Thiago Costa logging something

I often get requests of Lagoa artists available. I know a handful of them and I always pass it around to the people I know. But from time to time someone new appears doing beautiful simulations. See Artemy Craft on Vimeo.

I’m putting together a list of Lagoa users that should go on the website, so if you are a “pro” and want your name to be there just drop me a line.

If you are not a pro – drop me a line too, but it might be good time to become one since there’s now plenty of Lagoa Training out there, and also demand. So to help you get started with the tool I’m listing two places you can start with:

Digital-Tutors has a nice collection of videos that should cover the basics. You can jump right in.

i3D Tutorials has recently published a two volume Lagoa Training series with over 25 charpters that covers a whole lot:

Have a good learning of Lagoa Multiphysics!

Many people have been asking what am I working on and what’s the silence all about. All I can say now is that I’m working on some really exciting things, with some really exciting people And yes it has to do with Graphics and yes it’s for Lagoa. Look forward to some action in the coming months!…

I’m planning to do some changes over here so if you are a follower of this blog and my work, I hope you will appreciate the changes.

I will starting morphing this site into an articles page, I don’t know what to do with the old content yet, but this is indeed a public history of my professional career, so it’s very likely that I will just keep it all up.

There are other ways to keep in touch with me. You can:

• Start following me on Twitter at @thiago_at_lagoa.
• Facebook is something I use to keep track of my friends, so just add me on FB if we have met before (definitely not sharing Halloween party pictures with people I don’t know…).
• I did not figure out what’s Google plus for, but apparently I’m this number here: https://plus.google.com/114591691200581760259/
• If your thing is business with Lagoa, you can always email me at thiago@lagoatechnologies.com, or find me on Linkedin http://www.linkedin.com/in/thiagocosta3d

Finally, please signup to our mailing list at www.lagoatechnologies.com, so you will be the first to receive news directly from us.

Tendril Design+Animation Toronto based studio completed a beautiful piece for Open Text with lot’s and lots of papers simulated in Lagoa Multiphysics engine. From their website:

“On a technical level, much of the content animation was handled using Lagoa Technologies’powerful multiphysics simulation engine. Over the course of the project we simulated more than half a million ‘pages’ and generated over 45GB of simulation data. Lagoa was also extended in order to create the flocking behavior seen in some shots.”

Watch this video here:

This rolled out today: Lagoa Survey 2011

Takes like 5 minutes to answer and you might win a Mudbox+Maya license! But for real we need to get your input! go go go!

We want to centralize news regarding updates, next beta cycles, training etc for Lagoa… So we put up a newsletter that you can sign-up at www.lagoatechnologies.com
Generally the design and development of Lagoa is highly driven by users, so don’t be shy if you get a couple questions from us at some point

Check out what users are creating with Lagoa Multiphysics for Softimage on Vimeo!

Thanks Vladimir Jankijevic, Michael White, Yoshiyuki Watanabe, Guillaume Laforge, Stephan Woermann, Sam Howell, Andreas Böinghoff, Reinhard Claus, Farid, Byungchul Kang, Tim Marinov and everyone else.

Here is an interview I gave to CG Society about Lagoa Multiphysics.

I was nominated “Autodesk Master”,

I’ve own Autodesk Master 2010, category Softimage! You can see all nominees on  http://area.autodesk.com/masters

Thank you,

Today I have resigned from Ubisoft and decided to focus all my time on Lagoa.

Was great the time I spent at Ubisoft Digital Arts working on asset management tools and giving Technical Direction to Softimage users, but now I rather work on Lagoa and research computational physics and software development.

If you have interest to use our technology or services please contact us at:
business@lagoatechnologies.com

There’s a lot of buzz out there about what’s this tool and etc…
All I can say is that soon I will be publishing more information on the website of the company www.lagoatechnologies.com

via Motionographer

Ben Steiger Levine for Sprite got effects done at MassMarket for Sprite Drake. They have used my SPH tool for ICE to simulate some fluids coming out of Drake and splashing all over the place.
Looks cool, check it out!

Quicktime

Sometime ago Ben Houston’s Exocortex approached me to help on the development of a realtime smoke simulator for Softimage ICE. This is the outcome which I just got permission to show.

SlipstreamRT for Softimage is a proprietary real-time smoke simulator developed for Softimage’s ICE system in collaboration with [exocortex.com/ Exocortex Technologies, Inc.] This video is posted with permission from Exocortex Technologies, Inc. For licensing information please contact [email:info@exocortex.com]

About my participation on this project:
I worked on most of the components of the solver including boundary conditions (laminar flow, turbulent flow, etc), vortex shedding, vorticity equation, particle splitting, etc…
Most of the tests on this video are done by myself, I’ve also implemented all the ICE workflow and some of the controls demoed on the video.

For a complete list of features contact Exocortex.

Just finish working on these series of short films for Assassins Creed 2.
The game looks amazing as well!

This production was done at Hybride and Ubisoft Digital Arts, my work consisted of making workflows/tools and leading the Technical Directors and pipeline people during the project at UDA.

This was quite an experience and I’m happy with the results, although I wish we had more than 5 months to produce the whole thing…
In my opinion (and not because I worked on it ) this is the first adaptation of a game to a film that makes into the form a short film and doesn’t let me down. It actually leaves that feeling that we could explore more of this universe.

I would be looking forward to work on a full feature film for this brand, with a lot of time to produce it of course

To know more, visit http://www.youtube.com/user/assassinscreed
or  http://www.assassinscreed.com/

There are at least 3 different meshers for ICE particles that can be used with the SPH:

Pwrapper from 3daliens

emPolygonizer

And Guillaume Laforge is doing this pretty cool project that constructs a fast scalar field in ICE and passes to the polygonizer in a grid structure.

The coolest stuff for me is that the distance function on Guillaume’s polygonizer is an ICE compound! So you can play with it right there and manage to change the way the polygonizer will weight the surface.

It’s exciting to see all these people developing these tools and they are all compatible with my SPH solver, have fun!

Mesher by Eric Mootz

I had a blast working with the crew of CafeFX on G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra.
I think the release date for the film is fixed to August, I will see you in the movie theaters!

My work was mainly as FX Lead/TD working on shots and also providing some tools for the other artists.
I have to say thanks to: David Ebner, Jeff Barnes, Seth Lippman and all the crew at CafeFX!
See the whole crew here: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1046173/fullcredits#cast

I produced about 4 hours of training about the new Softimage|ICE platform explaining a lot of the workflow/techniques to create tools that can be used in production.
This series is packed with packed with deep examples and it’s more of a intermediate/advanced thing.
Although if you are a beginner you might find this really exciting and really get into it.

To buy it, visit cmiVFX website

Hello, we are looking for testers to join the SPH fluids simulator for ICE.

This is a free set of nodes for ICE, all you need is register to get access to the testing group, Addon, sample scenes and documentation.

height=26 width=132 alt=”Google Groups”>

Subscribe to ICE SPH Fluids

Email:

Visit this group

I’ve been working on this SPH (Smoothed Particles Hydrodynamics) fluids simulator for XSI’s ICE.
I did my own collisions logic, integration, substeps, all the physics part, etc… using low level ICE nodes, and now some compiled C++ nodes.
The simulator supports pressure, density, viscosity, tension, collisions and some other stuff.

visit my page on Vimeo for some previews:

Visualize the graph of a function is not easy (at least for me), without plotting the function.
It can be really hard to understand what y = x^2 * z^2 looks like.
So I obviously did an ICE compound with these most common graphs.
I couldn’t stop doing functions and playing with it, so I ended up with this list, all in the same compound:
x*z
x^2 + z^2
x^2 – z^2
x^2 * z^2
x^3 + z^3
sin(x)
cos(x) + cos(z) ^ 2
cos(x^2 + z^2)
sin(x^2 + z^2)
-1 / (x^2 + z^2)
|cos(x) + cos(z)| ^ (1/2)
cos(x) + cos(z)
| cos(x^2+z^2) | ^ (1/2)
|cos(x+z)| ^ (10/2)
cos( |x| + |z| ) * ( x + z )
cos( |x| + |z|) * (|x| + |z| )
cos( |x| + |z| )
|sin(x) * ( sin(x) + cos(z) )| ^ 0.2
sin(x^2) * cos(z^2)

Some are very common, others are not. It’s cool how many crazy patters you can get using these functions.

Hopefully this will work as a “educational” resource, so you can see what these functions look when applied to a 3d shape and understand how Sin, Cos, Absolute values, etc, can affect the function.

Here is what these equations look like when applied to a grid:

What’s even more cool in ICE is that after I had all the functions done, I could apply this as a force, a weightmap… basically anything that reads a 3d vector or a scalar.

Visit the page in the Softimage Community

Package of 6 animations done at Nervo.tv for Zune.
My participation on this project started on RnD, and how we would make the simulation work on the cube shape, then how to animate it. I also did most of the lighting work and the final compositing/color grading.

Few interesting things from this project:
The “Boxes” animation was done simulating rigid bodies in XSI, and a lot of layered animation on top.
The “Liquids” one I had to write a little script to allow me import a sequence of meshes, that came from a standard particle simulation. To then enable people to tweak it later, in a mesh state and apply relax operations etc.
The “Sweets” one was very tricky too, each frame of the animation is a different object. Like a 3d stop motion technique.

This project was fun and challenging at the same time, I’m pretty happy how it turned out.

To see some original sketches/concepts just follow Fabiana’s website

.

Credits – project page http://nervo.tv/index.html?sect=5&proj=zune
Creative Director: Nando Costa
3D Artists: Thiago Costa, Jeff Norombaba, Joshua Cox, Catherine Langevin, Gabriel Beauvais
Compositing: Thiago Costa, Jeff Norombaba, Alphonse Swineheart, Robbie Johnstone
Storyboard Artist: Fabiana Fortes
Music: Darrin Wiener

I’ve uploaded my Obj Sequencer in the community site.
This tool was used during the Zune project to import sequences of animated liquids. This saved us a lot of time during the production.

Download addon from the Softimage Community

Based on the number of neighboring particles, this compound can adjust the color around the boundaries of a particle cloud.
The range is calculated based on the number of points in the island, so a gradient is smoothly blended to the particle color.

This can be used in any region of the stack. Plug the Execute Color in one ICEtree port and you are good to go.
However if you want the color to update with the simulation, you must use this in the simulation region.

The Company was nominated in the category Main Title Design for the 60^th Primetime Emmy Awards!
I was lucky enough to be on this project with Digital Kitchen – Seattle.

The Company • TNT
Studio: Digital Kitchen
Creative Director: Matt Mulder
Lead Designers: Cody Cobb, Ryan Gagnier, Noah Conopask
Animatiors: Ryan Gagnier, David Holm, Pete Kallstrom, Matt LaVoy, Dayvd Chan
3D: Cody Cobb, Igor Choromanski, Gordana Fersini, Thiago Costa
Editor: Dave Molloy
Producer: Jill Johns, Colin Davis
Executive Producer: Mark Bashore

My participation here was on the last scene, from the transition to the mushroom to the end. The guys at DK and Cody Cobb specially worked really hard to give all the styling on the final frame, with lot’s of render passes and even drawing things by hand over the 3d render.

Here are a bunch of Shaderballs for XSI
Visit the page in the Softimage Community

For this Timex spot done at Nervo.tv, I worked mostly in the runner, but also in some background elements.
The runner rig/animation/cloth simulation was pretty fun, I worked with Syflex, used Refmodels to manage the versions of the runner and also developed the look of this guy in 3d.

Like the grease pencil tool for Maya, this tool allows you to draw with the sketch tool for 2d animation/per frame annotation, directly in the XSI viewport.
Changes V1.1

Download addon from the Softimage Community

Here is a video showing this tool

This was fun to do, unfortunatelly I didn’t had the time to do more than Model, rig and animate the bird!
To see more: Nervo.tv,

This is my sketchbook.
Most part of the work here was done in digital (photoshop, open canvas, painter, artrage). But I also work on paper and I really like life drawing sessions.
I’ve used photographs as a reference for some images on this section.

I will post my OC painting sessions with my friend Mario Ucci, don’t forget to check out his amazing 2d portfolio.
I would say it’s better then the 3d one. But don’t tell him