Real time rendering for vfx, episode 03 /  by Xuan Prada

Hello patrons,

Real time rendering for vfx episode 03 is here!
In this episode we will spend around two and a half hours inside Unreal talking about textures, materials, shaders and everything related to the material system.

Some of the topics we are going to cover.

- How to work with textures.
- Shading models.
- Using instances and exposing parameters.
- Fresnel effect.
- Emission.
- Transmission.
- Opacity.
- Multi-channel masks.
- Modulate.
- Displacement.
- Vertex shading.

All the information on my Patreon feed.

Thanks again for your support!
Xuan.

Camera projection masterclass, episode 02 /  by Xuan Prada

Hello Patrons,

Camera projection masterclass, episode 02 is here! In this video, we are going to be doing two different exercises involving camera projection work in Nuke. The first exercise is a simple one, but also one you'll be doing all the time, a layering camera projection.

The second exercise is a more complex one, we'll be dealing with multiple geometries, different footage, and different approaches to set up our camera projection setup, this will be a coverage projection exercise.

More than two hours of content, also providing working files for you to practice.

As always, I can't thank you enough for your support.

Questions, suggestions, and critiques are always welcome.

All the info on my Patreon site.

Thanks!
Xuan.

Real time rendering for vfx, episode 02 /  by Xuan Prada

Hello Patrons,

It's been a while since I posted a video here. I did a little bit of traveling (not for fun though) and I've been super busy at work, but I finally managed to put something together for you guys.

Episode 2 of "real-time rendering for VFX". This episode is boring, really boring but also very much needed. If you really want to get into real-time rendering you need to go through everything that I explain in this video. I will cover very important topics that you need to know before starting to create any content for real-time.

Concepts like occlusion, overshading stages, lightmapping, vertex shading, distance culling, rasterization, and many other fancy terms that you necessarily need to understand. This video is almost 5 hours long so I hope you don't fall asleep and learn a few things to put in practice soon.

As usual, please let me know if you have any questions, concerns, suggestions, feedback, etc. And also, thank you very much again for your support.

Right now we are 199 patrons, let's get up to 200 and do something to celebrate it.

All the information on my Patreon site.

Real time rendering for vfx, episode 01 /  by Xuan Prada

Episode 01 for "real time rendering for vfx" is dropping later today. I called this video "your first day in Unreal engine". We will do from scratch a very simple environment that we can scout in virtual reality.

These are some of the topics covered in this (almost) 4 hours video.

- Assets considerations for real time.
- Exporting/importing assets in Maya/Unreal.
- Using templates in Unreal.
- Collisions.
- Materials basics.
- Lighting/atmospherics basics.
- Exporting projects.
- VR scouting.

Please head over my Patreon site and check this out.
Thanks for your support,
Xuan.

Intro to LOPs and USD /  by Xuan Prada

My introduction to Houdini Solaris LOPs and USD is already available on my Patreon feed.
These are the topics that we are going to be covering.

- Introduction to USD and LOPs
- Asset creation worflow
- Simple assets
- Complex assets
- Manual layout and set dressing
- Using instances in LOPs
- Set dressing using information from Maya
- Using departments inputs/outputs
- Publishing system
- Setup for sequence lighting
- Random bits

This introduction is around 4.30 hours long.
Check it out here.

Camera projection masterclass, episode 01 /  by Xuan Prada

The very first episode for "Camera projection masterclass" has dropped. For more than two and a half hours I will be introducing you to the fascinating work of camera projection for visual effects. This is a long format series where I will be covering many concepts, ideas and practical exercises. Let's see what today's episode is all about.

- Introduction to the course
- Matte painting evolution
- Matte painting in the visual effects pipeline
- Matte painting workflows and tools
- Camera projection fundamentals
- Types of camera projections
- Common issues
- Camera projection elements in Nuke and Maya
- Recipes for all type of camera projections in Nuke
- A few words about Photoshop

Downloadable material will be available for certain tiers.

As always, thanks a lot for your support, you make this channel.
Check out my Patreon for more information.
Xuan.

Introduction to heightfields /  by Xuan Prada

This is the first part of the "Redshift little project" we are doing to conclude the "Introduction to Redshift for VFX" series. In this case, I will explain to you the basics of Houdini's heightfields. The most common tools, different workflows, how to export attributes, geometry, and textures, how to use real world data, and many more things. In the end, is about three hours of video training that will set you up quickly to start working with heightfields.

The video will be available for subscribers in my Patreon site.
Xuan.

Introduction to Redshift - little project /  by Xuan Prada

My Patreon series “Introduction to Redshift for VFX” is coming to an end. We have already discussed in depth the most basics features like global illumination and sampling. I shared with you my own “cheat sheets” to deal with GI and sampling. We also talked about Redshift lighting tools, built-in atmospheric effects, and cameras. In the third episode we talked about camera mapping, surface shaders, texturing, displacement maps from Mari and Zbrush, how to ingest Substance Painter textures and did a few surfacing exercises.
This should give you a pretty good base to start your projects in Houdini and Redshift, or whatever 3D app you want to use with Redshift.

The next couple of videos about this series are going to be dedicated to doing from scratch to finish a little project using Redshift. We are going to be able to cover more features of the render engine and also discover more broad techniques that hopefully you will find interesting. Let me explain to you what is all of this about.

We’ll be doing this simple shot below from start to finish, it is quite simple and graphic I know, but to get there I’m going to explain to you many things that you are going to be using quite a lot in visual effects shots, more than we actually end up using in the shot.

We are going to start by having a quick introduction to SpeedTree Cinema 8 to see how to create procedural trees. We will create from scratch a few trees that later will be used in Houdini. Once we have all the models ready, we will see how to deal with SpeedTree textures to use them in Redshift in an ACES pipeline.

These trees will be used in Houdini to create re-usable assets llibraries and later converted to Redshift proxies for memory efficiency and scattering, also to be easily picked up by lighting artists when working on shots.

With all these trees we will take a look at how to create procedural scattering systems in Houdini using Redshift proxies. We will create multiple configurations depending on our needs. We are also going to learn how to ingest Quixel Megascans assets, again preparing them to work with ACES and creating an additional asset for our library. We will also re-use the scatterers made for trees to scatter rocks and pebbles.

To scatter all of that will be used as a base Houdini’s height fields. For this particular shot, we are going a very simple ground made with height fields and Megascans, but I’m going to give you a pretty comprehensive introduction to height fields, way more than what you see in the final shot.

Once all the natural assets are created, we’ll be looking at the textures and look-dev of the character. Yes, there is a character in the shot, you don’t see much but hey, this is what happens in VFX all the time. You spend months working on something barely noticeable. We will look into speed texturing and how to use Substance Painter with Redshift.

suit.png

Now that we are dealing with characters, what if I show you how to “guerrilla” deal with motion capture? So you can grab some random motion capture from any source and apply it to your characters. Look at the clip below, nothing better than a character moving to see if the look actually works.

It looks better when moving, doesn’t it? There is no cloth simulation btw, it is a Redshift course, we are not going that far! Not yet.

Any environment work, of course, needs some kind of volumetrics. They create nice lighting effects, give a sense of scale, look good and make terrible render times. We need to know how to deal with different types of volumetrics in Redshift, so I’m going to show you how to create a couple of different atmospherics using Houdini’s volumes. Quite simple but effective.

Finally, we will combine everything together in a shot. I will show you how to organize everything properly using bundles and smart bundles to configure your render passes. We will take a look at how Redshift deals with AOVs, render settings, etc. Finally, we will put everything together in Nuke to output a nice render.

Just to summarize, this is what I’m planning to show you while working on this little project. My guess is that it will take me a couple of sessions to deliver all this video training.

  • Speed Tree introduction and tree creation

  • ACES texture conversion

  • ACES introduction in Houdini and Redshift

  • Creation of tree assets library in Houdini

  • Megascans ingestion

  • Character texturing and look-dev

  • Guerrilla techniques to apply mocap

  • Introduction to Houdini’s height fields

  • Redshift proxies

  • Scattering systems in Houdini

  • Volume creation in Houdini for atmospherics

  • Scene assembly

  • Redshift render settings

  • Compositing

  • Something that I probably forgot

All of this and much more training will be published on my Patreon. Please consider supporting me.

Thanks,
Xuan.

Arnold interoperability /  by Xuan Prada

In this video I will guide you trough arnold operators in both Maya and Houdni to show you advanced methods for creating looks, and potentially anything arnold related. Working with arnold operators can be very beneficial in your visual effect pipeline, among other things you are going to be able to transfer "for free" pretty much anything from one 3D package to another, in this case from Maya to Houdini and vice-versa.

These days it is very common to work in a traditional 3D package like Maya while creating assets and then moving to a scene assembler like Houdini or Katana to do shots. With this workflow you are going to be able to do so in a very clean, tidy and efficient way.

On top of that, I'm going to show you how to create look files that can be easily exported to use in lighting shots, independently in Maya or Houdini. You also are going to be able to override looks, versioning looks in Shotgun and many more things.

This is a two plus hours video tutorial posted on my Patreon feed.

Thanks a lot for your support.
Xuan.

Cryptomatte in Katana and Arnold /  by Xuan Prada

This post is mainly for my Patreon supporters. Some of them are having issues while setting up cryptomatte AOVs. This is how you do it.

  • Create a material node.

  • Add an AOVs shader -> cryptomatte.

  • If you are using the Arnold AOVs supertool, add all the cryptomatte AOVs that you need.

  • In the arnold global settings add the cryptomatte shader to the AOV shaders.

If you are not using the Arnold AOVs supertool.

  • Create an arnold output channel define node.

  • Set it to be crypto_material.

  • Type RGBA.

  • Add a render output define node.

  • Set the channel to crypto_material.

  • Repeat the same steps to create crypto_object and crypto_asset.

Katana Fastrack, episode 07 /  by Xuan Prada

Hello patrons,

Episode 07 of Katana Fastrack is already available.
In this episode we will work on the second and latest lighting shot of this course, a live action shot where we have to integrate some CG elements, in this case our very own Ant Man falling on the ground.

We will learn a few things like:

- How to quickly capture HDRIs on-set and lighting references.
- How to technical grade footage and HDRIs to live under the same context.
- How to approach live action shots in Katana.
- How to slap comp CG renders on top of a plate for validation.

More information on my Patron site.

Thank you very much for your support!
Xuan.

Wade Tillman - spec job /  by Xuan Prada

This is just a spec job for Wade Tillman’s character on HBO’s Watchmen. After watching the series I enjoyed the work done by Marz VFX on Tillman’s mask, that I wanted to do my own. Unfortunately, I don’t have much time so creating this asset seemed like something doable to do in a few hours over the weekend. It is just a simple test, it will require a lot more work to be a production-ready asset of course. I’m just playing here the role of a visual effects designer trying to come up with an idea of how to implement this mask into the VFX production pipeline.

I’m planning to do more work in the future with this asset, including mocap, cloth simulation, proper animated HDRI lighting, etc. I also changed the design that they did on the series. Instead of having the seams in the middle of the head from ear to ear I just place my seams in the middle of the face dividing the face in two. I believe the one they did for the real series works much better but I just wanted to try something different. I will definitely do another test mimicking the other design.

So far I just tried one design in two different stages. The mask covering the entire head and the mask pulled up to reveal the mouth and chin of the character, as seen many times in the series. I also tried a couple of looks, one more mirror-like with small imperfections in the reflections. And another one rougher. I believe they tried similar looks but in the end, the went with the one with more pristine reflections.

I think it would be interesting to see another test with different types of materials, introducing some iridescence would also be fun. I will try something else next time.

Capturing lighting and reflections to lit this asset properly has to be the most exciting part of this task. That is something that I haven’t done yet but I will try as soon as I can. It is pretty much like having a mirror ball in the shots. Capturing animated panoramic HDRIs is definitely the way to go or at least the more simple one. Let’s try it next time.

Finally, I did a couple of cloth simulation tests for both stages of the mask. Just playing a bit with vellum in Houdini.

References from the series.

Just trying different looks here for both stages of the mask.

Simple cloth simulation test. From t-pose to anim pose and walk cycle.

VES 2020 and LoSt in space breakdowns /  by Xuan Prada

We are back from our VES trip after a week in Los Angeles attending to the 2020 VES Awards Ceremony.
We were nominated for 4 VES Awards but unfortunately we couldn’t bring home any trophies this year.

ILP has published our 3 breakdowns for the categories that we were nominated. On top of these 3 we were also nominated for best VFX in episodic series. More Lost in Space breakdowns will be published in the near future.

Introduction to Reality Capture /  by Xuan Prada

In this 3 hour tutorial I go through my photogrammetry workflow using Reality Capture in conjunction with Maya, Zbrush Mari and UV Layout.

I will guide you through the entire process, from capturing footage on-set until asset completion. I will explain the most basic settings needed to process your images in Reality Capture, to create point clouds, high resolution meshes and placeholder textures.
Then I will continue to develop the asset in order to make it suitable for any visual effects production.

This are the topics included in this tutorial.

- Camera gear.
- Camera settings.
- Shooting patterns.
- Footage preparation.
- Photogrammetry software.
- Photogrammetry process in Reality Capture.
- Model clean up.
- Retopology.
- UV mapping.
- Texture re-projection, displacement and color maps.
- High resolution texturing in Mari.
- Render tests.

Check it out on my Patreon feed.

Creases from Maya to Houdini /  by Xuan Prada

This is a quick tip on how to take creases information from Maya to Houdini to be rendered with Arnold. If you are like me and you are using Houdini as scene assembler this is something that you will have to deal with sooner or later.

  • In Maya, I have a simple cube with creases, on the right side you can see how it looks once subdivided twice.

  • Not only you can take creases information into Houdini, you can also export subdivision information and HtoA will interpret it automatically. Make sure you add catclark subdivision type and 2 iterations, or whatever you need.

  • When exporting the alembic caches you need to include the arnold parameters that take care of subdivision and creases. Actually there is no extra parameter for creases, by including subdivision parameters you will already get the creases information.

  • Note that the arnold parameters in Maya start with ar_arnold_parameter, for example ar_subdiv_iterations. But in Houdini arnold parameters don’t use de ar prefix. Because of that make sure you are exporting the parameter without the ar prefix.

  • All this can be of course happen automatically in your pipeline while publishing assets. It actually should to make artists life easier and avoid mistakes.

  • That’s it, if you import the alembic cache in Houdini both creases and subdivisions should render as expected. This information can be overwritten in sops with arnold parameters.

Mari 4.6 new features and production template /  by Xuan Prada

Hello patrons,

I recorded a new video about the new features in Mari 4.6 released just a few weeks ago. I will also talk about some of the new features in the extension pack 5 and finally I will show you my production template that I've been using lately to do all the texturing and pre-lookDev on many assets for film and tv projects.

This is a big picture of the topics covered in this video. The video will be about 2.5 hours long, and it will be published on my Patreon site.

- Mari 4.6 new features
- New material system explained in depth
- Material ingestion tool
- Optimization settings
- How and where to use geo channels
- New camera projection tools
- Extension pack 5 new features (or my most used tools)
- Production template for texturing and pre-lookDev

All the information on my Patreon feed.

Thanks for your support!
Xuan.

Lighting a full CG shot in Houdini, part 02 /  by Xuan Prada

Hello patrons,

I just finished the second video for Lighting a full CG shot in Houdini, if you are a patron you will find it in the next private post. This is the content that we will go through in the video for almost three hours.

- Introduction to ACES in VFX. We will talk about the basics of ACES, why it's important for your productions, how to set it up in Houdini, Arnold and Nuke.

- CG lights. I will show you how we usually deal with CG lightings in relationship with principal photography. We will talk about the most common lights used while lighting a CG shot and the purpose of each of them. A very quick introduction to cinematography for VFX.

- Finally, we will jump into Houdini to create a master lighting template that you would be able to re-use in your shots. We will establish a tidy structure that will enable you to work straight away in Houdini. We will create smart bundles to setup automatically your render passes, and finally we will see how to use operators, probably the most powerful render feature ever!

Here the link to the episode.

Thanks for your support!
Xuan.