Sketchbook | Sasha Stanojevic

2017 - Sept. 19

Beakerhead VR installation

This 360 stereoscopic VR video of a space craft launch was played in synchronization with an elevator ride going up the 190m tall Calgary Tower.

It was a collaboration between the 'Humble Wonder' production team and Banff Centre Animation office. I was the technical director and although working off of provided storyboard, I ended up doing a lot of creative direction as well in order to complete the project within a tight 3 week turnaround.

We primarily used V-Ray for Maya to render and animate. Composited in After Effects. Some backgrounds in E-on Vue. Many textures in Substance painter.

2017 - July 25

Unreal Interactive VR Experience

After several spherical VR videos I've been itching to add interactivity. Malking map helped me get familiar with the work-flow between Maya and Unreal, as well as virtual UI's and blueprints. Thanks to everyone in the animation department for helping, especially Adam Fulawka for detailing all the buildings.

2017 - June 18

A post shared by sasha s (@sashafromthefuture) on Jun 15, 2017 at 7:52pm PDT

Projection Mapping / Photogrammetry Training

I recently resented a training workshop on projection Mapping using the powerful (but under documented) camSchnapper script for Touch Designer.

I have put together a tutorial on camSchnapper for future reference as it's full of 'gotchas'... View Tutorial more details to be added shortly.

2017 - Mar. 04

Oculus Medium First Impressions

I am most excited about VR as a productivity tool. After trying Tilt Brush it was immediately apparent to me that VR is more than a gaming toy.

Of all software, VR and desktop, zBrush is my favorite. It has an amazing set of tools and equally deep menu set. The hint of a VR interface, at the 2016 zBrush summit, is great to hear but it can't come soon enough.

Oculus Medium is just such a sculpting tool built from the ground up for VR. It's functionality is much simpler than zBrush. However as a rapid 3D idealization tool, it is unparalleled. The shapes that can be generated by moving your hands in 3D space are much easier to achieve than on on computer screen. On a screen non-planar brush strokes not limited to an existing surface, require a few extra actions that can effect the gesture and spontaneity.

Below are the results of my first focused sessions in Medium spending less than an hour on each.

Medium is not without it's flaws, as the program crashes every time I remove the headset. This doesn't seem to be a common problem and possibly related to my hardware configuration. Medium does allow you to import outside meshes as “Stamps” that can be inserted into sculpts, but their scale is in part determined by the mesh resolution, and also have a resolution cap. Medium is Voxel based that results in very messy topology, and limits the amount of fine surface detail that can be achieved.

Despite these limitations I will definitely be using this for ideation and base-mesh generation that can be exported as .obj files.

2017 - Feb. 10

Ship Design Workflow

I have taken one of my #SpaceShipOfTheDay projects to completion. This project's focus was to dive deep into the asset creation work-flow from: concept sketch - Zbrush - Maya - Substance Painter - Vray.

I still plan an doing a version with the WWII nose art as originally inked.

2016 - Nov. 17

3D Scanner Training!

While I wait for the much delayed "eora 3D" kickstarter to deliver, I have been able to get my hands on another scanner. This one is a Creaform Go!Scan 50. It's an industrial scanner targeted more to engineering, and delvers some nice geometry, although with limited fine detail. (it also has a colour module that we don't have a license for)

2016 - Oct. 25

3D Zoetrope

the past couple months I have been doing a lot of clean up on scan data for artists to 3D print. This gave me access to Banff Centre's 3D printers.

I took the opportunity to try my hand at a 3D Zoetrope. The model looks pretty interesting but I need to hook it up to a motor, and get a good enough strobe synced up to bring it to life, or alternatively build a slitted drum.

2016 - Oct. 15

Projection Mapping in Maya and Nuke.

A project came along requiring adding depth to still landscape images. Rather than use straight parallax I decided to try a matte painting 3D projection, as this is an area in which I'm interested in specializing.

When using only Maya with Mental Ray, I was having issues with blurry textures on surfaces facing at a high angle to the camera, and also imperfect colours.

I exported cameras and geometry to Nuke where the scanline render made it painless to match source images.

Thanks to Jayden Soroka for the graphic design in this piece.

(I'v posted the networks to remind myself how this hooks together)

2016 - Aug. 27

Annual Projector Mapping Fiesta!

Thanks to Joel Adria for providing the 3D model and aligning it with the projectors in Touch Designer. Here is the animation I had thrown together that afternoon that mapped to to UVs of the projected model.

A post shared by sasha s (@sashafromthefuture) on Aug 4, 2016 at 11:11pm PDT

2016 - July 23

I'v been working on a VR project.

A 360 monoscopic animation a live action short video to be exact.

Embeded below is a short making of.

The final product is viewable here :

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vbschWEXu1I

2016 - Mar 28

Substance Painter 2 is out!

Really getting into it, and as a project to improve my skills am creating a new spaceship every day and posting on Instagram for a month.

Form more on instagram check out #spaceshipoftheday

A post shared by sasha s (@sashafromthefuture) on Mar 29, 2016 at 11:27pm PDT

2015 - Sept 1

Homemade nodal mount

Saved me about $250. Main downside is it can't shoot straight down.

2015 - Aug 15

I now have a Gear VR and created a 360 stereo thing!

I'v been messing around with a panorama image background and photogrammetry foreground model for a first test. Rendered in 360 stereo using Maya with the Domemaster 3D plugin.

While viewing it on a Gear VR, an easier format than ORBX was to just watch it in Milk VR by dropping the file into: Galaxy S6\Phone\Android\data\com.samsung.vrvideo\files\

Time to learn the Unity 3D game engine.

With Element 3D for After Effects it appears the age of real-time rendering is upon us.

I have a lot of maps of the Banff area as people are always asking me for maps. So used that along with a raven I had previously made as a starting point.

2015 - July 15