So Busy, Much Work

So I'm currently pretty busy and haven't really felt like doing much on my computer at home besides play some hearthstone when I get off work  Hopefully by the end of this week things will start to cool off and I'll get back to it.  I'm also collecting work from some of my previous jobs so that I can start to cut some new reels, so there's that to look forward to, but it may be a while since I'm hoping to start to divide my professional work by genre and program, and I just don't have the bulk to make a reel for each thing yet.

Mercedes

I was playing around with car rigs yesterday and decided to texture and render this Mercedes in the L.A. river.

Here's the original photo as well.  It's from one of the sIBL sets.

Underground Tunnels WIP

I haven't done any animation lately, so I thought I would post this work in progress of an environment I've been doing in C4D.  I still need to do a lot of texture work, as well as add details to the pipes and more debris here and there.  I'm also still kind of playing around with the overall color and lighting.  I haven't really decided how I want it to look yet, but it was sort of inspired by some environments from the movie, The Colony.

Picture Depth

I didn't have a lot of time this week.  Spent most of it preparing things for Christmas, then did some stuff for my birthday, and caught a cold.  I was thinking about that scene from the trailer of The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, where Sean Penn is in a photo and beckons to Ben Stiller, and I wanted to play with taking a photo and pushing it back in space.  The camera move ended up fighting with the motion of the photo expanding, and I didn't get around to making a new move and re-rendering.  Also, I feel like I should have shot a short clip of something moving, that seemed to give the Walter Mitty scene more shazaam.


Picture Depth from conor scully on Vimeo.
I'm not sure what I'll be able to come up with next week since I'll be out of town for a few days.  I may just play with some deformers and effectors or something.

Little Blobbies

I saw a music video on motionographer this week that I thought was pretty cool, so I tried to play around with some of the techniques that I think they might have used.

Blobs from conor scully on Vimeo.

What the Hell is on My Coffee Table?

So we are now caught up to the current week.  This week I wanted to do a lot more than I had been, now that I feel more comfortable working in Cinema and After Effects again.  I started with shooting a quick plate and creating a panoramic of my living room using PTGui. My panoramics usually come out a little janky at the top and bottom because I don't have a full frame camera, so I can only get about 150 degrees vertically, and I poorly fake the rest, but they work out pretty well.




Coffee Table Plate from conor scully on Vimeo.

I found this awesome HDRI plugin a while back called Smart IBL by HDR Labs, which I have just begun using because I have been shooting panoramics and adding them to my own IBL library within SIBL.  It's pretty cool.  They have their own HDRI library that you can download, and if you shoot your own panoramics as well, you can use the SIBL Edit to keep them all organized and ready to go. I strongly suggest checking them out.

Anyway, I got a nice track in Boujou, had a rough time getting it into C4D, but finally figured it out, then I started playing with what to put on the table.  I had been wanting to learn how the metaball worked, so I played with that a little and came up with this guy.


Coffee Table from conor scully on Vimeo.

I ended up cutting the final a little short because correcting the reflection in the table in After Effects was taking up too much time and a little beyond my skill level.  Next time I use the metaball, I think I'll try to get it to conform to different shapes, or into text.

Earthquake!

The real reason I started working in 3d was so that I could do one simple thing.

BREAK STUFF!

I was playing around with the fracture tool, looking up a bunch of different ways to shatter objects in C4D since I feel I've gotten a fair grasp on the rigid dynamics and I found thrausi.  It is so sweet.  If you haven't gotten it yet, you can download it for free from Nitro4D.  It's simple to use and a lot of fun to play with.  Once I got the hang of it I also decided to try out Trapcode Particular, which I had used once before in this small logo animation from school.  I basically ripped off an old ABC logo animation and followed a Video Copilot tutorial.



PBS Logo Animation from conor scully on Vimeo.


Anyway, since it was Thanksgiving week I really only had about 2 days to put this together, so I didn't end up making it as cool as I would have liked, and I just pulled the statue model off of TurboSquid.  Next time I'll put out more nulls for larger individual chunks and give them dust trails too, and probably some dust puffs when they hit.  Also, when I used thrausi, I broke the texture mapping or something, so I'll have to figure that out before I make another destruction animation.



statue crumble from conor scully on Vimeo.