VFX

Simple Trick of the day: Sharpen

Although I’m not a big fan of sharpening an image in most cases, sometimes it does help bringing out more details. Sharpening is basically exaggerating the brightness difference within an image and this process has some nasty side effects. One particular one is the dark edges introduced around the objects.

The other days one of my colleagues at work, Luke Armstrong , showed me the simplest trick that improves this dramatically! I was surprised why I haven’t thought about it myself! The solution is maxing the sharpened image with the original image, so this way only the highest positive values comes across! Neat and simple! no more dark edges!

Life VFX

Gravity: The Success Stories!

VFX

Gravity wins big at the Oscars

Uncategorised VFX

Working efficiently: using spreadsheets

One of the most important part of working efficiently is keeping a track of your tasks and assignments. I try to provide myself with as much as visual information as possible by organising my tasks in a colour coded way so by a quick glance I can see what shot is reaching it’s deadline and needs more attention. Using Google spreadsheet makes really easy to create interactive tables and keeping everything organized.
I’m going to share a few tips today about how to setup an interactive block that shows the remaining dates and changes the colour based on that.
Let’s say the deadline for Shot A is 15th of March. First step is creating a data format that can be used for further referencing. To display the date use this format:
=DATE(2014;3;15)
Now we can use the following line to extract the remaining days from our date;
=MINUS(B2,TODAY())
It will be easier to colour code the remaining days block so when it’s reaching the deadline it automatically turns red. To do that go to Format>Conditional Formatting and set a condition.

ok seems we have plenty time left and everything is still green! you can go home early tonight!

VFX

Gravity wins Special Visual Effects Bafta

Life Uncategorised VFX

A Bitter Oscar!

There were so many fantastic VFX movies last year. From the (Hollywood) blockbusters such as The Avengers, The Hobbit, Prometheus or a film that didn’t get as much attention as…

Uncategorised VFX

De-Interlacing footage in Nuke

I’m doing a short talk tomorrow for the third years students. One of the things I’m going to talk about is how to de-interlace your footage inside nuke and thought…

Uncategorised VFX

DE Techniques – Week 2

Still working on the DE Techniques, the third term project. Have made some progress with designing the environment but the fluids are still making trouble! It’s a bit tricky to…