The DynaCyc toolkit is a spiffy little thing that contains three main tools. The first is called “Forest” - it was originally developed for algorithmically generating dense areas of shrubbery, grass, trees, plants and so on (thus being called “Forest”) but I quickly learned that it was also rather handy for replicating a handful of images of people into a large crowd. (That icon is a couple hundred tiny little me-s, wearing dark trenchoats, fedoras and carrying rifles.)

The other two tools in that toolkit address an issue I used to see a lot when teaching and realized it would be a helpful tool for everyone, not just students. The first one allows you to set a start and end point for an object, indicate an apogee, start time, end time, etc, and have an arbitrary image transformed from the start to the end, arcing in a true parabola (that you can skew to simulate perspective) It seems a lot of people don’t realize that freely moving objects ALWAYS travel on a parabolic path (so long as they’re in the Earth’s gravitational field that is). The last tool, Volley, is what happens if you combine the first two… We can launch hundreds of objects, with a wide variety of adjustable parameters, all driven by some fancy chaos math.

Did I mention that all the tools in the DynaCyc toolkit generate a z-channel when they’re done? Oh yes. Yes they do. So it’s easy to insert other objects in the midst of them or even to combine multiple instances of those tools in the same scene.

Check out the videos!

OneLight Plus is another great kit. Using a rendered normals pass (worldspace please! Object/local normals are for game engines), a diffuse pass, and an ambient occlusion pass, this tool is able to simulate additional light sources being cast onto an already rendered object. The video showing how it normals-relighting works is here. Lightmix is a companion tool that makes it easy to tune the apparent focus, light color and intensity of several of these lighting nodes (and can also come in handy for other lighting tweaks using more traditional methods)

Training videos online!

I still don’t have the training video for this one online yet, and it may be the hardest of any of them to use. If you’re a Shake user, though, you can download the uv-retexturing tool itself from this page and get the video when it becomes available. It makes it possible to do fancy things like add damage to a rendered element, track additional details onto digital doubles, completely replace the texture on an existing render… and it works with up to 16 separate textures at once, each up to 8192 x 8192. Imagine having a cg triceratops (like our little icons) that gets beaten up: you can add wounds, dirt, dust, scratches, etc right there in the comp and they’ll stay with him as he thrashes and moves.

You'll need this shake-based texture generator to build compatible UV shaders.

Tutorial should be online this week (17 March). Keep an eye on this spot for an update!

For some quick pointers on how I use this tool, check out this entry in my blog.

This last one for today is a tool I wrote specifically as a companion to SynthEyes, but it can be used regardless of the visual effects pipeline it’s a part of (as long as they have Shake of course). It applies and removes (in an optically-accurate way) lens distortion on plates. You can remove distortion from a film plate, or apply it to a CG render, or even use it to analyze the plate to determine how much distortion is there. There will be a tutorial for that one eventually as well, but for now you’ll just have to wing it if you download the lens distortion tool from here.

This tool has been used on numerous TV shows, commercials, and feature films for several years. Use it on your next one!