Is a plate within a plate that can make more plates a MetaPlate? Who knows, but that’s the name of this test. What’s the Objective? With the rise of Virtual Production, notably LED volumes and a shortage of familiar artists with real-time engine experience, we’ve seen plate material doing a lot of work in these…
Across three months, we designed, set up and shot LED Volume days with our partners October Studios & 80Six. Our first shoot focused on creating in-vehicle driving sequences, our second shoot placed people in different environments for a US-based documentary series. In this article, we walk through our process for in-vehicle driving scenes. Roads…? Where…
What we do uniquely at Lexhag is think about our creative challenges with all the tools available to us, which includes SFX and practical techniques. To illustrate this we decided to make a workflow piece to show how a shot can be designed from the start to end using a range of techniques in both…
Hair and Beard Grooming with XGen and Arnold What We Did We did a full beard groom in Maya using Xgen splines and rendered it out using the new Standard Hair shader in Arnold 5. Standard Hair is a physically based shader to render hair and fur, based on the d’Eon model for specular and…
When we needed to capture hair at a macro level we tested an old trick but a good one; the practical route. For more about our digital hair work for the same project, check out this post. The world of FX requires a ton of testing. This is where silly ideas become great ideas, it’s…
Hair Primitive Projection Using Maya 2018 (XGen) and Fusion Studio 9 What We Did Using a single frame from the plate, we created a simple groom, before decimating the hair count and using these to drive the animation of primitives with camera facing normals. We then used Fusion to project the plate back onto the…
What We Did We took 10 seconds of a song that had a good repetitive beat, and used it to drive a realistic simulation of an ocean surface. We wanted it to behave naturally, whilst subtly carrying the rhythm of the music. We used MASH to create float (no pun intended) values, that were used…
The power of Houdini. SideFX kindly provided trial software for our team to get their heads into Houdini and this is the result. Modeling the Boat The first step was to model a Tall Ship using reference of the ship we wanted to create. We kept the shape and silhouette as simplified as possible…