| Locking textures to particles with Krakatoa
So this again is more of a brief how to – but one of the most common questions I get asked is how to lock uv coordinates to particles, so for instance you can have a texture move and stay locked to each individual particle. So I’ve created this very quick example, I’ve then also pointed out how it works with Krakatoa, which is pretty much seamless. |
| The Last Air bender Trailer
A recent project I’ve been working on at Industrial Light + Magic |
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VFX BOOT CAMP I’m toying with the idea of trying to organize a 3 day boot camp for Visual FX in LA for later in the year, which would be aimed at a limited amount of seats being personally trained intensely over 3 days in everything from Particle FX, Fluids, procedural animation, pipelines, scripting and compositing. At this stage I would just like to gauge what interest is out there, I get a lot of people asking about personal training which is hard to do with schedules, but an intense face to face workshop over perhaps a 3 day weekend might be something that a lot of people might be interested in. I’d love to hear your thoughts – so please email me! |
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Particle UV Tutorial + VFX Boot Camp?
Happy 2010!
| Los Angeles bound!
Hi everyone and happy new year! Wrapping up on The Last Airbender for Industrial Light + Magic over the coming month and I will be officially be setting up in Los Angeles as my base city to work out of. So for future reference if anyone needs work done or consulation/supervision I will be based in LA and a lot more accessable! Over the coming weeks I have a lot of new great announcements to be unveiled, and a load of new content both for 3D Studio Max and Maya, so expect a lot of new stuff soon! |
| CG Society Real Flow Workshop #2
The CG Society Workshop Real Flow was a huge success, it sold out in less than 24 hours after it was announced! And it’s currently in week 3 of 8 with all the students creating some amazing work! Because the workshop sold out so quickly, there’s already been a lot of enquiries and a waiting list quickly building up that is nearly already at maximum. So for anyone interested in participating in the next Real Flow workshop and missed out last time, you can sign up now for the waiting list so that you will be assured a place in the next one which will be announced in April. To sign up email Biljana at CG Society asking for a place in the next Real Flow Workshop. Email her here |
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Creature FX Volume 1 DVD Review up at MaxUnderground |
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Creature FX Volume 1 physical DVD being sold through Turbosquid check it out! |
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3D World Magazine + Digital Media World Fluids Articles A lot of you might notice the past few articles I’ve been contributing to a lot for 3D World Magazine in London, take a look at the past few issues and the current one out at book stores right now. I also have completed the fluids overview series for Digital Media World Magazine, reviewing and comparing the fluids for Maya, Max and Houdini. |
| Day Breakers
Day Breakers is released, this was a co production between my studio Catastrophic FX and Kanuka who headed up all of the major visual effects (go Kanuka!). What made this production interesting was the fact that we were 5 3D artists (2 seniors, 2 juniors and one animator) working collaboratively between Houdini and 3D Studio Max seamlessly. Our budget for this entire show was beyond tight, and yet we managed to pull off a lot of major FX sequences for the film without any overtime or any real stress. I personally created all of the digital fire for all of our FX sequences, as well as supervizing one of the big sequences in Day Breakers. We created the visual effects back in 2007, however the film had been delayed until 2010. I haven’t personally seen the film, however it was a fun opportunity to work with a lot of close friends back in Australia on probably the tightest project I’ve ever worked on (I’ve worked on tv commercials or tv channel ID’s that had bigger teams) so it was a real collective force to get this film out the door! |
Newsworthy Items
| Real Flow Essentials CG Society Workshop |
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| So the big news of what I’ve been working on for the past 3 months! The Real Flow Essentials CG Society Workshop has finally been announced! This workshop is aimed at both expert level and intermediate FX users, or anyone in general looking to break into Real Flow.
This workshop is multi-platform, so whether you’re a Maya user, Max user, Houdini or XSI etc. As long as you have Real Flow you’re able to participate in this course. This workshop runs over 8 weeks, during which we cover a lot of information on how Realflow works, but also how to optimize and speed up simulation times, various tricks to get better simulations and utilize much of its dynamics, as well as various industry techniques to help advanced all users and ready them to jump into real visual effects shots confidently. The workshop has only been announced for a few hours of posting this, and last time I checked there were 18 positions of the 35 already taken, so Imagine this 8 week course will fill up very quickly. So get in while you can! |
| Christmas Special – all four DVD’s for $199! |
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| A bit of a shameless plug, but for those of you interested in purchasing any of the training DVD’s of mine, I have for this month only (until end of December) selling all four advanced training DVD’s together for only $199! Click here for more information |
| Autodesk Masters |
| Joe Gunn has been nominated to join the ranks of the masters. Some of Joe’s recent work includes working on the LA destruction sequence for the new movie 2012. Joe’s most recognized for a lot of his rigging and cloth/hair DVD’s, tutorials and classes as well as much of his great work he’s performed in New York and LA. Check out the Autodesk Master’s nominee’s here! |
Want to write your own FX tools?
| Previously I’ve mentioned saving pflow presets which has been a real time saver, but what if you want to delve into building an fx pipeline where you literally put in the controls, the object you want to have your FX applied to etc. all in your own custom interface? This is something that I any many others have been doing for years, building blackboxes for FX.
This video we don’t go too deep into the whole process, however rest assured there will be some more videos coming that do. In this video we more just cover the first few steps of building an interface and choosing a custom object to apply your effects to. As well as building a preset file which we can read into our scene and then modify through our script. This is the first steps in the process, but I’m sure many of you will watch this video and then take this concept and build way further beyond the intended steps using this approach. I can’t wait to see what you guys come up with! More to come soon on this subject, as well as a few big announcements coming next month so stay posted! |
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| Make sure you’re using the ensharpen codec. Also VLC is recommended as the prefered video player |
Pflow 2010 FX Elements + Pflow Presets
| Are you overlooking Particle Flow Presets? |
| Surely you’ve forgotten that Particle Flow in Max 2010 has a preset function, that allows for you to save and load particle presets. This feature has been around since Box Set 1, however it seems most people really overlook it.
This is in fact a really powerful feature, which of course is great for saving and loading preset systems, but also for saving pflow scripts, and constantly used set ups, even just some to make “rotation, spin, position, random_scale” on the fly. Here we just quickly jump in and point out the potential and usefulness of this great feature in 3D Studio Max 2010. |
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| 3D Studio Max 2010 Particle Flow FX Elements |
| With the release of 3DSMax 2010 – Autodesk has added in a lot (over 100+ to be exact) particle flow setups, ranging from fire, smoke, earth, water, and in addition – Logos. These contain lots of different set ups, and also conceptual files demonstrating how to create various effects.
I was brought on board to create these earlier this year (2009) for the release. Although with certain limitations such as not utilizing any plugins and not making the scenes too slow in the viewport and copyright on textures or stock footage, it meant they needed to be more sample files to demonstrate how to create a flow for the set up, rather than a full blown production ready sample, at least in some cases. However I believe that pretty much all of these scene files that ship with max are very informative and useful in day to day production. A lot of the key concepts here are the core elements of what I use in building a lot of my more complex effects and flows. Check out this video just discussing how to use them and make the most of your Particle Flow En devours! |
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| Hungry for more knowledge? |
| Check out a good buddy of mine Carlos Anguiano’s website, loads of great information in there. Carlos is currently a Creature TD at Industrial Light and Magic, freaking talented guy and his website has a lot of great information I’m sure anyone reading this website is going to find useful! |
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| HAPPY THANKSGIVING! |
Website Update + Afterburn 4.0 Tutorials
| News update |
| Hopefully none of you really notice this, but this site’s been completely rebuilt (again). Pretty much same design, just completely different content management system, so things like visits and other stuff have been reset. One key feature is comments now work, so feel free to supply comments on posts that are relative, it would be good to get other industry people and enthusiasts posting comments or adding ideas to posts on tutorials or showing some of their end results etc !
Hopefully all newsletter subscribers still stay in tact, however feel free to resubscribe to the newsletter just in case! |
| Afterburn 4.0 – Utilizing Explosion Daemon |
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| Still covering more basic subjects just to add some more introductory content. Here we go through one of many methods for creating explosions in 3D Studio Max. This one is designed to really show how to use the Explode Daemon in Afterburn 4 as well as create an explosion without any key frames or lights necessary, purely all based off the particle age. |
| Afterburn 4.0 – Triggering Canned FX |
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| Following on from the previous tutorial, we then take our explosion and link it up to another system. In this case, its killer teapots! (Yes I was too lazy to make any actual planes flying around). The concept is very similar to the airstrike CG Academy DVD I created some years ago, however updated for Afterburn 4.0. This is a demonstration of creating canned FX and then being able to hook them up to other effects to control the entire thing through some basic controls you set up, rather than manually having to do all of this by hand. |
| That’s it for now, there are a few announcements happening over the coming weeks, as well as a lot of advanced content coming. As I’ve previously mentioned I’m trying to put a bit of my spare time into producing some beginner to intermediate subjects for real flow, max, maya, scripting etc. for people who are wanting to get into FX and don’t know where to start. However I have a lot of more advanced content that will be coming soon. As always, if you have any cool ideas or requests, feel free to shoot me an email (go to the contact page) and I’ll keep them in mind!
Allan McKay San Francisco, USA |
Website Update
| A little overdue, but finally a new website up and running! I’ve been running this webpage for 13 years, 6 of which have been as allanmckay.com, however averaging over 1,000 hits a day the bandwidth has not been able to keep up in the past!
I’ve switched over to a lightning fast server, and unlimited bandwidth, all of the previous tutorials are online, and loads more are going to be popping up very soon, as well as other content, maxscripts, Real Flow, Maya and various other material too. Bare with us over the next coming weeks as this website comes online, however I now have other people running and contributing to this website so it will become a lot easier for myself and others to keep it up to date and make more frequent updates. I will be putting up a newsletter soon, so people who are interested in participating in CGWorkshops or other events that sell out quick can get a heads up before they are announced, ensuring their place in the workshops ahead of everyone else, as well as gaining access to exclusive content and other cool material that noone else has access to. I’m excited and looking forward to getting this website online both to put together a focal point for solid visual effects content as well as various other areas I’m tied to such as travel, writing and film production. Any ideas or things you would like to see covered, or anything else feel free to contact me! amckay@allanmckay.com
Allan McKay Gold Coast, Australia |
