lighting, lookdev and compositing
I recorded a talk about how to design lighting in CG and create (hopefully!) good looking images. We are looking at references, techniques that classic and modern art painters used and how to transfer them to CG, how real world photography works and how that translates to CG. We will look at the importance of values and how to guide the viewer through our image so that we can tell […] Read More
The classic 2×4 brick. If you have read part 2, you might think, well that minifigure looks kinda nice and all, but what about good ol‘ classic bricks? And what happens if we go even closer, so we can see all the micro details? Taking it to the next level Please pardon me if my blog posts are not completely straightforward. Part 1 is a bit more theoretical and part […] Read More
My first impression: Lua has somehow similar syntax to Python but there are enough differences to make this confusing. So here is my Python to Lua cheat sheet:
After 3 years of Python scripting, I finally reached that point where I can confidently say that I roughly know, what I am doing. Then I fall in love with Katana and while interface and node graph stuff can be accessed/modified via Python, OpScripts are – for performance reasons – Lua based. Well, off to something new then. tongue I consider this blog post as a dynamic place that I will […] Read More
Maya & Scene Management While Maya gets more bells and whistles with every release it is still pretty useless in a production if there is no one, caring about all the data management. The problem is, if scene/cache imports, exports and versioning is done manually we tend to produce a big ugly mess. Especially if we are in a hurry. Nobody wants to spend time typing in data, prepare scenes, or […] Read More
LEGO is – without a doubt – the best toy in the world. The problem is: sitting on the floor the whole day hurts, big time! Luckily, with all the modern 3D tools and thanks to ldraw and mecabricks I’m still able to play with it digitally. Up to now, I’ve made two brickfilms already. A stop motion one and a CG one. At the time of making those movies, I was pretty proud. From […] Read More
With Photoshop CC 2014 Adobe introduced the stupidest “feature” Adobe has ever introduced. (And that’s saying something!) From now on Photoshop uses Microsoft’s Windows Ink API, which simply doesn’t work. There are odd circles appearing around your cursor, right click doesn’t work reliable and pressing alt (to pick a color for example) takes ages to temporary switch the tool. Luckily it is possible to disable this Windows Ink thing.
I have never been a big fan of normal maps. It’s difficult to manipulate them, it’s hard to guess how they might influence your shading and – probably the worst part – it’s not possible to modify their strength in maya. This is why I avoided them most of the time in favour of bump maps even though normal maps can look a lot better. Luckily, I found this thread where NextDesign posted […] Read More
There are different types of grain nodes in nuke, but the problem is, while they may accuratly emulate specific types of filmgrain, they make your image – to put it mildly – really ugly. This is why I decided to create a “beautiful” grain gizmo. The key thing in my opinion is, that noise shouldn’t modify chroma, but luminance. I exposed knobs to control intensity and grain size (just a blur essentially). […] Read More
A few months ago, I took a closer look at maya’s nucleus. I learned a lot and I thought it would be a good idea to write everything down. This is not intended to be a step by step tutorial and I’m not going to discuss every single parameter. I just wanted to throw together all the “wow, now I got it!” moments and I hope that this is maybe a good starting […] Read More