Lee Greatorex Photo/3D blog

Last week went back to university to help a friend with a VFX project. This time being a character in his VFX shots. It was great to see the studio again (the last time I was there was when shooting parts of my final year projects and learning Flair Motion Control camera software and general studio lighting).

Now the studio is fully set up and is looking great. For the shots he needed Gareth used a combination of the motion control camera and used the scissor lift with a camera attached to it.

This week I did a little photography, mainly setting my D80 in Aperture Priority mode to shoot in b+w, although as it is in RAW format it still keeps the colour data. This is mainly for personal preference as I used to shoot largely in black and white and it helps me visualise images a little more. Here's an example with a shot taken earlier today.

Looking through my old footage on my laptop I found some test shots of my Final Year Project at university and I thought I'd put them on here so that I can compare my lighting techniques after learning some new tricks and techniques later.

My final year project was based around mainly using fluid particles to make a glass of water turn in to a flower (well a flower growing from the water). I knew I was going to be shooting it on just a black background as I was wanting to emulate the slow motion Sainsbury's food adverts that were out a few years ago. Lighting was obviously going to be one of the key things I looked at as I needed to make it efficient and yet still look good. For this I decided not to use caustics as the was no solid background for light to reflect to. Then I created a simply lighting rig using grids with a white or gray Lambert texture on them, hiding their primary ray visibility in the render and then using final gather. This cut the render times down by a great deal without the need of global illumination/caustics and gave me the ability to create a nice studio lighting setup using grids as reflected lights and reflectors themselves.

I don't remember the exact render times but they were at most 2-3 minutes each per frame. The only troubles I had were actually with using XSI and Realflow together. I made a decision at the time to stick with the package I knew as opposed to which had better fluid/Realflow integration and it caused some pretty nasty glitching problems during the render phase.

Here are a couple of test videos of the petals growing, hopefully the video compression on here doesn't make them look too bad. Unfortunately I don't have the final render/shot on this laptop but I was going to re-render it or infact reshoot it completely using Maya to make the most out of it.