My World of VFX

Update Sep 17 2011 This video was chosen as The PFhoe Project of The Year by the http://www.thepixelfarm.co.uk staff!!! I really can’t thank them enough! Go on and check the other great entries here http://www.pfhoe.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=282!

Note: There’s spoilers about the video in the text below.

The idea behind this video was born when I was reading something about space shuttle’s size (~56m) and then compared it to Puijo Tower (~75m). Also, listening to Muse’s Exogenesis Part 1 gave a strong boost for the motivation and I wanted to practice with the tools I’ve got, so live the project went. Actually the Muse’s song was also dispiriting as I would’ve loved to use the song in this video, but all the hassle & possible costs with copyrights forced me to leave it out from this as this was just a practice without any income. Anyway, if you know the song, think about the part where the drums & Matt’s singing starts and match it with the liftoff. That part always gives me goosebumps. Then again, the mood of the song is pretty serious so it might be just a good thing I didn’t use it here. Ah well.. enough of babbling. Luckily there was some great songs at www.jamendo.com so I managed to finish this in a satisfactory way.

Happy new year to everyone!!

A while ago, I had the privilege to work on some of the Snowblind movie’s visual effects. What I did mostly was 3d smoke simulations & 3d particle simulations and some simple 3d background elements. There was one a bit more complicated 3d scenery too though. I used Blender for all those of course. I did a lot of compositing in After Effects and below’s one example of the layers what those compositions usually did hold.

The workflow in the shots I was involved in went so that Kalle Max Hofmann sent the raw video layers or pre composited layers plus an alpha layer for them. Then I added the particles and such and sent the layers back to Kalle. It was great to see afterwards how Kalle used and merged the shots in the movie. For example the last color gradings to night that you can see in this video was done by Kalle.

Oh, I almost forgot. I found this task at www.wreckamovie.com, go check it out if you’re interested in participating in movie making.

So. I wanted to have a personal web page where I could show some of my works, but then it occurred to me that I might not have enough material and time that I could actually create something that could be called a site. So, a blog it is then. I hope this won’t fade out anytime soon.

What would be a better way to start blogging than to show some fresh material that also matches closely to blog’s domain name www.fxgrill.com. Here’s a fire / smoke element that got rendered just yesterday and will be used in a short film called Materia 2 – The Awakening. Blender 2.5 was used for simulating the smoke and After Effects was used for the particles & compositing.

And here’s the recruiting teaser from Samuli Jomppanen:

Check out the film’s blog! http://materia.planetblender.org/