Nuevos Talento: Andres Ruge Angel, Caldas, Colombia.
Medical VFX and animations with thinkingParticles 6.0
Thinking Particles Explosion from Andres Ruge Angel on Vimeo.
Cebas: Andres, Ola, thank you! We are very happy to have you and that you found time from the exciting world of VFX at freelance_Behance to do the Cebas New Talent interview. Please give us an update about yourself.
Andreas: I have special affection for my very first work. It was a medical commercial where we used VFX to animate the destruction of tiny bacteria, and this was cool to do. Our team consisted of 4 persons and my job was to make the ‘explosion’. In the beginning, this was a bit challenging because I didn’t know much about thinkingParticles and I knew I must not fail! There was quite a lot to learn, about working with the TP caches. I enjoyed doing the fracture, and that was fun. Here is a glimpse of my first medical vfx commercial.
Another project I truly enjoyed with thinkingParticles was making the ‘dandelion’ - a personal RnD. With this one, I learned quickly about how-to-use datas nodes and used the helpful Vectorial mathematics. I thought I will not finish this RnD as I was simply trying to learn something cool and then let it go, but when I uploaded the preview to Vimeo, I received positive likes and comments, so, I was encouraged to do more and finished it. I think with vfx, the idea is to do more, and to practice creating effects. With this project, I had learned so many new vfx.
Dandilion_Comp from Andres Ruge Angel on Vimeo.
Cebas: The vfx community and followers would love to know more about your freelance / Studio - some interesting history and your career path.
Andres: Actually, I am a 3D generalist and I have been in this role now for 4 years. I started focusing on vfx and its technicalities some time later while working on a project with a local enterprise. The opportunity arose then to go beyond being a 3D generalist with the possibility of doing vfx work with TP.
Fortunately, I was able to learn thinkingParticles quickly, thanks to my friend who has been working in VFX and using TP for some time, and I am grateful. So, I began to learn and try things myself. It did opened a whole new window of opportunities for me with more vfx tool knowledge at my disposal.
I am also a Visual Designer at the Caldas University and dived into the world of design, when in a class a teacher showed me the amazing things one can do with 3D Max studio. I found it really cool but I never believed that one day, I would actually work so much with it! So, life you never know, you have to be open to new things. A year ago, I began specialization in rigging and soon, I fell in love with all these technical tools! Here is an alligator I created… https://www.behance.net/./gallery/28563067/Rigg-Diego
And I enjoy so much being able to work independently and I have plans to travel to Brazil soon, because there are so many awesome talents there and I would really like to work with the experts.
Cebas: On the aforementioned projects in 1, how helpful was TP in getting the right animation going for you?
Andreas: For the medical VFX and the ‘dandelion RnD’, thinkingParticles was actually the only option. Our team had at first thought of making the fracture with other scripts and then to join everything together in Pflow but it was very slow, and the machine keeps crashing every moment. We needed to amplify the ‘explosion’ in the vfx, but found that with the native programs, we couldn´t do it. I had lots of problems in the beginning as the team had never worked with TP before this project, and we were afraid of more problems coming up with the rendering farm but at the end of the trial, as it turned out, everything was quite hassle-free and things had worked out perfectly so we were so relieved.
Cebas: Why did you decide that TP was the best for this vfx creative and did our software help you achieve the desired effects without much hiccups?
Andreas: Because TP give me so much control with all in the scene, besides the fracture nodes are so amazing. I find the cache files very easy to use.
Cebas: Tell us something about why you decided to do medical VFX when a lot of folks were concentrating on game and film fx? What drew you into medical art? Was it easy to get work of this sort?
Andreas: I don´t really know :) … as the enterprise arrived with projects of this type, and it has been fun to do it. My country is not that big a market so to specialize is a challenge as the market is very small. On the other hand, because there is minimal specialization in my team, we learn to do everything, from VFX for film series to Medical VFX, modeling, rigging, surfacing, and lighting. It is cool to make stuff work. We enjoy our work!
Cebas: What do you find… usually are the most difficult aspects of 3d/ fx design work - is it technology or artistic creativity? - is there an available vfx software that resolves all your technology-to-art needs? What is missing?
Andreas: This is hard to say because all aspects of artwork require different skills. Some times people may think, this is design work so I don´t need any other knowledge except my artistic talent, but in actual fact, this is only partially true as 3D and VFX at the complex level gets a lot better results with vectorial, coordinates and reading formulae, general math skills. Highly skilled VFX artists must have the knack to know many different effects, how to combine them in many areas, such as you need to know how to work the photon light to make good illumination and resolve problems particular to a desired vfx. If you do not know the many operators, helpers, nodes and tools incorporated in TP, and how they work, and you only know some art, you cannot create much of a vfx.
I learned all these the hard way since I could not afford costly programs, so every day I try to learn something and understand more of the coding, or math or physics of particles by personal RnD and by watching videos of experienced artist or refer to books… I try to learn something new every day to improve my software skills.
Cebas: How do you feel about the TP community on facebook? Ostensibly, we are not huge, like Houdini, since cebas is a boutique software developer. Do you find, like yourself, that most 3d artists uses tools from both Max and Maya or Max-TP is always your other awesome buddy?
Andreas: I am a Max lover, and sincerely, I did found information on TP a bit hard due to the language, as a mainly Spanish-speaker. Now, everybody wants to make things in Houdini, and this is ok, Houdini is a great program, but it is also very dense and technical a tool. I think that VFX with plugins like thinkingParticles or the ICE on softimage (..now no more..) or MCG are awesome first steps, and does not preclude using other software like Houdini, and if you need one FX “faster” and working awesome you can use TP and have it resolve.
Cebas: Would you say VFX work allows you to be international? We would love to hear more about Colombia’s job market and your hopes and dreams.
Andreas: In this country, there are people with excellent VFX skills. I have colleagues in this market that have done truly admirable work, and many of them are working with the big studios. My skills would not be as tops as these experts and that motivates me every day to learn more effects. Just talking with the experts, one learns something new. The problem with Colombia is that the market is small, yet we are now creating a name for ourselves in vfx.
Cebas: Back to TP, would you say on a scale of 1 (uh-oh) to 10 (awesome) how did thinkingParticles 6 compared to other vfx software you may have used ? And in what kind of FX do you find that thinkingParticles is your preferred choice in your artwork?
Andreas: TP for me is a ‘10’ - works great and the updates with the subscription are amazing! I use to work with several plugins: one for fluids like smoke and fire, another for liquids, another for destruction so we needed to bring all the plugins together just for one effect, but now with thinkingParticles6, things get much easier.
Cebas: How did cebas software integrate into your production pipeline? How straightforward was it for the commercial vfx that you have been doing?
Andreas: Yes, at the beginning learning phase, it was challenging, because we knew nothing about the system, but with progressive trials and testing and now we have grasp it.
Mainly, thinkingParticles, I use for everything and in the past year, there was a project from a local production company that required many visual effects so I used TP to do scenes of flocking birds and so many butterflies, and as an fx resource for making ‘fires’. TP helped made vfx so much easier for me, as a new user.
Cebas: What was the most fun or rewarding part of a project for you?
Andres: Resolving the problems and translating technicalities into animated scenes – always some complexity arises or things that we have not really tested out and not sure how gonna do it, so sometimes this causes some headache, but when we find a solution for them, it feels very cool and satisfactory.
Cebas: In your view, what is your wish for cebas software to achieve that is not currently doing for you?
Andreas: I think that you can optimize the caches files, some times files are soooooooo big and can be unstable, but I like the way that TP follows for the caching.
Cebas wishes Andreas and Team more
VFX projects in the years to come!
Follow Andres vfx work at Behance(freelance)