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Hi! I’m Matt Wilde, an old man from the North of England who has worked in visual effects, lighting, and rendering for games since the last century. Most recently, I worked on Variable State’s Virginia. Previously I was responsible for blood, magic, and urine in games as diverse as The Lord of The Rings Aragorn’s Quest (magic/blood), The House of the Dead: Overkill (blood/urine), and Dancing with the Stars: The Official Game (all of the above). Now I’m contributing VFX and rendering to In the Valley of Gods at Campo Santo.

Putting together our announcement trailer provided plenty of challenges, but one thing I spent a fair chunk of time on didn’t actually make the final cut: a scene where Zora and Rashida wade through an ancient flooded passageway.

The starting point was this thumbnail sketch from art director Claire Hummel:

To bring the scene to life, we’d need nice-looking water, which wouldn’t be convincing if it didn’t react to the motion of the characters and surrounding geometry. A game that does this well is Resident Evil 7 (especially if you’re a fan of floating corpses, like I am).

To this end, graphics programmer Pete Demoreuille (who apparently does exist even though he doesn’t have a Twitter profile) created a GPU-based simulation using a “shallow-water” approximation. It’s a little more accurate than traditional video game techniques, as it accounts for the water’s depth and computes its horizontal velocity along with height. For collision with the characters and the world, a “signed distance field” can be precomputed for the static environment, and characters are added in per-frame by attaching primitives (capsules, in this case) to bones in their rigs. Got it?

The end result is a number of dynamic textures which are fed into the shader for the water surface’s height, normal, velocity, and distance from a blocking object. Timo Kellomäki’s work on water simulation in games is a great reference.

With these at my disposal, I set about making an actual shader, starting with a simple flow mapping texture—the flowing determined by the simulation. The output is brightened depending on factors like surface normal and velocity. The below was captured right out of the Unity editor and was immediately fun to play with. Imagine the capsule is a rubber duck, like I did. For about a week.

I gradually built this into a more watery-looking shader with the addition of normal mapping, depth-based transparency, caustic lighting effects, and probably some other things.

By this time the passage scene contained some first pass environment modelling and character animation, so I could try the shader out in situ. But first, Claire produced this handy style guide broken down into layers.

Isolating each element of the material was really useful in getting the final combined effect to work as we hoped it would. This is how it looked with the breakdown recreated in the shader:

If you’ve worked with Unity shaders, you may appreciate that getting shadows to project onto a translucent surface is quite challenging. But I think it was worth the effort to enable the subtly visible geometry under the surface, fogged and blurred by depth.

With the characters and colliders added, the scene was as complete as it was ever going to get. The environment, character models and animation would all be updated in time, and I had plans to add particle splashes, water dripping from the ceiling, and a way to allow the characters to appear to get dynamically wet. But then, the devastating news.

The shot had been cut from the trailer.

Not one to take this kind of thing badly, I quickly brushed it off and it was really no more than a few months and a Balinese yoga retreat later and I was eagerly anticipating my next challenge. Dust motes? Oh no that’s great. Bring it on. I love dust.

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Made my own version of Hanazuki XD

#hanazuki #hanazuki full of treasures #kensutanza #Fanart #animation #hemka

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A little doodle ~

#digitalart #digital painting #digital art #digital #digitalpainting #painting #myart #kensutanza

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Concepts from the upcoming film Wish Dragon, produced by Chinese studio Base FX and written/directed by Chris Appelhans. Full info and interview at Animation World.

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#digitalart #digital painting #digital art #digital #digitalpainting #painting #myart #kensutanza #pretty helpful if youre planning a oneshot #this doesnt apply to ATWWTTA but theres good stuff here

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Hirune Hime: Shiranai Watashi no Monogatari (2017) | Official Trailer

Napping Princess: The Story of the Unknown Me is an upcoming film directed by Kenji Kamiyama and is set for release on March 18, 2017, in Japan.

“The film will be set in Okayama prefecture in 2020, just before the Tokyo Olympics. Kamiyama describes the story as one of a father and daughter that is close to his personal feelings.

I.G Port’s new anime studio subsidiary Signal.MD (Tantei Team KZ Jiken Note, Anime Tamago’s ‘Colorful Ninja Iromaki’ short) will animate the film as its first anime film project.” - Anime News Network

#animation #film #anime #Signal.MD #Napping Princess: The Story of the Unknown Me #trailer #video #digital #2D

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Some scans of the concept art from Sun and Moon.

#digitalart #digital painting #digital art #digital #digitalpainting #painting #myart #kensutanza #character design #gaming #Game Freak #Pokemon Sun and Moon #2D

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one my hair attempts, looks quite good!

#digitalart #digital painting #digital art #digital #digitalpainting #painting #myart #kensutanza

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a doodle I did back in October :D 

#digitalart #digital painting #digital art #digital #digitalpainting #painting #myart #kensutanza

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For those who don’t know, I’ve put together a collection of resources for emerging artists. Topics include self-promoting, approaching our directors, invoicing, contracts, etc. These are all the websites, articles and videos that I found useful when starting freelance. follow the direct link on my IG profile. Go to http://AshlyLovett.com > About > Artist Resource Page. I hope it is useful to everyone 👍☺️. It can be scary starting a freelance career. #art #illustration #artarticles #artfido #artadvice #artblog

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useful!

Background & Movement in TV

Since TV animation tends to have smaller budgets than feature animation, we are often times limited in the kind of animation we can do in terms of backgrounds.  Here are a couple workarounds I have to show movement in a background.  

The first is a tracking shot into cam where our Character is running without gaining away or from cam (but they could if you wanted) The foreground is the ground plane which is just a simple looping set of lines. The BG is actually a static image that would slowly drift down towards the horizon line imitating movement away from the background. 

The second is also a tracking shot where the character is more in profile. This one requires some soft focus and low detail background drawings (usually not a lot, maybe 3 looping images. I only used 2 here but the theory holds.

The last one only requires a single background layout, but we use the camera to imitate action as it pulls out over a static image.

This is all based on my own experience rather than hard rulesets, so you know as usual take it with a grain of salt.

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Late by a day i know but still i want to draw Nima for @rossdraws birthday 😂😂! Happy birthday to you, thanks for always inspiring me through your art and videos! Hope you have a good one and Godbless 😁😁😁. .

#nima #rossdraws #rosstran #fanart #digitalart #digitalpainting #artwork #illustration #kensutanza

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Click to enlarge)

Breakdown / Accent / Arc

To thank for the support for our film so far, we are posting some notes on animating originally made for our animation assistants. Breakdown is a very crucial technique of animating. It is a guideline of how every action should be acted out. It involves a thinking process of “hmm, I want my character to move in this way particularly, because of the context/situation/emotion/thought… etc” 

Last but not least, breakdowns are the playground for animators. If you find these notes useful, also check out our film We Have Plenty. It’s a 2D animated film created by the students of SCAD and RISD. Please support us on Kickstarter and help usspread the word! We will be back for more notes on animation! 

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This is a gijinka for Tsareena! Happy Halloween XD

#pokemon #pokemonsunandmoon #sunandmoon #sun and moon #pokemon sun and moon #gijinka #tsareena #humanized #halloween #hahu2016 #hacha2016 #kensutanza #fanart #digitalpainting #digital #digital art #bounsweet #steenee #evolution #queen #majestic

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This is awesome!

Overwatch Anime style Opening

By inkling inkling here link http://youtu.be/0zo3F7-G9ss

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this is legitly awesome!

some guy: instinct just memes around uselessly, i hardly see any of their gyms

me: holds ur face gently listen to me you little shit

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#pokemon #pokemon go #art #batteru #sinix #painting #process #digitalpainting #digital painting #kensutanza #pokemon sun and moon #sun and moon #charizard #blastoise