Friday, October 31, 2014

A basic dielectric with refraction

Another quick post. This is also not new, I've done this about a week ago, and its essentially an assembly of the theory posted by Kevin George that describes the Beer's Law of light absorbtion. He only posts some information about the main part of the shader (the logarithmic decay of the light), and so I went ahead and implemented the theory as well as the rest of the basic shader. This is not a physically plausible setup, and I am currently working on implementing a more generic, RSL 2.0 friendly, and physically plausible version that will eventually include some texture mapping support, and maybe other basic features. I am looking to implement a correct BRDF approach, and will see if I can actually utilize the GGX BRDF eventually. It is quite a bit of work, so I wouldn't expect this to be something that will come too soon, but still, its good to aim high!

test dielectric 01 from Dimitry Kachkovski on Vimeo.

Tuesday, October 28, 2014

Henchmen Teaser

I completely forgot to actually post the Henchmen Teaser, our lookdev piece, or a short, that basically sets the design and idea for our upcoming feature animated film with the same name - "Henchmen", which has gotten quite some publicity over the last few months (http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/behind-screen/siggraph-gary-sanchez-productions-produce-725064). If you haven't seen it yet, here is a chance to do so now! Enjoy!

HENCHMEN TEASER 2014 from Bron Studios Inc. on Vimeo.

New logo for BRON Studios!

Aaaaaaand its LIIIIVE! This is our new logo that many people will be seeing with most of the movies that BRON is going to be releasing and producing, and it features a whole bunch of stuff I did, such as the sim/lighting/rendering of the pouring lava, the sims of the steam, and the sims of the sparks. I have also done some finishing tweaks for comping. A huge props to Barry Andres for doing an awesome job lighting and comping most of this shot, and to Matthew Bilton for doing a kick ass previs/layout job (the text reveal is his baby as was all the layout of the environment to make it happen!). Enjoy!

BRON STUDIOS ANIMATED LOGO 2014 from Bron Studios Inc. on Vimeo.

P.S. If not showing here, just go to vimeo to check it out!

Monday, October 20, 2014

A soap bubble shader - first RSL learning experience

So as i start my process in moving towards LookDev and lighting departments, one of the necessary upgrades to my skill-set is learning shader development, specifically using renderman and RSL. So following a nice tutorial on digital tutors, this here is the result of my very first shader! Features included as i was going through the tutorial are raytraced fresnel reflections, thin-film light interference using distance and angular methods based on RGB spectrums (the rainbow effect on the soap bubble), and some noise based procedural displacements. Ah, and some gravity based thickness motion and general thickness variation (also noise based). As i learned all this, i will need to do a separate post on all the details i figured out so i can recap them, and hopefully remember a bit better.

bubble test from Dimitry Kachkovski on Vimeo.