Name: Allan McKay
Position: Freelance Technical Director

Allan, your known around the 3d Studio community as a "Particle FX Guy". Are particle fx something you've focused intentionally? Or has the industry pushed you towards it?

I should have really seen it coming, I've always seen myself as a creative, but fire/explosions/fog/cloud/ any natural phenomena has always intruiged me, especially after I moved into 3D as far back in the days of dos/irix 3d packages as clouds, water, fog were always 2D effects either applied in compositing or mapped onto flat planes in the scene. I always would try and find ways to cheat those techniques to better them and find ways to work around the limitations of the current technology. I would have hundreds of photos of clouds that I could use at my disposal, and plenty of stock footage of smoke ect. Although as an fx animator particles aren't the only area I focus on, the simulation of natural phenomon is something that really does challenge me which I find is something I really neeed to do to keep stimulated, be challenged both creatively and technically with the projects I work on.

Tell us a bit about your FX teaching dvd's - name, dates, pertinent info, and a website where we can see the progress as you build them.

Releasing a DVD on particles and advanced visual effects for film is something I've been wanting to do for a long time, but there have been so many movies coming to Australia like Star Wars, Matrix sequels, Ghost Ship, Mad Max, The Core ect. That it's just not the time to take a break from the film industry to work on it! But I'm currently building up the criteria for the first few volumes of DVD's for max, that I want to cover a lot of the professional techniques used in film for particles, shaders, compositing and integrating live action with CG ect. As well as a lot of Technical Director type methods for working. There's a lot of techniques I've built up over the last couple of years that I think it would be ridiculous if I didn't begin getting these techniques out there as they really open up a lot of doors as to the possibilities of what you can do with both particles and visual effects in general. Obviously for the time being there isn't too much news to report back, although you can count in time there'll definitely be a few hitting the market to keep your eyes out for. Check www.3dluvr.com/machette/ as I'll probably be keeping progress updates on it from there.

Do you find that people in the industry view FX as being "not as important" as, say, character animation?

This is actually a lot harder to answer than I would have thought, but I would say definitely not. Most people I work with are blown away when they see what you're working on, and find it really amazing that you're able to make something come to life without having to use the more tedious methods of fine tuning things by hand as it's all procedural. Although there are people who see it has being more of a "oh it's the computer doing all the work" type scenario, as with the whole CG in comparison to hand animation scenario that some people still try and bring up occasionally. All in all, most movies I see in pre-production these days have their pipelines being set up for effects sometimes ahead of the character animation departments, which sometimes can be scary if they're CG features and the whole sales point IS the characters in the movie! But these days effects are usually more the metaphor for what ties the movie together is now it isn't actually the explosions and dust, but also the cloth on a character, the suspension in the car, the interaction between the character and the water, the hair on a characters head ect.So it's all essential secondary things that really bring it all to the next level, and most people see that as being just as important as the voice of the character and the actual performance of a character. Although it's like comparing "A Bugs Life" to "Antz", one focuses more solely on the character animation, whereas "Antz" I think spends a lot more time wooing the audience with effects than performance.

Do you reccomend that folks go out and purchase an advanced product like afterburn to learn particle effects - or are there some low cost programs which can deliver the same kind of shader effects?

99% of the time you're able to deliver shots without any plugins or extra commercial packages, otherwise if it looks like you're going to need a hair plugin or a good camera tracker, then you put that into the budget and purchase it. Maya is less plugin orientated as there are a few directions Alias|Wavefront have focused on that aren't essential to the package, although are handy and there if they're needed (dynamics a few years ago would have been seen as a very rare thing to use, although now is a requirement in any package). Max has caught up to this and now doesn't need to rely on plugins in many areas, although when it comes to volumetrics it really does need more support. Afterburn is a necessity to every and any fx animator in the industry, as I haven't come across any commercially available volumetric tools out there that can do what Afterburn can do and with such speed and flexibility. I've worked for plenty of Maya studios who literally own max seats purely just so they can use Afterburn on various jobs. Matrix Reloaded is relying on Afterburn for a large number of CG explosions amongst other effects as are a lot of other movies coming out these days, as it's so cheap and so powerful.

There however are free alternatives for max such as Free Pyro and Particle Combustion amongst others, they're not as greater solutions although they can do the trick. Afterburn as far as I know does have an educational version which is compatible with educational versions of max which is handy to know when looking into these areas as a student.

Do you favor a specific platform for setting up your particle effects - or do you find that Max, Maya, xsi, houdini are all about the same?

I've worked in a production environment with all four packages, I find no package has all of the answers and I'm constantly at different studios saying "gee I wish I had a license of on this job". Houdini's approach is much more alien than the others although long term more intuitive, although not as supported in the industry. I find Maya's approach is a lot more hands on and technical, their approach is "Hey! With our package, you can do anything!!" , which is very true, although you pretty much have to code it from ground up, every time. It's volumetric shaders are really lacking which is very frustrating at times, although you do have complete control over every single element, it's a lot harder to do even the simplest things, and you will end up writing several pages of code, but in the long run as long as you're technically savy enough, you can get complete control out of the package. Max I find is a bit dated, although a lot more straight forward, it's more of a visual package, where instead of having to code everything, it's more like a friendlier approach to Houdini, where you end up plugging hundreds of nodes together to do some really amazing things, without the complexity of a flow chart. I've found max is probably the best all round tool for particles as long as you have afterburn ect. Although Maya can really bring things to the next level on more ambitious particle jobs.