Evaluating a Particle System: checklist

Below is my original manuscript of what was first published as a 2-piece article in issues 183 and 184 of a 3D World magazine. Worse English and a bit more pictures are included. Plus a good deal of techniques and approaches squeezed between the lines.
Part 1
Most of the 3D and compositing packages offer some sort of a particle systems toolset. They usually come with a nice set of examples and demos showing all the stunning things you can do within the product. However, the way to really judge its capabilities is often not by the things the software can do, but rather by the things...

Project Tundra

01. Tundra
Since I find it very cool to call everything a project, here goes “Project Tundra” with some anagrams. Pretty much all visual elements (except for a couple of bump textures) are completely synthetic and generated procedurally with Houdini and Fusion. So almost no reality was sampled during the production of the series. Some clouds from these setups were used. 
The originals are about 6K in resolution. I'm a bit split between the desire to write that prints will follow shortly, and the desire not to lie. Let's say they will follow for sure if you're patient enough to follow the slowly revolving pace of...

Bit Depth - color precision in raster images

Last time we have been talking about encoding color information in pixels with numbers from a zero-to-one range, where 0 stands for black, 1 for white and numbers in between represent corresponding shades of gray. (RGB model uses 3 numbers like that for storing the brightness of each Red, Green and Blue components and representing a wide range of colors through mixing them). This time let's address the precision of such a representation, which is defined by a number of bits dedicated in a particular file format to describing that 0-1 range, or a bit-depth of a raster image.
Bits...

Pixel Is Not a Color Square

Continuing the announced series of my original manuscripts for 3D World magazine.
  Thinking of images as data containers.
Although those raster image files filling our computers and lives are most commonly used to represent pictures (surprisingly), I find it useful for a CG artist to have yet another perspective – a geekier one. And from that perspective a raster image is essentially a set of data organized into a particular structure, to be more specific — a table filled with numbers (a matrix, mathematically speaking).
The number in each table cell can be used to represent a color, and this is how...

Procedural Clouds

I've been playing around with generating procedural clouds lately, and this time before turning to the heavy artillery of full scale 3D volumetrics, spent some time with good old fractal noises in the good old Fusion.
So row by row, top to bottom:
The base fractus cloudform generator assembled from several noise patterns: from the coarsest one defining the overall random shape to the smallest for the edge work. It is used as a building block in the setups below. Main trick here was not to rely on a single noise pattern, but rather to look for a way to...

On Anatomy of CG Cameras

Anatomy of a CG Camera
The following article has first appeared in issue 180, and was the first in the series of pieces I've been writing for a 3D World magazine for some time now - the later ones should follow at a (very) roughly monthly pace as well. These versions I'm going to be posting here are my initial manuscripts, and typically differ (like having a worse English and more silly pictures) from what makes it to the print after editing. Try to enjoy.

Typography Basics for Artists. Part 2 - Matching the Typeface

Anatomic parts of a glyph according to Wiki: 1) x-height; 2) ascender line; 3) apex; 4) baseline; 5) ascender; 6) crossbar; 7) stem; 8) serif; 9) leg; 10) bowl; 11) counter; 12) collar; 13) loop; 14) ear; 15) tie; 16) horizontal bar; 17) arm; 18) vertical bar; 19) cap height; 20) descender line. And here it comes finally - the second part of the typography basics for artists, where we're going to address a very common and practical task of matching a typeface to some pre-existing reference. The first part can be found here, and again, the material of these posts should...

My article on CG cameras in 3D World magazine

It should be out and on the shelves by now. Unfortunately, few errors sneaked into the printed version of the article. However, the editorial promised me to fix those in digital edition and to put the edited pdf into the online 'Vault', which all print readers have access to when they buy the issue. 
3D World Website
A little preview of the article below.

CTU's Faculty of Mechanical Engineering video

//player.vimeo.com/video/84875334?portrait=0

Double no: No, I didn't forget about the next part of a typography article and No, I didn't lie claiming it will take a while... And while a while continues, here is a piece of recent work I accomplished with the guys at DPOST Prague.
Czech Technical University 150th Anniversary from DPOST Prague on Vimeo.
Aside from wearing both Director's and Art-Director's hats, I've spent quite some time with hands on material here, taking the 3D work into Houdini to design the cubes effects, animate and render.
Probably the only 3D parts of the spot, which are not mine are the inner models...

Two Killer Tips for Mastering Any Software

RTFM. Please.
At different stages in the career I've been paid for working in Houdini, Nuke, 3DSMax, XSI, Fusion, Maya, Shake, Blender and After Effects among the other applications. I've been using Lightwave, 3D-Coat, Combustion, Rayz and so many other things. Not even mentioning programs like Photoshop, Corel Draw or Inkscape here. Of course I'm not the master in most of them, but I think I'm OK with learning new software, and here are the two tricks I know.
As obvious as they are, it is quite amazing how often even quite experienced artists manage to ignore them.
First one: RTFM....