Jack Binks’ J_Ops plugins can be found at www.nukepedia.com and on his awesome blog at major-kong.blogspot.com

I created this out of a still photo I took several years ago at school. I like the extreme close up framing and the gritty texturing of the fire hydrant. I’ve been doing a lot of projections and replacements at work, so I got the idea to add a nice soft camera move to the photo.

I started out by modeling the hydrant and fabricating where the camera most likely was. I happened to remember the focal length I used, so that helped a bit. It’s a little tricky doing both at once, but without any reference photos of the object or anything like that, I’ve found it’s best to do both at once with still photos.

After that, I spent some time getting the camera move right and animating the focal plane in my ZBlur node. The ZBlur node utilizes the depth channel generated by Nuke’s scanlineRender node, which makes depth of field a cinch.

Over the past year, I’ve been working for Zero VFX here in Boston. We’re growing steadily, taking on more and more challenging and exciting jobs all the time. Check out more of our work at our website!

2010 was a great year personally and professionally. I’m really looking forward to 2011!

My part in the project was to take a collection of rigid character models, rig them for animation and then to animate several animation cycles for use in the game. Going from a film environment to a game environment was quite a learning experience as many of the tools I am used to using do not translate very well to the specific and procedural nature of games. For instance, I was unable to use complex and realistic rigging tools that are used in film since the game engine used Collada formatted models, which only supports a select variety of deformers. To work around this, I had to get quite creative in the way I rigged the model.

Generally, characters are rigged in such a way that animators actually control meta objects that then control the joints that actually affect the model’s vertices. In other words, these controls act as the puppet strings. However, for this particular application, the animation data had to be contained within the actual joints for use in the game. Not only was this a technical necessity, but also an efficiency issue since every part of the game had to be optimized for size and computational footprint. Unfortunately, this also made it rather difficult to animate. I could have chosen to struggle with the simple, bare-bones rig I had created, however the though of having to revise my work on a rig with no complex controls bothered me quite a bit, so instead, I made two rigs. One with no controls, and another with controls that animators are used to seeing. Using a series of scripts and constraints, I was able to take my complex rig and bake the animation curves into the game-ready version of the character which could be successfully integrated into the game by the software developers.

40 characters later, the game is complete and is now actively being used in community meetings! One of which I was able to experience last night. It was great fun to see the game in action with real end-users!

I get asked this question a lot, so I thought I’d answer it here:

The answer is in the math. Over is defined as an expression: A+B(1-a). A is the rgb values of image A. B is the rgb values of image B. a is the alpha of image A and b, while not used in an over, is the alpha of image B.

take these two images:

Our goal is to put the teapot, (image A) over the grass (image B). To do this, we need an alpha channel of image A to cut out the teapot:

Simple enough right? If you just plug in the teapot with its alpha channel over the grass, we should see just that, right? wrong! you will see this:

Here’s the problem: A+B(1-a). Let’s consider a point in the middle of the teapot. It as an rgb value greater than 0. it also has an alpha value of 1. therefore, A+B(1-1)=A. That’s great. we got just A. Now let’s consider a point we expect to be just grass. it also has an rgb value greater than 0, but an alpha value of 0. therefore, A+B(1-0)=A+B. Oh no! we didn’t want A+B. that means, we’re adding the rgb values together, which in this example produces a gray tint over the grass since we’re adding that gray value behind the teapot to the grass. The only case where this works is if the rgb of A is 0 where the alpha of A is also 0 since 0+B(1-0)=B.

In order to get the result we expect, we must first premultiply A by its alpha channel. This is expressed like this: A*a. Then, plug that in to the over expression and you get A*a+B(1-a). Now take the point over the grass again. plug everything in and you get 0+B(1-0)=B. Yes! That’s exactly what we wanted!

That’s why you have to premultiply to use over correctly.

Most movies made today have at least some VFX shots in them and many of those elements (backgrounds, environments, characters, etc.) are primary story telling vehicles. Visual effects have also been a way to save a lot of money on shots that would otherwise be too costly to produce. It often surprises my friends to learn just how much of their favorite movies were shot primarily on sound stages. It surprises me sometimes too!

One would think that such an important tool in filmmaking would be treated as such… Important. In fact, this is not often the case. It is considered necessary, but not valued. It’s pretty frustrating to see the names of VFX and CG artists listed toward the end, if not dead last during the rolling credits of a movie. The situations we often joke about as ‘war stories’, sleepless and stress-filled nights, 7 day work weeks and endless job insecurity, are not isolated or rare incidents. This is what one experiences regularly during the post-production of a movie.

I don’t really think this or any letter will bring about any substantive change, but I do think it raises some important problems that I, for one, considered a given in the professional world.

The web design work has been a great way for me to dive back into html and css. I’ve fallen in love with WordPress in the process. I even turned my own website into a WordPress powered site, and I’m very pleased with the result! I still have some pages to transfer, as well as some small design issues to tidy up.

I’ve also been thrown back into a production situation, but this time on the game side. I’ll be be developing animated player and non-player models for a browser-based multiplayer game called Participatory Chinatown. I’m really psyched to get going and dig my teeth into this one! I’m sure I’ll have to readjust a lot of my habits to make the models and textures suitable for real-time rendering.

Anyway, the future is not bleak.

On Monday, I headed to New Orleans for SIGGRAPH 2009. Though I only got to stay for a day, I got to see a lot of really cool exhibits and short films. The Computer Animation Festival definitely lived up to it’s usual awe inspiring potential. I was especially excited and happy to see The Incident at Tower 37 up there with the best CG and VFX the industry and academia has to offer! I’ve included a short video of a cool/creepy exhibit we saw in the experiences are of the conference. Unfortunately, I had to shoot from the hip to avoid getting hassled by the staff.

Anyway, SIGGRAPH and CAF were a lot of fun and I was really happy to see everyone who was able to make the trip down.

-The Proposal:
The movie that I had spent close to 9 months working on was released to the public almost two months ago. While this was and is very exciting news, being overcome with both joy and frantic life-purpose finding, I neglected to announce this fact and offer any reflections. (I was also unsure of the terms of any non-disclosure agreement I was under, but I believe it’s safe to talk about now).

Having completed such an epic undertaking, I have a hard time remembering how we all got through it! The sheer volume of data that went across all of our screens seems inconceivable to me now. Along with my fellow junior artists at Brickyard, I can safely say I’ve learned, un-learned and re-learned everything I thought I knew about the visual effects and computer graphics industry. From theory to process, I’ve gained a solid foundation and even more questions. I can only express what I have now as an unquenchable thirst for more!

-The (movie I probably can’t mention the name of yet):
More is what I got. Almost as soon as The Proposal wrapped, I was called back to work on a shot for another movie. Considerably more complex and of a wholly different nature than anything we’d done before, the shot consumed 100% of my time and is the biggest culprit responsible for my blogging hiatus. Instead of rotoscoping, I was tasked with producing 3D assets for a 25 second aerial shot involving the placement of photo-real roof-top objects that, at times, are very close to camera. Without going into too much detail, this shot has tested every single aspect of my knowledge and talent and still continues to do so.

Working for a new and fairly small company, one must be utterly flexible and be prepared to wear more than one hat. Often times, wearing multiple hats at once. Over the past month and a half, I’ve played the role of pipeline developer, modeler, shading and lighting artist, matte painter, render wrangler, rotoscope artist and compositor. With the addition of another similar shot, I’ve had the chance to refine my methods and I’m pleased to say that the second time around is going quite a bit smoother than the first. The fact that I got home at 9pm instead of 5am the day before a delivery is proof of that!

-Brickyard University:
In related news, Brickyard Filmworks is going to be putting on a training program for young and aspiring artists in the Greater Boston Area. This program is designed to train local talent for eventual work on feature films that Brickyard will work on. The reason this is important to me, is that I will be the instructor! Working with our VFX Supervisor, I’ll be teaching people how to rotoscope and paint-fix for feature films. I’m excited about this for two reasons. First, I love teaching. Second, with more fresh talent at a small company, that means I get to move up and possibly become a compositor, which is also something I love!

The program is supposed to start soon, although the actual start date depends on our current production schedule.

-SIGGRAPH, 2009:
The Incident at Tower 37 will be in the SIGGRAPH 2009 Computer Animation Festival! We always talked and dreamed about it, and it finally happened! I bought my plane ticket to New Orleans today, and I can’t wait to go see it on that big, gigantic screen alongside friends and hundreds of similarly enthusiastic people. I feel very proud and fortunate to have been part of such an amazing team of artists and filmmakers that have (see above paragraphs for proof) profoundly shaped my life.

-Miscellaneous:
Other more sundry things in my life… I bought a bike. I spent 300$ on a road bike to take me to and from work every day. Ironically, it was more expensive than my recently plane ticket to San Diego.

I bought a new camera too! Since the untimely demise of my old Canon Rebel, I had been reluctant to buy a new one due to monetary concerns, but the upcoming Ultimate tournament in Wildwood, NJ prompted me to get a new Rebel. This one is smaller, lighter, has a larger image sensor, and can even shoot live action HD footage! It uses H.264 compression, but I couldn’t ask for more from a still camera.

In anticipation of assisting my boss with an FX Phd (www.fxphd.com) class he teaches on advanced Nuke compositing, I’ve been given a semester of classes at FX Phd. I’m taking a class on DSLR cinemetography, crowd simulation with Massive and 3D tracking with SynthEyes. The classes have only just begun, but I’m already having fun with Massive and learning how to better use my new camera.

-The End:
I hope to write more often so I can go more into more depth about individual topics that cross my mind. With the volatile nature of the VFX and post-production industry, who knows… I may have a lot of free time to write!