Whilst i have an hour away from my desk / away from actual work. I thought I'd upload  the latest personal project I've been working on. It's a piece of fan art form one of the discarded designs for Elysium's robots. It's got some really nice details in there and whilst I don't want to share the images Hopefully you'll see that as the model progresses. 

The main forms are blocked out but I've only started detailing the head, shown in the render below. All in all it's probably been about three or four solid days work, but spread over a few different evenings. Hopefully I'll get a bit more time over the weekend ot be able to start building up the internal chest / torso geo.

Normally I'd UV pieces as I was going but on this occasion I haven't so that will be an interesting afternoon's work no doubt. 

The next steps will be adding a slight casing around the base of the neck, maybe some holds / support for the seventh cervial vertebrae fan and detailing the frontal chest plates. 

Watch this space. . . . 

Over the course of my time at EGG and for my modelling and texturing work for Screen Scene I've been able to dive into Mari full time in a production environment. I don't often offer views on software as they're mainly tools and everything you can do in one you can normally do in another. However for Mari, I did a lot of reading on it before I started and I can't remember where but one artist had written for quick textures, use Mudbox, for high end textures Mari is the only way to go. This is a sentiment I find myself agreeing with more and more. For a number of projects there was no locked off idea of where on screen the assets were going to sit so everything was painted with hero textures, full 8k or 16k textures or lots of UDIMS. Mari handles these huge textures so easily that it makes absolutely no difference in workflow.

There are still a few things that would be on my wish list, a proper Maya plugin for full integration (or at least an option to export flattened channels in Maya's native UDIM format), the ability to re-project painted details onto another mesh or the same mesh with different uvs and the ability to read alembic for animated meshes would be a nice plus. Having said that in terms of ease of use, non destructive workflow and ability to work with huge numbers of variations, Mari is second to none. If anyone would find it useful I'll record a video showing my both my workflow from Maya to Mari and back and also my typical Mari techniques and whatnot. Let me now via email or through the contact form.

I haven't found too much time to update my blog or site in the last few months. Shame on me. Last June (2013) I was employed by Egg Post Production in Dublin and have been working solidly there on a number of TVCs and most prominently a Warner Brothers feature film scheduled for release later this year. 

I have also had the immense pleasure of working with the VFX gurus over at Screen Scene, the biggest project of which was a full CG ship modelled and textured in conjunction with Glen Southern for the Sky show Moonfleet. It was nominated for a VES award but sadly lost out to the Banshee:Pilot.  Whilst it was fantastic to be nominated, my part was incredibly small and it was just a pleasure to see the fantastically talented guys at Screen Scene pulling all the shots together. You can see the breakdown of the shots on Screen Scene's vimeo channel here https://vimeo.com/84205360. In the next few days I'll render out a turntable of the ship and some wireframes and update my gallery with some more work form the last few months and one or two of the personal projects from that time too. 

This is going to be a little bit of a stream of consciousness update unfortunately. It's been quite a start to the year and I don't seem to have blinked and we're into April. I've already worked on a number of projects that I can't show though which is slightly disappointing in terms of being able to update the site. One of them was a collaboration with the fantastic Glen Southern of SouthernGFX http://southerngfx.co.uk/ building a number of models for Agustawestland. It was a fantastic project to work on and I learnt a huge amount not least from having as talented a modeller as Glen looking over my shoulder. It was though, a very quick turnaround so everything else has been on hold. Straight from that project I've had extensions form two previous clients which is also keeping me pretty busy I have found a little time to render out the latest test of the shoe though. Despite the slow updates I think I've actually only managed to spend about three or four full days on it so far. The next stages are sorting out the laces and tweaking some of the materials, the leather's a little shiny and the sole is still a flat lambert.

The tongue was surprisingly nasty to texture too, with all of the mesh needed depth rather than just a flat diffuse. The lighting is still only a couple of area lights and a basic studio HDRI so I'll look at fixing that when I get a chance too. 

In other news my Project365 has taken a pounding since the big Agustawestland project but hopefully I'll be able to add some more photography to the next couple of weeks' plans. Oh and I like musicals now. . . . Les Miserables was a fantastic watch on the big screen and if you haven't already you should catch it before it's pulled.

It's been a couple of weeks or so since I managed to post an update. I the post-Christmas blues are starting to fade for everyone and work is starting to feel like the norm again. The latest personal project is a shoe. I've wanted to model one of these for a while but have never found the time. The soles always looked pretty tricky and so it's proving. On the sole of the new Air Jordans the insets are square-like but they're rotated at 45 degrees to the sole itself, so it's quite tricky blending that and the edgeloops from the body together. Not to mention there are a lot of loops that have to be ended before the reach the edge of the sole so finding ways to finish them is tricky. 

Well I've still got one project which seems to be one of those unfortunate never ending ones but happily most of the elements are out of my hands now. Over the last few days while I've been at a bit of a loose end, I've been building a little side project. Here are some of the characters from a new chess set I'm modelling. I've only got a couple more to build and then it's a case of loading some textures onto those bad boys. 

At the moment I'm thinking silver and black metal, perhaps with a kind of bronzed or gold base. The only issue that I'm not quite sure how to resolve is how to get a black material with a high amount of reflections. The reflection colour obviously affects the intensity so creating a black reflective colour would lead to a low reflection value. It's only a minor concern at the moment but I'll upload some render tests as and when. . . .

I'm still using my lunch break (or sometimes evening break) to keep up my Project 365, a photo a day for the year. You can find it here http://www.flickr.com/photos/patrickfinnvfx/sets/72157632405931004/. It's been a bit of a mash of a few things so far and that initial well of inspiration is starting to empty. You kind of assume you're going to have loads of ideas but loads at the start means about ten. I'm sure different themes will present themselves throughout the year but it's certainly looking like a challenge. If anyone has any ideas or advice let me know!

Wow it's been a long couple of months. I hope everyone had a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.

 It's been a case of nose to the grindstone, through the grindstone, onto the floor and beyond. I think my nose is somewhere in the southern hemisphere by now. I've just come to the end of a long and challenging project, a 3 minute animation involving a CG car, CG studio and CG desert. I don't think I can show anything unfortunately but if that changes I'll add some videos and stills up. 

There were some bits of the project that were just a logistical nightmare. I tried separating the tasks as a company would, into modelling, rigging animation etc and this process definitely helped. One of the key aspects that really sped things along was file referencing in Maya. The model and rig were in a scene that was referenced into the studio scenes and desert scenes allowing fast changes across the whole range without too much hassle. 

Another issue was the rig itself, for the most part the car had to be a rear wheel drive, so the rig was built to drive and steer from a controller with a pivot between the back wheels. At some points though the car needed to skid which meant the pivot had to shift to the front wheels. As a bit of a sticky back plastic solution I had a secondary controller with a different pivot and a switch (kind of like an IK/FK switch I guess) to allow me to switch between the two. I'm not sure if this is the right way to go about it but it worked. If anyone has any more elegant solutions let me know!

There is one more bit of news unrelated to 3D. I've started taking photographs a little more seriously / at all. As a bit of a learning exercise I'm doing a 365 project, or a photo a day. How long will it last? Who knows. Will there end up being a lot of photos of cups of tea and my workstation? Most definitely. But you should look anyway; you can find it on my Flickr page here:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/patrickfinnvfx/. Here's a yesterday's effort as a taster.

As always, any questions, suggestions, meaningless chat or if you want to say hello, give me a shout via the contacts page or social media or email or. .  . . whatever.

I've finally managed to upload the final render of my last project, an animation of a robot building and coming together for a robotics company. Following on from my last post, this project stresses again how strange it is when you're completing things on your own as opposed to passing off assets as part of a team. In one sense it was helpful as I could build and texture parts of the model for the animation, rather than build the whole thing (although he does have legs for a planned minute long version). However in another sense you can end up taking much longer to complete projects as there are naturally elements that are outside of you knowledge zone. In my case some of the animation got a little fiddly and I'm sure there are quicker ways of accomplishing some of the tasks than the way I went about them.

I should also have another project to show in a few weeks but the render times on it are staggering so please don't hold your breath. You'll be purple long before it's finished. . . . . Anyway, here is the video of the robot project, or you can check it out on vimeo directly ( https://vimeo.com/53672164 ).

 I haven't been able to put an update here for a while because I'm working on a project, sorry that should be fighting with a project and at the moment the project's winning. It's not even a close fight. I've started on a slightly different workflow with a new render engine and it got me thinking that there's never really a good time to do that. There's very rarely time when you shouldn't be working on a project or pitching for work or taking some time away from the screen. There's isn't that chance to sit and just take a month to learn the ins and outs of each new thing you pick up, you just have to throw it into the mix and hope for the best. This is multiplied when you're on your own or part of a small company with no tech team to turn to. 

This generally leads to some really nice results but also a lot of late nights and moments of frustration and annoyance as you scour round for someone who's had the same problem or just try to find a workaround for yourself. As the pressure is upped though the 'eureka' moments do get a little nicer.

Anyway, this was basically a stream of consciousness that fluttered around saying hopefully I should have the project broken down to show in a couple of weeks. Fingers crossed everybody and will someone put some coffee on, I can see another problem in the distance. . . . 

Here's a quick teaser from my latest project. A robotics engineer asked for an animation to publicise himself, with his logo and slogan 'Bringing Robotics to Life'.

The idea is to animate a robot building and coming together, then walking and perhaps interacting or playing some part in forming his logo. Most of the pieces are animated building now. You can see the initial test render of the arm building here https://vimeo.com/49594497.

This however is a still from the full render. Hopefully the entire spot should be online in the next week or two and obviously when it is you'll be the first to know. Okay, maybe second or third. . . after the client then my mother. As always feel free to let me know what you think via the forms or an email or whatever.