Drawing on the success of recent features (Ghajni, Magadheera et al), myself, Adel Adili and RC Kamalakannan along with acclaimed director SS Rajamouli and additional investors have founded Makuta VFX, based out of Hyderabad, India.
For more information on this exciting new venture, please visit Animation Xpress here
It's come to my attention that Autodesk omitted / retired the procedural Planet Map without letting people know about it. Good work yeah? This is used within the Snow Drifts tutorial within the DTE 3rd Edition and I've had a few emails over the last week as to how to get it back. Thankfully they have left it in there, but only via MAXScript exposure - open up the listener and drop in:
sphere material:(standard diffusemap:(planet()))
which will generate a Sphere primitive and assign a material with a Planet map to it. You can then open the Material Editor, sample the material from the scene and use the Planet map wherever you need it (copy, instance, whatever).
02/02/10Animex Festival, Arch/Viz Training with 3DATS...
A bit late, but Happy New Year to everyone! Animex kicks off again next week - apologies for the late notification, but I've been snowed under with the feature I'm currently working on and haven't had chance to update the site.
At Animex I'm going to be teaching a full day workshop on digital crowd control with 3ds Max, plus will be attending the Lounge events and covering the festival for 3D World magazine.
In collaboration with the 3DATS and CGArchitect.com guys, I'll be teaching in London from the 16th to the 19th of March. Classes I'll be covering are "Beginner 3ds Max for Architectural Visualisation", "Advanced 3ds Max for Architectural Visualisation" (particle systems) and "mental ray for Architectural Visualisation". All classes run for two days. Please visit 3DATS for more information on these classes and others that the guys (Brian Smith, Jeff Mottle, Tod Stephens and Mike Merron) are running during this time.
I should (pending deadlines that is) be attending the 3ds Max End User Event in Utrecht, Holland from the 3rd to the 4th of June where I'll be covering another workshop. Details of this to follow.
I'm currently working on a sequence for another Indian feature (Endhiran, or "Robot"), however I'm also working on another personal side-project during downtime; this should be out later on this year with a bit of luck. I can't reveal exactly what the content is, but think on the scale of the DTE video tutorials, plus some "quckies", but not just limited to elemental work.
01/09/09 Magadheera VFX breakdowns (click on the links)
30/08/09 Magadheera stills in the Gallery, plus the year so far...
'09 so far has been a bit on the hectic side; I've been out to India twice to work as the VFX Pipeline TD on SS Rajamouli's "Magadheera", working with RC Kamalakannan & Adel Adili on the stadium & city flashback sequences and developing rendering and compositing pipelines for Chennai & Hyderabad branches of EFX; the VFX company responsible for the compositing & matchmove of these sequences. With the film now out and doing well, I can now upload some stills of a few of the shots I worked on and/or contributed to (for example, the shot in the splash image above was a combination of work of several departments). There's a ton more I want to add, however I'm waiting on footage, but for the interim I've dropped a few in the Gallery page (link in the section bar above).
After a spell in India from February until April, I travelled to the USA twice for festivals and to visit friends, plus a visit to Canada to help out at Keyframe Digital on "Warehouse 13" (who have now got a 2nd season - nice one guys).
After returning from Canada, I had a brief stint in the UK for external examiner duties at Teesside University, after which I got a call to come back to India to supervise and develop another bunch of shots for Magadheera, specifically geared towards relighting shots, fluids, cloth sims, volumetrics and crowd simulations. Unfortunately, I still haven't seen the film as I returned to the UK one week prior to it being released; the only showings of it over here are around 500km away from where I live; I'm hoping to return to India in the very near future where I'm hoping to be able to catch it in the theatre, if it's still running by then!
Oh, I'm also cutting a new reel which will include some of the Magadheera work, but (again) I'm waiting on a few shots to come through so I can include them, so as soon as I get them I'll drop the reel online :)
14/04/09 Red Stick Animation Festival Workshop
I will be attending the Red Stick Animation Festival where I'll be holding a full-day workshop on Visual Effects. Hosted in (hopefully) sunny Baton Rouge they've got a very good line-up so would be a big shame not to come on down, y'all :)
