Another brick in the wall

This week I blew up a wall, amongst other things. It was a bit of a varied week. A little scrappy in places. One of those ones where you make a lot of progress, but you just don't feel like it!

Motion Graphics

Due to losing a day to family illness, I haven't had much time for motion graphics this week. Although I may fit some in at the weekend whilst playing catch up!

I have started some exploratory work with layering so that I can try out some ideas for another project.

Feature Film Destruction in Maya

This was week two of the Feature Film Destruction in Maya course, which I'll be doing for the next couple of months. This week we blew up a wall with secondary fragments and dust pipelined into FumeFX.

I've certainly been impressed with the procedural power of FractureFX. It would be interesting to compare the workflow with Houdini, if I can find the time. Below is a rough cut of what we did, the dissipation on the dust is way too high but it's not a bad start.

It was a bit of a scrappy week, as there were issues with FractureFX and FumeFX on Maya 2015. The FumeFX GPU preview doesn't work consistently in Maya 2014 or 2015. But then I have an AMD graphics card on my Windows desktop, which could be a contributing factor. Still disappointing.

It will be interesting to push FumeFX a little more, and get a feel for how it compares with Maya Fluids.

Projects

The progress on the project front has definitely taken a hit this week, which I need to keep an eye on going forward. Right now, it needs to be my number one priority.

I have managed to pre-process the footage I shot last week, and made a start on tracking it. Also, I have now moved over from MatchMover into SynthEyes. MatchMover feels like one of those apps that Autodesk bought and then left in the basement for the last five years. There's no competition with SynthEyes, it just hands down beats it on every level.