Luke di Rago VFX

Santa wishes you to all VFX people a merry christmas and a happy new year… inside a Node Graph!! ;)

Best wishes

Your friendly neighbor,

Luke!

All your cache belongs to Us / Useful tips for understanding cache management in Nuke

Major Kong made this really good article about how the cache works in Nuke. Definitely  worth reading it. Also, if you haven’t used J_Ops yet, you’re missing some great tools. Here’s the link to get them.

Yesterday I read this interview in Nukepedia about Frederich Munch and the tools his developing (You can read the interview here), so I went to his page and downloaded the Beta release of both Geometry and Dynamic Tools.

After playing around a little bit, while watching the examples (since there’s no documentation yet) I got this ball hitting a pre-fractured wall working, and I set it up using Atomkraft for rendering.

The results are quite fast; I haven’t tried it in a proper computer, since I’m in China right now, I only have my Core 2 Duo Macbook, and it’s as fast as a one-wheel scooter =/

After setting up an rig using Atomkraft, I was ready to give it a go and render it out. With a modest shading sampling of 1.0 (AK actually needs like a 4.0 for final delivering, but it would take forever on my laptop) took 1 hour and 10 minutes to render 100 EXR frames with all the passes. AK gives you a lot of passes, most of them I honestly have no idea what they are (like Calories and Bent Normals i.e.), but here are a few that actually would come in handy if needed.

And finally, and quicktime output of a quick comp using the depth channel to give it a narrow DoF.

Playing with Dynamic Tools + Atomkraft in Nuke from Luke di Rago on Vimeo.

A quick test using Freiderich Munch’s Dynamic Tools and Jupiter Jazz’s Atomkraft for simulating / rendering inside Nuke.

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Hope you enjoyed it! I’ll try to keep playing and maybe get something out of the SoftBody Dynamics using this toolset :)

See ya!

The Foundry released a demo video of Model Builder, and so far, it looks amazing. Can’t wait for it

Great tutorial on reducing light wrap artifacts // (sl)Edge-hammer to reduce light wrap

I just stumbled upon with this written tut in Nukepedia, seemed quite simple and effective, just wanted to share it :D

Cheers

Luke

First Look at AtomKraft 3D Environment for After Effects

Great tutorials for AK in After Effects by Lester Banks! Although I mostly using it in Nuke, the settings are pretty similar. One of the few resources for Atomkraft out there.

Cheers!

Luke

Snow White and The Huntsman / Thinking Particles and their use for the Shattering Knights

Last week I went to see Snow White and The Huntsman. The overall look of the film was a-mazing; not only VFX wise, but in terms of visual storytelling, camera shots, art direction, etc. One of my favorites was the black shattered knights, here’s the Cebas testimonial about the use of thinkingParticles on the movie. Now I’m waiting some breakdowns and articles about the Dwarves, that really blew my head up.

A couple days ago I (accidentally) won a bid on two Revoltech action figures, an Iron Man and an Alien; so I took some pictures, and after playing around I got this image. Hope you like it!

Cheers!

Luke

Thanks to my girlfriend and a friend, I finally got my domain name working! Now is just lukedirago.com instead of the tumblr access! :D Whoopee!

PS: You should also check their sites, because there are awesome! :D

http://nataliapaez.com/

http://juando.com.ar/

VFX roll call for The Avengers / FXGuide Article

Amazing (and really long) article from fxguide. I loved this movie, it’s the cherry on top on all the work that Marvel has done over these few years on re-creating the Marvel’s Ultimate universe. Can’t wait for part 2 and 3 :P

Cheers!

Luke