andrew butler : vfx : r&d

Visual C++ Express 2010 and 64bit Maya plugins.
Here you'll find the project settings you need in order to compile 64bit Maya plugins for Windows.

Python Anaglyphs.
During the course of A Christmas Carol, I created a short python script that splits the colour channels of a left and right eye image, to create 3D anaglyph images; like this one of my 1987 Supra.

Depending on the colour balances of your monitor, results may vary. Roll over the image for an alternative view - August 2009

Minute Maid - 'Grow'
This application took a turntabled image sequence, stripped out the center column of pixels and reassembled them as one long unwrapped texure map. Written in Python.

Left: Part of the turntable sequence. Right: The resulting unwrapped texture map.

Bug rig
The in-house creature experiment at Fin Design and Effects. As the rig progressed, I have been animating the creature to see how all the parts work together as a whole and to spot any problems that might turn into a nightmare later on. This animation was the first of those tests.

Tooheys - 'Catapult'
Here is a brief run down of the processes I used to achive the dynamics. The modelling, lighting, matchmoving and compositing was done by the rest of the team at Fin Design and Effects in Sydney.

There were three parts to the process; the main arm, the rope and sling and the low to high animation transfer. The stages were broken up to minimise the amount of dynamic data one scene would have to deal with. Each stage was baked out and moved over to the next, eliminating the rigid solvers on the way.

	Dynamic rig. This low resolution rig was setup to control the amount of arm swing, recoil and release angle.
	Dynamic rope rig. Once the motion of the arm was established, the dynamic rope rig was imported and attached. This low resolution rope consisted of poly cubes connected by springs.
	Sling net research. The net needed to be dense enough to push the object along without being a simulation nightmare. This early test was succsessfull enough to be used on the final rig.
	Hi-res rope rig. The last stage was to bake the low resolution rope out and apply the data to this high res renderable setup. The releasing mechanism at the top of the arm is a constraint that keys off when the arm angle reaches the value contained in the control interface.
	Trebuchet Interface. This is used to control various aspects of the arm, sling and rope aswell as handling the exporting and importing of the baked data.
	The data transfer didn't always work out.
	All rope and arm dynamics baked and transfered onto high resolution main arm geometry.
	One side project was to roughly rig the stag for flight. As a demo for the rig I animated this quick test.