courses

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.

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.

Introduction to Redshift for VFX - episode 03 /  by Xuan Prada

Episode 03 of Introduction to Redshift for VFX, is already available on my Patreon feedhttps://www.patreon.com/elephantvfx.
It is all about surfacing shading and the video is something around 4.5 hours.

These are the topics of this episode.

  • Camera mapping

  • Redshift uber shader

  • Sub surface scattering solutions

  • Texture management

  • UDIM workflow

  • Look-dev workflow

  • Surface shading

  • Look-dev tools

  • Normal maps, bumps and displacements

  • Zbrush and Mari displacements

  • Substance Painter workflow

  • Shading user attributes

  • Look-dev exercises

Check it out on my Patreon page.

Katana Fastrack episode 05 /  by Xuan Prada

Episode 05 of Katana Fastrack is already published. In this episode we are going to take a look at the lighting pipeline that we could find in any visual effects studio.
First, I will explain quickly what is the most common workflow when starting a vfx production, from the lighting point of view.

Then, I will explain the recipe that we are going to cook in Katana for lighting shots. And finally, we will jump into Katana to build our lighting template, a tool that we are going to be able to use on many shots and sequences in the future.

Before finishing this episode, we will try our lighting template with very simple assets, testing features like importing look files, shading override, shading edits, geometry edits, etc.

All the info on my Patreon feed.

Katana Fastrack episode 04 /  by Xuan Prada

Katana Fastrack episode 04 is already available.
In this episode, we will finish the Ant-Man lookDev by tweaking all the shaders and texture maps created in Mari.

Then we will do a very quick slapcomp in Katana and Nuke to check that everything works as expected and looks good. We will do this by render a full motion range of Ant-Man walk cycle. And finally, we will write a Katana look file to be used by the lighters in their shots.

Check it out on my Patreon feed.

Katana Fastrack episode 03 /  by Xuan Prada

Episode 03 of my Katana series is out. We are going to be talking about expressions, macros and tools to take our look-dev template to the next level. Right after that, we will take a look at the texture channels that I painted in Mari for this character and then we will start the look-dev of Ant-Man.

We divide the look-dev in different stages, the first on is blocking, and we are going to spend quite a few time working on this today.

All the info on my Patreon feed.

Katana Fastrack episode 02 /  by Xuan Prada

Katana Fastrack episode 02 is now available for all my patrons. I cover how to create a proper look-dev template to be used in visual effects. Everything will be setup from scratch and at the end of this lesson we will have a Katana script ready to be used. In lesson 03 we'll be using this script to do all the look-dev for Ant-Man.

In Katana Fastrack episode 02 you will learn:

- How to create master look files
- How to use live groups to create light rigs
- How to create a look-dev template for production

All the info on my Patreon feed.

A bit more photogrammetry /  by Xuan Prada

Just a few more screenshots and renders of the last photogrammetry stuff that I've been doing. All of these are part of some training that I'll be teaching soon. Get in touch if you want to know more about it.

More photogrammetry stuff /  by Xuan Prada

I'm generating content for a photogrammetry course that I'll be teaching soon. These are just a few images of that content. More to come soon, I'll be doing a lot of examples and exercises using photogrammetry for visual effects projects.