Canon DSLR Film Rig

With all the excitement and talk of the DSLR 5D MKII i couldn't let myself be left behind. 

My main issue with shooting motion with this camera was the ability to hold the camera still. I needed to get it up on my shoulder, otherwise i wouldn't be able to shoot video. 

I have a mounted Canon body with the Canon EF 50mm f/1.8 II and 4 part macro extension tubes and 1 part wide angle adapter.

 I am using a shoulder mount, spring loaded steady cam arm with belt attachment, matte box with French flag and top, an LCD and Sennheiser MKE 300 with wind dampener, which i will move from on top of the camera to the side.

For some sample footage check out my YouTube channel LeFloofTV

3D Stereoscopic Rendering and Production

I have been fascinated with 3D Stereoscope since i was a child and experienced it for the first time, and now i am in a position to experiment and research the process to create this effect for digital 3D animation. Lately there are a lot of 3D films being shown in stereoscope, and with Sony confirming that there are getting the play station ready for the stereoscope movement i thought it was about time i learned how to do this also. With the 3ds max video Post function you can create stereoscope animations directly within 3Ds Max. Video Post calculates each frame for both cameras and uses an alpha mask to combine the two images to an interlaced picture. It's best to use an uncompressed video format, like FLC, to avois comression artefacts, which often distray the interlaced image structure.

To create a stereo panorama, place a stereo cam pair into the center of your scene. Turn the cameras to at least 12 or 16 positions and take one picture for each camera. You now can use a stitcher program such as PhotoVista or Apple's QTVR Authoringstudio to create the two panorama images. Now use any Plugin to combine these two pictures into an interlaced one.

Example 1.

I created some basic geometry in the scene just for the purpose of this experiment, to use as a demonstration in the development process of rendering out a stereoscopic 3D frame.

Below you can see  a 6 strip animatic of the process for creating one single frame, without using a render element of Zdept

Here is frame one, rendering out using a scanline render, with only the 3ds max basic lighting

Here is the ZDepth render element of the same frame

And finally a 3d stereoscopic frame.

3D Project Update - New Scene Development

Below is a frame from another scene from the "untitled" 3D CG project, based in London. This frame is from the sitting room of an apartment is south west London were the main narrative will be played out. Looking out onto the Themes we can see East London on the other side. Although this is still in development, the outline of London has been created and placed within the same scene outside the apartment in relation to where the apartment is situated in the real world.

There is still a lot of work to be done on this scene, but the light sharders i created work well with the scene textures and the post processing give a nice overall feel. The television in the scene will play out the opening credits and lead the viewer into the scene and will be used to open the context of the narrative.

In terms of rendering i am still looking at a 4K render.

Corel HD Video Production Tutorial (PART 2)

Corel Video Production Tutorial P2
720P HD Video - For YouTube

Adding an Intro Sequence
Adding a Title
Compression for faster upload




http://www.divx.com  http://www.corel.com

Corel HD Video Production Tutorial (PART 1)

Corel Video Production Tutorial P1
720P HD Video -

• Adding an Intro Sequence
• Adding a Title
• Compression for faster upload

http://www.divx.com  http://www.corel.com

3D Project Update - Its time to get real people..

terms of lighting and rending not in actual life ...

Below is the first scene completed for my newest project (Untitled) i have fully treated this frame in post composition with glows, color correction, depth of field, levels, light pass, diff pass, shadow pass, spec pass and the list goes on... for the final render it will be a full aperture 1.316:1 35mm (4096x3112) but for this test i rendered it out as 1080p (1920x1080).

 I have also included the wire frame render of the same scene. As you can see although the scene is not entirely of complex polygon modeling, the lighting is.. I based the scene on my own bathroom, with some small adjustments. All the textures were photographed by me, using my raw slr setting and creating hdr, spec, bump and diff channels for each bitmap, i also studied the way the light would travel out and attenuate away from the small light and bleed out, but creating the caustic effect.

There will be more updates to follow on this project.

Updated my YouTube Channel Design

Digital Media - The Style Diet Title Sequence

Below is the completed title sequence for the fashion channel "The Style Diet". I created this 14 second motion graphical piece with a combination of 3d animation and 2d particle effects.



I also shot a collection of photos in my studio to combine with the title sequence to create the branding for "The Style Diet" identity.

Game Development: 3D Physics Simulation

This short physics simulation sample is from a project that I am working on as a freelance 3d games designer.

Using a physics engine, this is simulating the effect of a full pack of cards being dropped onto the playing area (blackjack table). We will be using a real time simulation for the actual game because there are too many variables to pre-calculate.

Surface Area: 3.82 sq m
Volume -0.03* cu m
Center of mass -8.597m, 905.527m, 64.561m

Freelance Game Design Project

This project was going to be a little different to my last as this was to be exported to a real time environment. Using C++ and code blocks i was going to put together a arcade type casino game. We decided at the start to use the open source games engine OGRE. Orge offer an SDK version of the software so you can build you own custom engine. They also offer a plug in for 3ds max which creates an xml, scene export and conversion and material export which suited our project.

Having a limited knowledge of C++ coding i wanted a program that would allow me to work between 3ds max script and the code blocks C++.

Below is a screen shot of 3ds max exported scene opened in the OGRE windows viewer.




A sample of the code that was created for the meshes XML file exported from 3ds max and using in the OGRE engine.

Below is a sample of the C++ code generated for the code block program, as you can see this section is dealing with the event handling of the program.

This is the exporting user interface plugin that the OGRE engine supplies to allow and 3ds max to export meshes for importing to other scripted programs, in our case using with OGRE and code blocks.


When deciding on a compiler, the fact that this system was going to be driven by a Linux based system it was decided that a GNU GCC compiler was going to be used even though OGRE themselves recommenced the use of MV C++ 2005/2008


And finally this is the dds compression NVIDIA software that was used to format the bitmaps to be used in the OGRE engine.

As this project is still a work in progress there will be more posting soon.

Code Blocks Open Source:
http://www.codeblocks.org/

OGRE 3Ds Max plug-in:
http://www.ogre3d.org/wiki/index.php/Main_Page

NVIDIA Texture tool:
http://developer.nvidia.com/object/nv_texture_tools.html

Vote for my Esting

3D Animation and Digial Film Showreel 2009

This is my updated showreel (AUG09), all the productions are available for viewing on my website. I produced this reel at only 720x405 as some of the renders and film/video outputs were lower than 720p and 1080p so rather than upscale and loose a lot of quality i choose a medium resolution to render.

E4 EStings Production Update

This is the development so far, this project is currently rendering.



There are 800,000 strands of hair, constrained to a 500,000 polygon mesh character, 5 direct lights and indirect illumination with 1500 caustics per light all simulated with gravity and weight distribution therefore I don’t have a visual motion sample as each frame takes 45 minutes to render and the project duration is projected at 250 frames at 25 frames per second.

3D Transformer Project Update

After creating the car model, it was time to add the bone structure to the model, deconstruct the polygons and add weights to the constrained objects. In order to create the transforming models without using the morphing technique, I had to break apart each polygon element, rename it and attach it to a bone. The main problem with this effect is the weight system and envelopes will obstruct each other and cause bending of the polygons.



To solve this problem I edited each of the bones on their X, Y and Z so that they would fit within there movement path.

3D Project Update

Adaptive Subdivision image sampling render

New 3D Project Images

3D Animation - Adoption Follow up

This project was started to create a follow up to the “Adoption” short 3d animation I submitted as part of my research for my dissertation. I was going to follow the same style as the pervious animation but I wanted to create a different cognitive stimulation. This scene was as far as I progressed with this concept before I finalized my decision to produce “JolyRolyPoly”



Both these images are part of one frame broken into two parts so it would be displayed better on the blog here.

Barry M VIP Event - Video

Below is the video of the event i photographed a few weeks ago, all my images are available below and on facebook. The video rounds up the day and you can see me snaping away.

Short Animation DVD Box Design

I got the dvd boxes designed and printed for sending to festivals. The first two boxes are going out today to the THE LONDON INTERNATIONAL ANIMATION FESTIVAL Fingers crossed i get past the submission stage and get my work shown in a festival.

My Photos Featured on the BarryM & Now website

Click here to go to the website