Egg Chair

Fast production of chair. Modeling and rendering in Maya.

Audi A4 B5

I had a little free time so I did another render of audi. Maya and Mental Ray + post in After Effects and Photoshop.

Fantasy Village - Animation

Short animation of my last game art project.

Flash game

I was asked for developing flash game in Xantus. I programmed game and designed most of graphics. It is first game I ever made in Action Script 3.0 but it wasn't hurt. You can play in this game on kwrd

Game Art - Fantasy Village

Sack and stack of hay.

Game Art - Fantasy Village

The stone cottage.

Game Art - Fantasy Village

The mill.

Game Art - Fantasy Village

Old wagon with hay. Rendered in Mental Ray with HDRI lighting.

3D photo book

I had time to finish render this scene. I was training texturing for games. All assets are done in Maya 2011. Textures are prepared in Phtoshop. That's my move into game art world.

SDHC Cards for HD Video Guide

Ostatnimi czasy postanowiłem zainwestować w sprzęt fotograficzno-filmowy i skusiłem się na wiodący model aparatów Canona z serii DSLR a mianowicie padło na Canona EOS T2i/550D.

Nie będę w tym miejscu oceniał jego możliwości, czy też rozpisywał się o parametrach technicznych. Natomiast chciałbym udzielić kilku wskazówek dotyczących doboru kart pamięci osobom, które nie miały wcześniejszej styczności z aparatami dającymi możliwość nagrywania materiału w HD i uniknąć na przyszłość problemów, które spotkały mnie. Kupując aparat w sklepie, polecono mi kartę SanDiska Ultra 4GB z opisem na opakowaniu 15MB/s class 4 cena 72 zł. Nie miałem wcześniej pojęcia, że istnieją klasy pamięci i na co się one przekładają zanim nie spróbowałem w domu nagrać testowego materiału w HD. Karta okazała się zbyt wolna (zapis) i po ok. 14 sekundach przechwytywania obrazu aparat automatycznie wyłączał nagrywanie filmu. Po kilku godzinach googlowania i przewertowaniu instrukcji obsługi aparatu okazało się iż Canon rekomenduje karty min. class 6 w celu pracy z materiałem HD. Tak więc zaryzykowałem i nabyłem na aukcji internetowej kartę A-Data Class 10 o rozmiarze 8GB za 55 zł.

Z lekko drżącymi dłońmi zaakplikowałem ją do aparatu i włączyłem nagrywanie filmów w Full HD 30 fps. Na szczęście działa pięknie i wydajnie. Na koniec dopiszę iż przeglądając fora mało kto był skłonny polecić tą kartę - bo nieznany producent, bo nie SanDisk Extrime coś tam za 200 zł. Tak więc słowem podsumowania, nie zawsze trzeba wydać ogromną sumę pieniędzy aby móc cieszyć się przyzwoitą wydajnością. Na dzień dzisiejszy mam co chciałem za rozsądną cenę. Mam nadzieję, że ten niecałkiem krótki wpis oszczędzi innym frustracji z powodu błędnych rekomendacji w sklepie w którym powinni najlepiej wiedzieć jaką pamięć polecić do danego modelu aparatu. Szybkie karty przydają się także przy seryjnym zapisie zdjęć, a przede wszystkim w formacie RAW.

Speed Up Rendering in After Effects - Tips

If you press "Caps Lock" button in rendering queue window, After Effects will not waste processor's time on refreshing preview screen every frame. The conclusion is to safe counting power during rendering. It gives good result in many cases and speed up rendering. I recommend this way of working with AE.

CodeRetreat Wrocław 2010

I was asked for designing web site for my mate. It was for Code Retreat event in Wroclaw. It's coming soon and starts at October 23. If you are programmer and would like to participate in that project you can sing in for free. I prepared layout and cut it, also write html and css template. I drew also art for t-shirt (those two geeks in top) and it will be printed as logo of CodeRetreat event.

EXP is UP

I'm working on intro to tv commercial I would like to share with one still frame from it. Explosive stuff. Frame straight from After Effects. Blown title was made in 3D software.

Catapults Animation

Shot from my short animation which I did as a part of master diploma project.

Electrolux Intuition

Modeled and rendered in Maya, Mental Ray.

Nokia 2700

This time Nokia 2700 Classic. Model was made in Maya and rendered with Vray. It was my first attempt to vray engine. Model is for tv commercial and render as personal project for my own.

LG LD550

Model of LCD TV which I did for commercial tv production. I modeled it in Maya 2011 and rendered in Bunkspeed Hypershot. I started playing with RT (real time) renderers. It's awesome stuff.Design and postproduction in photoshop. That's my personal creative and self-developing project.

TV LCD Panasonic

One last project of LCD Panasonic TV.

VFX Project

I'm writing my master diploma project and I did some reference to my old project which I realized with my colleague from university.
I thought it's nice to refresh it and post to blog some information about that project. I was first attempt to VFX in life-footage. Below are screens and breakdowns from production and final movie.

I was responsible for FX which I did in After Effects and 3ds Max as well I cleaned footage a bit and painted some elements in Photoshop. Further more I animated the robot in second scene and put everything together at the end.



Project was did as a semester's project in University. Everything maybe it's not so much perfect but I learnt a lot.

Audi A4 White

Another render from Maya and Mental Ray of Audi A4 B5

Audi A4

I finished my second car ever made finally. This one is Audi A4 B5 (1995-200). I did all in Maya 2011 from modeling, materials and lighting to render in Mental Ray. I would like to thank to Piotr Koczan for his help and supervising me in production of that Audi.

Speed Up Rendering in After Effects using GPU

Lastly I found good way to increase speed of rendering and preview in After Effects CS. Since After supports OpenGL and using GPU for many things it gives great opportunity to be faster and more efficient.

Here are few steps that you should know to use that feature.

Render with OpenGL

OpenGL is a set of standards for high-performance processing of 2D and 3D graphics for a wide variety of applications. For After Effects users, OpenGL provides fast, high-quality rendering for previews and final output by moving rendering from the CPU to the OpenGL hardware (GPU).

To use OpenGL in After Effects, you’ll need an OpenGL card that supports OpenGL 2.0 and has Shader support and support for NPOT (Non Power of Two) textures.

OpenGL in After Effects supports the following features:

• Shadows, except point light shadows (Colored shadows appear gray.)
• Lights (eight maximum)
• Masks
• Alpha channels
• Track mattes
• Intersecting layers
• Transformations for 2D and 3D layers
• GPU-accelerated effects, including Alpha Levels, Bevel Alpha, Box Blur, Brightness & Contrast, Channel Blur, Color Balance, Color Balance (HLS), Curves, Directional Blur, Drop Shadow, Fast Blur, Find Edges, Gaussian Blur, Hue/Saturation, Invert, Noise, Radial Blur, Ramp, Sharpen, and Tint.
• All blending modes except Dissolve and Dancing Dissolve
• Metal property settings for 3D layers
• Cone feather settings for light layers
• 2D motion blur
• Adjustment layers
• Anti-aliasing

Turn it on

When OpenGL does not support a feature, it simply renders without using that feature. For example, if your layers contain shadows and your OpenGL hardware does not support shadows, the output will not contain shadows.

To enable OpenGL for rendering final output, click the underlined text next to Render Settings in the Render Queue panel, and select Use OpenGL Renderer.

To enable OpenGL for rendering previews, choose Edit > Preferences > Previews (Windows) or After Effects > Preferences > Previews (Mac OS), and select Enable OpenGL.

To see what features your OpenGL card supports, choose Edit > Preferences > Previews (Windows) or After Effects > Preferences > Previews (Mac OS), and click OpenGL Info.

To modify the amount of texture memory, choose Edit > Preferences > Previews (Windows) or After Effects > Preferences > Previews (Mac OS), click OpenGL Info, and enter a value for Texture Memory of no more than 80% of the installed video RAM (VRAM) on your video card.

Summarizing

In my case I have real time preview and rendering time was 3 times more faster than when using CPU. If you have opportunity to use GPU do this.

Bosch Clasixx 6

Another model did for advertisement need. I used photometric mr Sky Portal lights.

Braun Silk Epil

It's been while since my last post but I was very busy because work. I did some models for commercial tv production. I did animation of models as well but I didn't have time to render them. I will post animation next time. It was modeled in 3ds Studio and render using Mental Ray. Lighting is HDRI. Color correction in Photoshop.

Butterfly Forest

I did't have a lot of time for doing my personal projects but final I found time to learn more expressions for After Effects and here is the result.
Butterflies have some expressions which control speed and angles of flapping wings. Rest is just mix of vectors and others footages.

3D Text Expression

Quite simple but useful expression for after effects which creates 3d text by offsetting layer every 1 unit in Z axes. It uses first layer index value which should be on top of stock.



Here is a expression which should be put in position parameter

offset = index -1;
p = thisComp.layer("your_layer_name");
[p.position[0],p.position[1],p.position[2]+offset];

After duplicating this basic layer the next will be offseted by 1 unit in space. Just copy around 15 to 20 layers and you will have 3D looking text in After Effects.

Interior Viz

I finshed this interior concept few minutes ago. Thats final render without post production in Photoshop. I found very useful references for furniture on IKEA home web page. Very helpful for modeling pipeline. I used only Final Gather method and Daylight system for lighting.

Pillows

I was working on interior visualization and I modeled some pillows. They were too simple so I added extra resolution and details in Zbrush by sculpting them. It was my first time in Zbrush but I'm happy because of final results.

Packshot Visualization

I tried some visualizations of dvd boxes which I modeled recently. I did compositing with ambient occlusion pass and color correction in Photoshop.

Packshot

My brand new design of cg blogger packshot. At first I designed covers in Photoshop. Than modeled dvd box, textured and rendered in 3ds Max 2010. Next I put everything into After Effects and composited together.

Katapult 3D

Speed modeling. I tried to model low-poly one.

Blogger Promo

Project for promotion of my blog.

Life of Motion

Short design I did for portfolio.

CG Boxes

Daily exercise. After Effects and some creative tryouts.

Motion Graphics Reel

I did motion design reel finally. I was very motivated to finish it. I love motion design and I always looking forward opportunity to practicing and designing stuff like this.

Sketchbook 07

I found my old sketches I did three years ago. Those drawings are pretty rough and old. I wish to have more time for practicing drawings. I'll spray some car paint on them in Photoshop later.

Quick Net Rendering Setup in Mental Ray

I needed more power and cores for faster rendering and I try to get to know how to render using net rendering in mental ray. At first time I discovered farm kind setup using backburner and other more complicated things than I wanted. I thought it's only one method but it's not. Mental ray also has something other for net rendering called "Distributed bucket rendering". It's very rapid method for setup and takes only 3 simple steps (sth two) - approximate 15 secunds. I posted image with screen shots which has description how to do this. I just want to add that if we need to share with some texutres, maps in LAN we have to check "distributed map" option. It allowes to share net disc with all stuff needed for scenes. Tutorial is for 3ds Max and works perfectly with cross system setup (I used windows XP Professional and windows 7). U have to have installed mental ray satellite or 3ds Max with it. You don't have to run max on another machine with this kind of rendering. More information you can find in 3ds Max help.

Enjoy your faster rendering's production.

Dancing Female Biped

Today I tried animation with links and constraints in character studio. That is my quick test of inverse kinematics (IK) constraints with Object-Space Object (OSO) linking by using biped and 3ds Max. It was fast animation around 10 minutes. I did compositing later in After Effects. Hand is snapped to pole by applying IK key and linking by OSO with pole as parent for it.

Matchmoving Biped

I did this as personal exercise and test of matchmoving. I'm very interested in this field of vfx and I tray playing with project like this as much as I can. I used 3ds Max and Boujou. Next time I'll rather use Matchmover 2010 shipped with Maya 2010.

Animation Reel

This's my personal animation reel. Animations are done in 3ds Max 2010.

Arkadiusz Leszko - Showreel

It's time for very first personal reel. Here you can see samples of my work did in past.

Trivialart Promo - Breakdown

Here you can see how video was made. I broke down footage to show you all parts of it.

Trivialart Promo

My personal project. Everything was done from scratch by me in After Effects. It was a lot of fun doing this video. I think it's good time to prepare some demo reel.



Music comes from Unreal Tournament Theme.

Great thanks to:
Kamil Jurek - Actor
Rubén Monfort Meseguer - Cameraman

Flying High - Animation

I created script for this animation 8 months ago. That sample was made as project at University of Beira Interior in Covilha - Portugal. My job was:

- creating story and storyboard
- modeling and texturing whole environment
- painting background
- animating biped and others objects in scene
- rendering, lighting
- editing and final compositing
- audio



It is not final version. I couldn't do whole scenes and shots because of time (project deadline) which I planned but I didn't say end. I will develop and work on this project more. In this production I used After Effect for first one and last two shots, 3ds Max for creating 3d part of animation and Adobe Premiere for putting all parts together.

Akademia Promo

Short clip for Akademia TV.

Flying High - First Shot

Finaly I finished first shot of animation called Flying High. Picture was cut for layers which were set in 3d. After this I was able to add camera and some animation. Wheats were animated using CC Bender effect. All animation and composition was did in After Effects. At the end I add sounds in Premiere.

Environment - Digital Painting

Enivonment for my short animation project. It will be projected and I will add some camera movement to it and motion clouds.