Look Dev  |  CG Env  for Visual EffectsSee how LUCHEN blows your mind in VFX

This is a stunning work that everyone could put down the chin. Lu rised the bar of VFX again in the of 2015 all by himself alone. He killed the eyes of every professors of SCAD VFX department, making impossible "toy thing" possible.

In the year of 2015, Lu was asked to make a car rendering work when he worked at Pixomondo--a Oscar aweard winning studio. Lu finished it using an iMac and C4D only wiout any thired part toolsets in a week. With his soild understanding of lighting, shadering, rendering and compositing, he made rotten into magic.

This project was originally coming from the last assignment of the class VSFX708. Some of the aspects like the clouds are expentions of this assignment. This project covers many aspects of CG landscape developing including terrain, water, sky, massive plants, cloud and many more.

"The most advanced feature of Vue perhaps is its fast, high quality evironment material system. Vue can generate massive planets just in a fingertips. Eco system is an amazing massive object generator which can not only duplicate billions polygons, but also can give me more efficiency to control all of them. Plus, Vue also has advanced node editor for making things more complex.

After doing all material works, I made several tests to check if some specific materials can be used properly. After all, all materials give me a good feeling that they look like so real."

Doing a project which has over 3 billion polygons is definately a huge challenge ever. The default slowly rendering setting scared most of the people who took this class. However, Vue can do rendering very fast if we just think something in different ways. Baking objects is good method to reduce rendering time, which was the first idear coming from my mind when I did think about how to minimize the rendering time. Seperating different kinds of objects by using different rendering steetings is another good way, which can significantly speed up my rendering workflow.

This is a CG Environment work coming with iLand. But I separated them to 2 works. Back to 7 years ago, there was no OpenVDB thing that allowed people to make cloud and render them out easily. Vue was the only option to make it happen in an artistic way in the market.

When I was doing iLand project, I did want to make the camera going though the cloud, and finaly up to the cloud with sundown. However, due to the deadline problem, I canceled the ending could shots, that is the dream cloud scene which you see here. That was finished in the summer of 2013, I spent a few of my summer holidays to do it. That's worth it.

"This was original made for Huawei, the forturn 500 of the world companay, low-end smartphone, but it just superisingly made an amazing high-end look. Huawei would be so thrill to have it becouse they never thought they could pay 5 but got 50 in the dream. Chose LUCHEN, means you chose the most great value, Much much better than that Franch team."

In this project, Lu was Responsible for inside parts modeling and major look development including shading, lighting and rendering as well as pre-compositing for Huawei Y6 smartphone opening video in an international team.

"This was original made for Huawei, the forturn 500 of the world companay, low-end smartphone, but it just superisingly made an amazing high-end look. Huawei would be so thrill to have it becouse they never thought they could pay 5 but got 50 in the dream. Chose LUCHEN, means you chose the most great value, Much much better than that Franch team."

"In this project, I was, at least, in advanced over 2 years than any other competitors at SCAD. Especially in rendering, they still used that old-timer, out of date Mental Ray to do it, because of its extremely low speed, they had to use Monty's renderfarm to finish it. While I never had that hopeless pressure, so that I could easily using just 3 PCs to make anything happen in relax and confident mood. "

"Sorry about my 5 minutes rough sketching and photoshop painting. It shows the general idea that people finally going to the self - destruction war, and we are losing our homeland. In the last moment, a space shuttle carring the last couples going to the space to find the human being's hope."

℗ © 2014-2021 LU CHEN. All elements which are presented in this website are produced by Lu Chen. The copyright of this website is owned by Lu Chen

"Trying to make a birdeye shot was killed by out client -- Prof. Moon. This picky guy doesn't like many empty spaces appearing in the shot. Based on her requirment, every buildings in my scene should be concentrated to let people know where we are, to let people feel this is happening in a real world, to let people feel this is the day in the last world when they see it at first sight. So my next move is to fully satisfy our customer-- killing empty spaces. Finally, my final pre-viz (visualization) is approved."

This is the FX pre-viz showing on the mid-term presentation. Originally my idear would have nuclear exploration, which would be happening after launching of speace shuttle. What I was thinking was that if all the technical issues can be solved by time, every thing should be destroied by nuclear boomb. However, it covered too many things such as particle debries, smoke simulation, more compositing works. In this case, this FX pre-viz didn't happen into final render by the end of this quarter.

"Even though most of the destructions can be textured by procedual shaders, some objects such as damaged cars and space shuttle can not be given by this way due to their more complex constructions. I have to expend UVs piece by piece and paint them on useful channel maps. This is a horrible work because it has over 5 cars having to be assembled the UVs, and I have to do them one by one. Fortunately, they only need damaged looking, if I need to do over 5 new cars with fresh car paint, and editing UVs from zero, the only wise decision I can make is to quit."

To make more working efficiency and get rid of time wasting, I saved illumination data as lighting cache files, so that next time if I need to test whether the shaders or the texturers meet expectations, no need to calculate the illumination any more, which saving me bunch of time for doing texture and shaders.

It is hard to say how complicated when pushing the multi-pass renderings into compositing in a week just by one person. How many times I want to kill myself for doing this crazy work. I split the entire scene into 12 pieces to adjust each individually with different render passes like GI, diffuse, specular and etc. But this is just for a single still image, not motion the whole animatic sequence. If I want to finish the compositing of this animatic sequence in two days, ILM will definitely hire me for doing Transformers 15.

"For Vue version, Vue gives me a 2K resolution cloud map for using. It's enough for doing a student demo with 720 HD video. However, for ultra realistic CG development, that is like kind of playing children's game . For most of big budget films, the texture maps should be up to 8K or even 16K resolution to give more crystal details. So I use my 8K in house ultra-high resolution map as my resources to do matte painting for cloud map in this project."

℗ © 2013-2021 LU CHEN. All elements which are presented in this website are produced by Lu Chen. The copyright of this website is owned by Lu Chen

"The biggest problem of Vue's earth system is that its default map is too small that can not feed my goal for makeing a big-blaster-movie like look. So I made my own in photoshp, rasing up the resolution to 4K and adding more details for it."

The C4D version Earth using a totally different approach to achive it. Thanks to C4D's easy-to-understand multi channel system with layers imbed, it's so easy to load my brand new 12K map into C4D. The only regretful thing I made at that time was the rendering was just 720p, I sould make it larger. Sigh~~

Nuke in this project played a key role to accomplish a good final result. Assambling all elements which were rendered from C4D was a huge work. With Oscar-level compositing solution coming with LU's multi years work experience with the most talented artists of the world, making it happen is a must have.