Bryan Chen Xiang Dian VFX demo reel

my vfx demoreel for 2009

Final Product

Final Product of my very 1st shot at VFX

It took a long time to render a few of the passes, the leaves were made with the alpha texturing, the same way many games use to create leaves, but in that way the ambient occlusion shader cant render with alpha so i had to use mental ray's final gather to try and simulate the effects of the ambient occlusion shader. It took a very very very long time to render, welll... at least it all tunr out to be ok i guess.

Tracking / match moving test



Original Footage

Completed only the 1st 5 sec

Completed only the 1st 5 sec, the rendering was just taking too much time, it took 2hr to jus render 1 frame for 2 of the passes, ambient acclusion and shadow within the tree. the 2 passes took very long to render becos i cant use ambient occlution shader for the leaves, the tree has lots of leaves and they are all bade with the help of alpha map, which in this case not good for me, bcos i had to use final gather to get the result to look like AO, actually its just a lambert applied to my leaves with the alpha map on it, but due to the final gather checked, it would create a render pass much ,like the AO pass. As for the shadow within the tree, it was again the leaves that took very long to render, and my system seems to have problem rendering the leaves in mental ray so i had to use software render, thinking that it would speed up the process of rendering, it actually didn't help, bcos i use a direactional light to lit the scene and in order for the maya softweware to render raytrace shadow, raytracng needs to be checked in the render settings

BG object test

I did a little test to c if the obj in the bg is moving correctly

Leave design Test

Planting leave in CG

I did some teste with the leaves had some problem trying out the looks of the leaves.

Blocking out a test of the track

Did some match moving with the help of the software the school is using, Sinteyes. i had to edit it in Aftereffects due to the aspec ratio of the video from the video camera, its 1.33 so meaning in any case if i should work on something like this i should have it set to a aspec ratio of 1.

So i had to change it in Aftereffects by setting the diamension from 1440 x 720 to 1980 x 720 then change the aspec from 1.33 to 1.

Then i exported the video clip to a jpg squence so that i can work on it with Sinteyes, if i am to import a video file into Sinteyes then i would have to take note of the framerate. To keep things simple i use image sequence.

It took me the whole day looking through the many videos that i have taken, and really had a hard time trying out all of them, trying to get a good match move in Sinteyes. I realize that i should have kept the motion blur on the videos to a very minium, i knew it would be a problem but i guess my hands arent very steady, i could still see some motion blur on my footage, most of the time when the software had problem making the tracking is because of the blurring of image in the footage. The software tracks base on artifates, so if the image is blur it cant really track well.

After i track the image i place a cube in the middle of the scene within Sinteyes, just to see if the cube is sliding or not. If it is, its not a good track. Then i exported the track into a maya file and a obj file. After which i convert the jpg sequence into iff so as to allow maya to use it as an image sequence. I put a few more boxes in maya because i plan to create something in the background so i need to do some kinda of a test to see if it works.



Heres the video:

Video of the carpark

Did some video shoot of the life footage that i will be using for the comp, its an empty carpark near my friends house on the 20th Jan2010. Spent most of the afternoon there filming, most of the morning filming another carpark near my house, both of which is under a very hot sunny day sun, because I needed the sunlight for the shadow reference. Hope in the end it will pay off ^^

Baby Shot

VFX --- Baby Shot

hi, i am now learning how to create VFX, had to do a "Baby shot" my very 1st VFX short clip. I am now at my very 1st stage of the production, still at concept stage. Everythings really cool so far, i was made to come up with 10 ideas to do for this very 1st VFX project, its a small project that is spread over 2 weeks and i am really not sure how much i could do in 2 weeks but what wows myself was i was able to come up with 10 ideas in less than an hour, and some of them were ideas that can be done within the 2 week time span. Cool.

I am goin to b makin an alien tree or some kinda plant growing out from the ground, 1st i had to design the look opf the plant and its just the 1st official day of my Spec.

Here are some of my concept art