Laura Low VFX

An aspiring VFX artist, designer and film maker.

[lauralowvfx]

new refined demoreel. can't wait to add more work to it

[lauralowvfx]

More tweaking to the lighting and compositing of the VLS shot of my uni short film.

[lauralowvfx]

More tweaking on the disintegration part of the opera dancer with more particle flow.

[lauralowvfx]

Exploded disintegration test for uni short film

[lauralowvfx]

Test lighting and test render for one of the shots for my uni short film

[lauralowvfx]

Dust upon impact for one of the shots in uni final project. Using maya dynamics to simulate it with expressions for time and particle opacity.

[lauralowvfx]

swirling smoke test

[lauralowvfx]

first round of environment test lighting with all the furniture in place except for the audience model. 

[lauralowvfx]

a lot need to be tested our for our final climax scene. i still have no clue how it will look like but this is something to work with I hope.

[lauralowvfx]

Putting the ncloth disintegration into used. It's been five months since I have touched it. Looking back at my test files. Feels like a huge amount of time has passed from the initial test till putting it to used now 

[lauralowvfx]

Level of detail on one of the pillars. lotsa bump mapping required to keep the poly count low.

[lauralowvfx]

set modelling and texturing done for my uni final project. almost there. just a bit more.

[lauralowvfx]

i worked fully on the set modelling and texturing. almost done. just some minor shader adjustments and add the chairs, benches and more lanterns.and then i will be lighting it.

[lauralowvfx]

Things that I have learnt from my uni final project

On this project, I have been in charged of working on set modelling, texturing, previs animation, lighting, VFX disintegration and compositing. I have learnt a tremendous amount out of this project.  The most important is learning to work in linear workflow as I have never been taught  in college on how to do and how essential it is to a project. Also, I had learnt how to use mia_x_passes to generate textures instead of the old fashion way of using blinn or lambert. Mia_x_passes also allow for multi-layered shading which generates a nice result but will increase render time. Also learn how to cut down on polycount on creating beveled edges without having to bevel the edges. This is by using mia_roundedge shader connected to Main Bump input of the texture shader. I also learnt how to use mia_portal_lights to get a nice lighting results in mental ray. Initially hit a rocky bump in trying to render the mia lights in render passes but finally figured out today how to render them in RGBA (Short) 16- bit framebuffer in TIFF uncompressed file format and it worked well.  Also increased my knowledge in 3 point lighting which is proving to be a menial task in getting a stage like lighting to work. I also learn how to generate fog light of a spotlight and creating dust. Two spotlights must be created for this effect. One spotlight produces the light and the fog. The other one generates fog with density inserted with a 3d graphite texture and adjusted to suit the scene. Still trying to figure out how to get the dust to move.  That's all for now. Waiting for some test render passes to work now.

[lauralowvfx]

Log on the things that I have been doing for my university final project

Set modelling, reassign shader to use mia_material_x_passes, texturing Test lighting, test comping Previs Animation- weekly refining of previs VFX disintegration test- finding out how to bake animation using Geometry Caching, Using Nmesh constraints for disintegration Render passes pathway and setup

[lauralowvfx]

I worked on the set modelling, lighting and rendering. No compositing done yet.

[lauralowvfx]

I worked on the set design, the lighting and rendering. No compositing done yet.