Chase Like A Boss

YEAH! It's finally online! :) This was the most awesome and interesting project i've worked on lately. Adi Chifor, a friend and colleague at FLAVOR3D (the new film and print devision of RTT), came up with the idea and concept for this awsome short movie. We did the CG work mostly after work hours but later also got some support (resources and render power as well as budget for sound, music and final grading) from the company we work for.
I got to do FX on this one (in cooperation with the guys from post). It's been a lot of work but also heaps of fun and i learned a lot working with TP and FumeFX! Cheers to everyone involved! Looking forward to the next project! ;)

Adi Chifor: "The material was shot in the course of 2 days from the back of my car with a Canon 5D. The idea came about while watching a comparison between the old 1970 Boss 302 and the new 2013 model. Unfortunately they discontinued the Boss model for 2014 which is too bad as it was a nice looking car.

After finishing it, we were very fortunate to have these guys do the music and soundFx : soundadventures.tv/ Very cool company to work with.

The grading was done by Peter at scanwerk.de/ , another amazing post production house in Munich."

Maya Version Conversion

Ever needed to convert a Maya file between versions but the file is too large to open it in your text editor or you wouldn't even know what to edit? 

Then this tool might be something for you. I wrote this in my spare time, but it has been used in production since quite some time and has proven to be a time real saver when having to convert multiple 2012 files back to 2009 format.

As usual you can download the script on creative crash for free.

(EDIT: Link updated & working now.)

Paint Fracture Maps

I posted a new (partly manual) workflow for fracturing volume meshes using Voronoi Texture Fracture. It describes how to deal with messy normals before inward extrusion and provides a method for painting your own fracture maps directly onto the mesh using Maya's 3D Paint Tool. Check out the thread in the SOuP Forum for details ...

Mesh fractured using Maya's 3D Paint Tool and Voronoi Texture Fracture

If the is enough demand (and if i find the time) i'll implement this workflow into the tool. 

Ionic SPH/DEM solver enters open beta!

Tony Amblés released an open beta version of his GPU accelerated SPH/DEM solver for Maya. It will be free until the end of the year, so be sure to download and test it while you have the chance! There is also a forum that can be used for bug reports, feature suggestions and the like.

(DEM solver simulation)

(SPH solver simulation)

According to Tony Amblés, both simulations were created using a Nvidia GTX 670. I think the results and performance look pretty promising and it would just be awesome to have a GPU accelerated fluid solver integrated into Maya.

Just downloaded the beta and will hopefully have some time to test it on the weekend. Cheers Mr. Amblés! Great work - keep it up! :)

Demolition Master by Eloi Andaluz

Awesome blackbox collection for TP called Demolition Master by Eloi Andaluz:

These blackboxes let you achieve demolition effects quickly and easily with little to no TP knowledge. But the even bigger value is: they are perfect study material if you want to get more into TP! I definitely recommend to buy the full version. It's just 25€ and you'll get a lot of TP know-how (dynamic sets and example scenes) for just a few bucks - plus: you'll get free updates by email!

I had actually planned to build something like that myself, but since I'm not that experienced with TP yet, it would've probably taken me a while. Now, thanks to Eloi, I can explore these dynamic sets and learn a lot quicker.

Another great treasure chest full of TP knowledge is Hristo Velev's Thinking Particles live blackbox collection on Dropbox as well the TP tutorials on his blog.

Thank you guys for making this stuff available for free (or cheap) and giving me (and others) the opportunity to learn by example!