Dylan Neill

VFX Demo Reel May 2012

dylan — Fri, 09 Aug 2013 05:15:00 +0000

Dylan Neill VFX Demo Reel May 2012 from Dylan Neill on Vimeo.

Sydney Dance Company – 6 Breaths

dylan — Fri, 25 Feb 2011 07:17:25 +0000

A little while ago I created an animation for a Sydney Dance Company production called 6 Breaths.

The animation was directed by Tim Richardson and produced at Collider in Sydney. Music is by Ezio Bosso.

It was incorporated into the performance by being projected on a giant piece of see through material during the show. This allowed the dancers to perform behind the animation and lights were turned on and off to make the dancers seem to appear and disappear. The dancing was amazing and it was thrilling to play a part in a project like this.

Quick break down: Two of the dancers were laser scanned and then brought into Maya where I wrote a script to break them up into pieces. These pieces were then assigned to particles that controlled their position and rotation to get them to form into the correct shape. The main shots were rendered in 3Delight with the more distant shots in Mental Ray and hardware render.

Enjoy!

Club Chocolate wins AEAF award

dylan — Fri, 12 Nov 2010 01:08:05 +0000

This is kinda old news but I know I’ve been really bad at updating the blog lately. Been very busy with a lot of new stuff but I will be updating this website with a lot of new things soon.

Way back in August, the crew at Collider and myself won the “Commercial – Visual Effects” category at the Australian Effects and Animation Festival for the Club Chocolate commercial.

Click here for more info at Campaign Brief.

Click here for my original post about the commercial.

October 2009 Demo Reel

dylan — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 00:53:39 +0000

I’ve updated my demo reel to include the commercials I’ve been working on lately. The new reel can be found in the menu under VFX Demo Reel or by following this link:

VFX Demo Reel

Enjoy!

Myer Spring Fashion Show

dylan — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 07:40:18 +0000

Been pretty busy lately on a couple of TV commercials but I managed to escape to shoot one night of the Sydney Spring Fashion Festival. Here are some of the pics.

Qantas Business Travel Paper Planes

dylan — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 01:02:59 +0000

A new ad that I worked on for Qantas Business Travel has just started airing. I was brought on at the end to do lighting and shading and lit about 70% of the shots. I also created a backlighting shader to simulate the translucent effect of multiple layers of paper which was added to almost all the shots.

I grabbed it off the TV and uploaded it to youtube but I will be getting better quality versions of this and Club Chocolate soon so I will post them as quicktimes later on. I don’t have a lot of behind the scenes stuff but I’ll write up some info on the paper shader which may be of interest to other shader dudes. I’m also still working on the Club Chocolate stuff, just been a bit crazy busy last month or so.

Anyway, here is the Qantas ad. Please hit the HQ button to make it nicer.

Credits

Company: Collider
Director: Joel Pront
Producer: Pat Dedal
Modeling and Rigging: Shadow Studios
Animation: Julian Tylney Taylor/Shadow Studios, Hugh Carrick-Allan
Lighting: Dylan Neill, Julian Tylney Taylor, Serge Kovalenko
Compositing: Jamie Watson

Scheduling and hourly rates for 3D artists

dylan — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 02:39:37 +0000

I stumbled upon these two blog posts recently by a guy named Jonny Gorden. He has some very good information on how freelancers can determine what rates they should be charging and the importance of scheduling your time. In my experience a lot of freelancers charge way too little for their services because they don’t go through this whole thought process when working out rates. The companies that hire freelancers may balk at the idea of us raising our rates but the goal is not to rip anyone off but to sustain ourselves and our businesses. A lot of good artists get fed up with freelancing because they’re not charging enough and end up going full time at some big company just so they can have some stability. Freelancers have to charge enough to get themselves through the quiet times, to pay their own super, to pay themselves for holiday time, to keep their machine and software up to date and the list goes on. So I urge everyone who cares about their business and wants to stay freelance long term to please read these articles:

Freelance 3D – How to Determine an Hourly Rate
Freelance 3D – Scheduling Your Time

Nestle Club Chocolate

dylan — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 10:00:37 +0000

A couple of months ago I worked on a commercial at Collider in Sydney for Nestle Club Chocolate. The ad went to air about a week ago and has found it’s way on to YouTube. I created all the shading and lighting using Mental Ray area lights and the wonderful mia_material shader in Maya 2008. The fluid simulation shots were created with Realflow.

Please hit the HQ button to get a better quality version of the video.

Credits

Director: Andrew Van Der Westhuyzen
Producer: Pat Dedal
Animation and Technical Direction: Hugh Carrick-Allan
Fluid Simulation: Serge Kovalenko
Shading and Lighting: Dylan Neill
Compositing: Jamie Watson

I’m in the midst of collecting together some behind the scenes material to post so stay tuned!

Emerald at the Park

dylan — Mon, 18 May 2009 01:51:31 +0000

My girlfriend Sarah and I were looking after her niece on Sunday so we took her down to the park near my house.

This is her current ‘smile for the camera’ face:

Here are a couple of great ones that Sarah took:

After the park we went to a local cafe and “did lunch.” She’s so sophisticated with her babycino:

Rosemount Australian Fashion Week

dylan — Thu, 14 May 2009 22:17:31 +0000

A couple of weeks ago I was able to make it down for the last day of Australian Fashion Week to take some photos for a local Internet multimedia company called Orange Toast. It was my first attempt at catwalk photography and it was a fun and hectic day. I’ve got three tips to get good catwalk photos: Location, location, location. Be front and center – it makes all the difference. Usually only the best guys get the good spots in the press pit. One of those guys helped me out on one of the shows which was cool. Another time I just got lucky-ish.

Anyway here are some of the pictures I got on the day.

As you can see for this show I wasn’t front and center. They lose so much impact.

I’m working out some of the kinks in my gallery setup so once thats sorted I’ll post a proper gallery with heaps more shots.