lighting, lookdev and compositing
I have never been a big fan of normal maps. It’s difficult to manipulate them, it’s hard to guess how they might influence your shading and – probably the worst part – it’s not possible to modify their strength in maya. This is why I avoided them most of the time in favour of bump maps even though normal maps can look a lot better. Luckily, I found this thread where NextDesign posted […] Read More
There it is. Our short film “Das ist kein Hexenwerk”. Word for word translated it means: “that is no witchcraft”, but actually it’s a german saying with the same meaning as “It’s not rocket science”. This is supposed to be funny (not really after I had to explain it…) because in fact this short is about a witch… never mind, let’s move on. Willa the witch wants to pass her […] Read More
There are different types of grain nodes in nuke, but the problem is, while they may accuratly emulate specific types of filmgrain, they make your image – to put it mildly – really ugly. This is why I decided to create a “beautiful” grain gizmo. The key thing in my opinion is, that noise shouldn’t modify chroma, but luminance. I exposed knobs to control intensity and grain size (just a blur essentially). […] Read More
A few months ago, I took a closer look at maya’s nucleus. I learned a lot and I thought it would be a good idea to write everything down. This is not intended to be a step by step tutorial and I’m not going to discuss every single parameter. I just wanted to throw together all the “wow, now I got it!” moments and I hope that this is maybe a good starting […] Read More
No matter what you are rendering, at the end of the day you probably need to setup a nuke comp, and shuffle your framebuffers/passes/AOVs – you name it, to recreate your beauty. This is why I wrote a little script that does this tedious job for you.
The most annoying thing on earth: The default camera gate in maya. It’s just wasting useful screen space and what the hell is this see through useful for? When I use camera gate I want to frame the shot and don’t want to get distracted by anything around it. So this is why I created a small script. I created a button and placed it in my shelf. Now I can toggle […] Read More
Every modern renderer has to deal with fireflies (very bright, nervously jumping around pixels). Sometimes it’s quite difficult to get rid of those and often enough very high sampling just isn’t an option within tight deadlines.
And there it is… The not so long-awaited sequel to ARNOLD is finally here. The egyptians were even more creative this time. Watch out for their most dangerous trap, yet and hold your breath when Arnold is rocking the tomb once again. Will he make it to the golden bat someday? We’ll see…
This ist Arnold. Arnold spends his valuable free time robbing out graves and looking for the greatest of great treasures: the golden bat. During his quest he has to deal with barriers, traps and weird creatures that try to scare him away. The Egyptians were very creative. Did you know they actually invented the Tetris soundtrack? Today the world thinks it’s russian folk music. Yeah, right…
An oldie but an goldie. We made this thing ages ago, but it’s really not that bad. Kinda fun actually. You can choose between hundreds of ingredients and additional fruits and everything gets mixed for you. It’s even telling you how bitter/sweet/sour it is and the volume percentage. It’s written in php, so nothing special required to run cocktail maker on any device you like. Sadly it’s natively only available in german […] Read More