Demoreel 2007

Alright.. my reel is done .. at least for the moment.. i didn't like it much but I am tired and running out of patience for some of the test I am doing.. so I decided to leave them and make with whatever material I had. I dont have any shots from movies I worked in Weta Digital as it'll take so much time and effort to get the shorts released. Also I don't want to put them in there as well as they are not relevant to positions that I am gonna apply.

One thing that I realized is that i don't have much new materials in my reel. I am seriously thinking of going back to work on TVCs and post production where I have more involvement with whole VFX process. Big companies like Weta is fine but your involvement gets smaller as more people working on very small part of a shot.

So here we go..

Updates

I am sorry as I havent update anything on my blog.. Mainly I am busy finishing my reel.. As I'll be moving back to Singapore by year end, I will need my reel to look for job. I didnt sleep much working at home on the fx shots and finally, i kinda fell sick. So I will try to take things slow again.. I aint a teenager no more.. But I always felt I am being left behind in this fast moving vfx industry.. that made me work harder.. sigh.. I dunno.. Hope I will be okay next year..

Here some updates on some vfx shot I am working for my reel.

More Pyrotechnics

Some updates for the pyrotechnics simulations I am testing in maya..
When i was trying to achieve a flame/fire of large size using fluid sims.. usual methods need a very high resolution grid and hence took forever to sim and render.. so i tried to cheat with low resolution fluid grid and detailed textures.. this sims takes about a second/frame to sim and rendered at 9 seconds per frame on my laptop.



This is the update to my explosion sim.. added the dust cloud elements.. will add debris / sparks later..

Fall

Fall 02, originally uploaded by Maung Maung aka Mexx.

I was toying around with fluid simulations in realflow and rendering in maya.. in fact i want to shoot this kinda photo.. but these days, its cold and i dont wanna clean up the mess after i shoot this.. so here goes.. in computer graphics.. :D

more here..

Test water simulation

I have done a simple water sim in realflow4 and rendered it in maya with mental ray.
This is a current draft. Still not perfect and its only half way now.. i also need to add more density to the sim to have more details but my laptop is getting really hot. I'll need to buy a laptop fan before I really gonna grind the sims.
Rendering is Final gather using dielectric material for the water.

Higher res still frames..


Update to my lighting challenge

Lighting challenge #11 draft 01

Lighting challenge #11 draft 01, originally uploaded by Maung Maung aka Mexx.

I am pretty bored today at work.. and getting tired of working the same thing for awhile..
So I decided to enter the lighting challenge #11 from CG Talk.

This is my first draft .. I have worked more than one hour into it now.
Rendered straight out from Maya 8.5 + Mental Ray. Using white cards and Final Gathering.
no lights in the scene.

Lighting in Photography vs Computer Graphics

I am just trying to share some of the computer graphics pictures I have rendered in past a few years. I think by looking at them, you can see why photography is so closely related and why I am interested so much.


This picture is inspired by one of the Absolut Vodka advertisement. I called my vodka Absolut Barnyar ( Barnyar in Myanmar means Blah Blah). It was made more than 1 year ago in Maya and rendered with mental ray using dielectric materials. I was trying to achieve gradient frosted glass look on the bottle.. which I find is really expensive to render. This image took almost 30min to render on my laptop (Centrino 1.6 GHz)

For lighting, you can see I was using digital equivalent of soft boxes placed like that for reflection and soft shadows. Its rendered using final gathering in Mental ray to get color bleeding and such.
Same bottle from another angle and back drop. This image is still not finished. You can see the glass is almost black. The reason is I have not set full ray traced depth to get it transparent. Its expensive to render transparency in CG. That's why I am so happy to do so in Photography.

I did this about a year ago for CG talk lighting challenge entry. Lighting was done via 2 soft area light ( soft box) placed on left and right of the model. The reflection is from a HDR image.

This was done 3 years ago. Using a area light + HDR lighting too.

Lately, I haven't create anything CG at home. Working as a CG artist is enough for me. That's why I am doing more photography lately. I still like CG and creating photorealisitic images in it. But so far, I dont wanna fire up Maya or anything CG at home.

I think I will get tired in Photography if I have to do it for profession too. :P