It has been done

Jason Wong Lighting Reel 2013 Mk2 from Jason Wong on Vimeo.

I've finally finished my second reel... official second reel. A few weeks late, but I think it turned out quite beautifully. Looking back at my first reel for the year it really doesn't seem that good, but I guess that happens to a lot of our works when we look back at them. I feel I've made some good strides in this reel, and I would like to share them with all of you. A lot of the progress shots can be found here on the blog, so have a look around!

Enjoy!

Another Quick Update

I've been jumping back and forth between scenes to try to complete everything for my next reel. Just thought I'd do a quick update of this science-fiction one. I'm really glad that I chose to re-compose it. I feel that it frames the scene better.

Coolio~

So I finished this today, and really like how it turned out. I'm still playing with the color correct and what not, so this may or may not look like the final product. I was just really excited to get everything to come together in comp. Hope you like it as well!

EDIT: Decided to play with the color correction a bit more because it was bothering me. I think it looks better now. 

Grass!

As the title suggests, I spent today learning how to play with Maya Fur. I got really excited once things started to sprout and I knew how to play with the settings. I know its weird how these things excite me, but I find the technical side of these things really interesting. And then using that to help you create something in 3D space is still really cool to me.

Obviously I'm not showing all the various camera angles I went through before I settled on this one, but I really tried to keep all the composition lessons in mind when putting this together. Coming up with the right angle in 3D space is the most challenging for me. Even after drawing it out on papaer, positioning everything can be quite challenging to get it to look just right.

With that said this is the final composition that I settled on. Working on the lighitng and texturing is next.

Dino Update

A little closer to what I want the final product to look like. Made some changes after a few critiques, and feel that this is stronger than the previous post. I want to give it a stronger color palet, but trying to figure out how.

 

EDIT: So I decided to play around with it some more in Photoshop, trying different filters and gamma correcting it a bit. I'm getting tired, and I can't tell whats good anymore. I think it's time for bed. 



Rawr!

Not too much of a change. I was mainly trying to figure out how to make the t-Rex pop out more, so I was tinkering with the texture. I think I need to lower the bump even more though =S I really like the robot in the scene ^_^ Thoughts?

AAHHHH!!!

"AAAAAHHHHHHH!!!! AAAAAAHHHHHH!!!!"
Was really excited to start this one, so I did a quick mock up just now ^_^

WIP3

Just thought this was a cool picture to update with. I have a few more ideas for other scenes, so I want to finish this one up soon and get to the other ones.

WIP2

 

Been kinda busy with some other stuff and haven't been able to work as much as I'd wanted to on this, but the work I did today, I feel, seems pretty solid. I especially like the new camera angle that I chose for this scene. Will probably have to make the ambient light brighter and adjust the light on the ladder. Other than that I think it's coming along pretty nicely.

WIP

 

 

Just re-working this scene, and trying different lighting set ups. Debating how stylized I want to take this. 

T-Rex

Added the tRex in the shot, and lit him up separately. Id say this is 80-90% done, just have to up the samples for shadows and what not to make it final. But more importantly it means that I can move on to another shot, and continue to pump out renders. RAWR!

Museum

Updates! Yay, updates! Just re-lighting and re-positioning my museum scene. The t-Rex is going to be in the foreground, but im just getting a general feel for the scene first. These are also just low-res, work-in-progress renders. I'll probably end up putting the final renders in a reel rather than uploading them.

 

All my scenes are from 3D-Render, but the textures I did myself.

Art Stairs

 

After some guidence from my teacher, Ben, I realized that there was hardly any color in my scenes. It was very bland, and the artistic side of my renders were missing. It may seem like something very obvious, but I was so caught up on the technical side of things that I missed it completely... even in post (photoshop). So im redoing all my scenes in color.

 

I sound like a 60s cartoon:  Now in COLOR~!

Lighthouse Day and Night

 

So I took another scene and tried using the physical sun and sky. I decided to just upload the singles cause I didn't want to create a whole other reel just yet. Once i've compiled enough, though, I think ill put it all together in a reel later.

2013 Reel Ver. 2

Jason Wong 2013 Lighting Reel from Jason Wong on Vimeo.

Alright, so heres another version of my 2013 reel. I basically turned the intro into its own scene rather than having a name card. Although I feel like theres going to be another one up soon in June, it will be nice to see the progression. Take a look. =)

2010 Demo Reel

This was my demo reel after first year I think. I wanted to put this on my blog as well because it shows another part of my skill set. That and I like to keep things organized, so this gives me an opportunity to keep all my work in one place.

Its got a lot of energy, I really enjoyed timing the pieces to the music and compositing all of it together. The artwork are all in-class pieces, so there are some good ones and other... not-so-good ones. If you're wondering about the speed of the character transformations, we were inclined to mimic that idea from another reel that was shown to us at the time. It seemed like a good idea, but I would definately do it differently now if I had the chance.

All in all this was praised by Omar Dogan for the compositing side of it, so that made my day. ^_^ Hope you enjoy it too.

2013 Lighting Reel

Jason Wong Lighting Reel 2013 from Jason Wong on Vimeo.

So this is my new and improved lighting reel for 2013. I learned a few new things off tutorials online, so I thought I'd give it a try.

The first day shot was done using global illumination. A lot of tweaking, and fine tuning, but it gave a very nice... global... illuminated... look lol. Thats the best way I can put it. The night shot that followed I used one area light to keep with the idea that the light is coming from the one lamp, so no additional lights were used. Out of the entire reel I like those two shots the most.

After some resreach I found that bottles are best lit with hdri images because of all the reflections, but because im poor I couldn't afford to purchase any, so I had to fake it.

The last scene with the animation I enjoyed lighting the most because I based the color scheme on the Justice League's (animated series) Watchtower. Looking for reference and trying to get it to feel as though the character is sneaking inside the Watchtower was really fun for me. Unfortunately I did not animate said character. The animation was actually a geometry cache from Maya's stock animation files, so I can't take the credit.

I'm going to try to keep adding to this reel to make it stronger. This is like my base armor, a solid ground work for me to start with, but I need to continue upgrading it to make it even better and continue to impress. I'm working on another scene as we speak, so hopefully ill have up within the next couple weeks. But im a really bad blogger, so it might take a while to actually hit the blog. Im suprised that im posting now lol.

In any case I hope you like it, and if you're wondering about the music its One Last Bell to Answer on the piano by pianodoc82 from youtube. I hope he doesn't mind =S