D.U.Die

This is one of the latest ones I have done. By ones I am referring to 1000 ways to die. In this shot the guy is drunk and pukes out the window and his head hits a mailbox decapitating him. No I know this is absurd but I just do what I'm told. In this shot I did the fluid sims, shaders (that I have been using for the whole show) and comping. One of the main issues I have with working on television projects is that there just isn't enough time to do the things you want. There are several things I would have fixed in this shot but could not in the time allotted. In any case, try to enjoy

D. U. Die | SpikeTV | SPIKE.com

Orb Effect

This is an effect I have created for a friends animation. In the animation the character is entranced by this orb that has this going on inside it. Just some Maya fluids and nParticles because the collisions for nParticles is so great.

Orb Effect from Doug Holder on Vimeo.

Another Shot I Worked On

This is a shot called "Cock a Doodle Die" but when I worked on it, the title was "Killer Cocks" which I still like better. Anyway in this shot I did much the same as the last one (rendering, shading, comping) except in this one I also did the fluid simulation. The simulation was done in realflow.

Cock A Doodle Die | SpikeTV | SPIKE.com

1000 Ways To Die Season 2

So I have been working since October on 1000 ways to die season 2. I though I'd share a couple of shots I have worked on and what I contributed to each shot. As a preface for these shots I want to stress the fact that everything you see is obviously supremely exaggerated. Ok that being said There were two I wanted to show but the other one title "Titty Titty Bang Bang" is not on Spike.com anymore so Here is one called "Nurse Case Scenario". In this one I created the magnetic pulling effect and did the shaders as well as comping. Albeit the comping is minimal for these shots and the the shaders are pretty basic. Titty Titty has some fluid sims in it that I'd like to show but I'll have to wait until it goes back up.

Nurse Case Scenario | SpikeTV | SPIKE.com

nParticles

nParticlesMeteor from Doug Holder on Vimeo.

So after Dave sent me some content on nParticles from Siggraph it made me want to dive into nParticles a little more. So I took the Shipkov/Shoneveld method for fluid shading particles in Dave's meteor tutorial, and applied the same technique to nParticles. Let me tell you, that was not as easy as I had hoped it would be. Albeit, it wasn't as hard as I'm making it sound but there were a few things that made it kind of tricky. I did like the built in curve for controlling the radius of the particles over age or ageNorm but I wanted to be able to use more of the curves to control more of the PP attributes instead of using as much of the particleSamplerInfo node. A while back Dave had me add this sonic boom like effect to the meteor I did a while ago so in the spirit of more goofing I decided to try the same effect with nParticles since the nParticles will work within the same solver and I have more control over how other nParticles are affected by each other within the solver, which is awesome. I had to kick up quite a bit of particles (300,000) but the "thick cloud" preset has a defaulted fluid shader attached to it and this made it easier to shade them accrodingly. It worked great. My only complication really was caching the nParticles. You have to make sure that in the nParticleShape node itself you need to set the cacheable attributes to "all" and make sure the box that says "cache data" under "memory caching" is checked. This caused some problems when trying to network render the sequence. I'm not sure and I haven't tested it yet but I think that because nParticles have a default fluid shader on the thick cloud preset that they handle fluid shading the particles better than normal particles. Like I said I haven't tested it yet but I could swear it moved a lot faster than the original meteor I rendered with normal particles. Anyway here is a preview of the nParticle fluid shading I did. The speed is wrong and should be faster but you can see where it was going. The real thing I would pay attention to is the sonic boom sim because this worked a lot better than I expected it to.

quickFire

testFire from Doug Holder on Vimeo.

During my lunch break i created a quick fire sim. Someone on CGTalk was saying that people in the thread (a thread I subscribed to. Not important) were not using an oversampling method to create a better moving fire sim. This is a technique of creating a cache the evaluates however you want but saves the cache every 2 to 3 frames depending on how you tweak it. So when you play it back it appears to jump between shapes. If you watch a camp fire you can see how erradically it changes shape and how fast. Anyway, I like practice thes things when i get a chance and there you have it.

Secret Asian Man. Or is it Agent?

Secret Agent Challenge Final from destruct007 on Vimeo.

Dave and I tag teamed the hell out of this. This was a CGTalk challenge in which you have a limited amount of time to complete a project based on a theme. While we both worked on it Dave did the brunt of the work shooting, editing, FX, audio, modeling and comp. along with a slew of other things it took to get this done. I did about 6 or 7 shots and created the title sequence. My work revolved around creating some CG assets and comping the shots he assigned me. Here is a list of what I worked on.

spyMissionBreif

I created the holographic pen hud that he opens with the schematic. This shot worked out really well because dave had the foresight to create a green practical light cast on the actor.

evilOffice

In this shot I simply added the other actor on the left. It’s the same actor on the right just added. You know multiplicity effect.

evilMoonBase1 and 2

In this shot i created the matte with the earth and moon surface along with the 3d window in front of the actor. I created a 2.5D comp for this to create a subtle camera push in and cast the actors shadow on the wall with a light using the footage as the occluding object for the light.

spyDoorHack

In this shot the actor or spy is attempting to hack the terminal on the wall. This one took me a little longer because I didn’t know what I was going to put on the wall for him to hack so things just fell into place as I worked. I created the 3d assets, lighting, and comp.

spyEscape

In this shot the actor is on the edge of a building escaping from whatever peril he is in. Just some masking/roto and matte pf buildings.

spyBombDiffuse

In this shot the spy is using a computer touch screen to disable a bomb. You may have to watch it a couple of times to get that from it because there is a lot oging on all at once but I had hoped the timer couting down would get that across.

Well that’s all I did. Dave did the rest and I’m happy with how it turned out.Special thanks to Dave for including me in the project and my girlfriend for not leaving me while I worked.