lighting, lookdev and compositing
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 some reason – Lua based. Well, off to something new then. tongue I consider this blog post as a dynamic place that I will […] 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
Finally, I found some time to create a scene inspired by Steiner St with the beautiful Painted Ladies. I love the Thunderbird and Victorian Architecture, and I thought this would work together nicely. This is my first Redshift rendering. “Ludicrously fast production quality rendering” – so they say. And they are not exaggerating. Even with my ancient GTX 670 I can iterate pretty fast and final frame speed is great. smile Probably more to […] 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
No matter what you are rendering, at the end of the day you probably need to setup a nuke comp, and shuffle your framebuffers/passes/AOVs – you name it, to recreate your beauty. This is why I wrote a little script that does this tedious job for you.
The most annoying thing on earth: The default camera gate in maya. It’s just wasting useful screen space and what the hell is this see through useful for? When I use camera gate I want to frame the shot and don’t want to get distracted by anything around it. So this is why I created a small script. I created a button and placed it in my shelf. Now I can toggle […] Read More
Every modern renderer has to deal with fireflies (very bright, nervously jumping around pixels). Sometimes it’s quite difficult to get rid of those and often enough very high sampling just isn’t an option within tight deadlines.