below:

In any case it certainly looks exciting. Will watch this space.

Cheers,

Dave

10,000 Downloads!

Dave — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 23:51:42 +0000

I am very happy to say that over the last 12 months I have just over 10,000 downloads of scripts on my site. While in this day age that is not much, it is a lot for my very small corner of the web. I just wanted to take to say thanks to everyone who downloaded one of my scripts. I hope it helped you! I do have a bunch more that I want to release this year which I will do as time permits.

Thanks everyone for you support and happy maxing.

Cheers,

Dave

Another One 77

Dave — Wed, 09 Nov 2011 22:37:49 +0000

I was recently playing around with an idea for car render. I chose to use my Aston Martin One 77 model. It was rendered with V-Ray 1.5 with all of the post being done in Digital Fusion 6.3 (Which I recently purchased). I hope you guys like it I would love to hear any feed back you have.

Aston Martin One 77 Studio

Since I did buy Fusion I have started working on a small animation that has the One 77 in it primarily to put Fusion through it paces and try out some of the new tools like volume fog.

I hope you guys like the render. There is a darker version below for those of you using brighter screens. The above image looks great on my Dell 24 using Adobe SRGB. The render above seems to look better brighter less colour accurate screens. I will let you choose

Aston Martin One 77 Studio

Cheers,

Dave

Sky, Skies and some Skies

Dave — Tue, 08 Nov 2011 07:03:15 +0000

As a 3d artists you can never have to many backgrounds or sky plates in your arsenal. Especially for those working in architectural visualisation, there are only some stills you can pump out before your skies start looking a bit the same… I was recently on vacation and every now and then I decided to shoot some skies when they looked interesting. So below are some skies I shot that you might be able to use. At the very end of the page there a download link for the high-res files. There are all shot at 5k and are straight off the camera so do not expect some nicely cropped and manicured shots, you can do that your self .

They were all shot on a 7d with either a 17-40mm L or a 70-200mm L.

Tonga

Misc

Sydney Harbour

So there they are. In the Zip below there some additional exposures. If there is enough interest I will upload the Raw (CR2) files.

Download: Skies

Hope they are of some use to you.

Cheers,

Dave

Infocenter WHAT??

Dave — Mon, 07 Nov 2011 03:25:34 +0000

No Infocenter!

I hate the infocenter in max. I also hate the big “M” button they added when they removed the file menu (this file menu can at least be easily add back). I can understand Autodesk changing/adding these things as they decrease the learning curve for new users which is great as the more accessible Max is to new users the better.

But none the less, people like myself that have been beating max in to doing what we want for many years no might not always appreciate these small “enhancements”. If it where up to me I imagine max would still look exactly the same as version 2009 before they added all UI tweaks. So it was with much excitement when a collegue of mine at Ourvision flicked me a link to a script that removed it. As soon as I looked at the 4 or so lines of codes I realised this is something I should had have thought of a long time ago.

None the less if you like to remove the info center check out the script below:

Close Infocenter

If you would also like to remove the buttons that are to the right of the big “M” button you can use this version below:

( controlshwnds=windows.getChildrenHWND #max; InfoCenter=for c in controlshwnds where c[5]=="InfoCenterHwndSource" collect c; QATWind=for c in controlshwnds where c[5]=="QATHwndSource" collect c; try(UIAccessor.CloseDialog InfoCenter[1][1])catch(); try(UIAccessor.CloseDialog QATWind[1][1])catch(); )

No Buttons!

Both of these scripts should be placed in your scripts/startup directory. I have not found away to turn off the big “M” yet, if anyone knows how to I would be very interested in hearing about it.

Cheers,

Dave

V-Ray Simple Set GI Paths

Dave — Thu, 06 Oct 2011 06:08:17 +0000

Continuing my theme of releasing simple and useful scripts, I thought I would release this simple tool for quickly setting both Irradiance Map and Light Cache auto save and from file paths. When you are submitting jobs to be rendered this is one of those tedious things that you need to do which lends it self to human error as it is very easy to point a path to the wrong location (we have all done it)…

It has a very simple interface, basically you set the path where you would like the GI passes to be saved, type in a name and hit the button. This will set the paths for light cache and Irradiance maps. I have also added some quick options for swapping the modes of GI passes.

The screen shot below should you give you the gist of what is going on.

V-Ray Set GI Paths

You can download the script here.

Download: V-Ray Set GI Paths

This tool was actually extracted from our (Our Vision) custom Network Rendering Submitter I wrote which basiclly did all of this automatically. It would submit a GI only job and then send the final rendering as a dependant job. This little tool sped up our workflow a great deal. You can check it out below.

Deadline Quick Submit

Oh and for those who have been asking it only works with Deadline from Thinkbox Software. I am planning an entire post related to this tool including some tips for when working with the Deadline scripts.

Cheers,

Dave

Portal: No Escape

Dave — Wed, 28 Sep 2011 06:02:29 +0000

A friend of mine sent this short film to me. Its set in the Portal world of Aperture Labs and features some great shots and VFX.

Here is the short:

Here is the making of:

I hope you guys enjoy it.