As promised, presenting the first rhys-works.com visual effects presentation. CK Hicks provides insight into his demo reel, describing matte painting processes and his work on Threads of Destiny.


This is a great 5 minute piece dedicated to the shots on CK’s demo reel, be sure to check out his website at CKhicks.com, too.

It’s been a little while since we’ve had an update around here, so i thought i’d better let you all know about the situation as it is of the moment.


In respect to new tutorials - they are coming. I promise i will get at least one done over the Christmas period. The trouble at the moment is due to that of circumstances; my current residence does not lend itself well to quiet recording conditions, and secondly, i’m working an inordinate amount of hours a week as a computer scientist. I’ve had a number of requests in for the Rain Over Troubled Water tutorial and the Falling Drop sequence, the latter still being perfected and will almost definitely be released as a public tutorial. The former, i’m considering as an addition on the first (critically acclaimed) rhys-works.com dvd feature.

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Geekza.com have just recently trumped their George Takei interview with the new Billy West interview, the voice of popular characters from far and wide (think Futurama, Doug, Ren and Stimpy) so be sure to check out the interview at geekza.com, which marks the end of their usual podcasts and the start of a new direction the hosts are taking the site in so be sure to check in at the site and watch this space into the future.

The new site has gone down pretty well and i’m glad to see that we’re still working well within our bandwidth with plenty of room to expand. The site is pretty popular lately, we’ve been featured in the P2L newsletter for the V for Vendetta tutorial and had a handful of enquiries from various (and significant) VFX and tutorial groups around the net. Thanks to everyone who’s made kind comments on the latest batch of tutorials.


So on the topic of tutorials, if you guys have got any requests for AE feel free to send them in via comment on this post. I can’t guarentee i’ll be making each one of them but i’m interested in what people want to see, whether they’re interested in more academic AE instruction or more specific effects, and so on, so let me know.

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Ever played a MUD? They’re online text-based games. Don’t give me that look. You like World of Warcraft, so you’ll like this better. The difference between a MUD and something like WoW (apart from the lack of graphics) is that MUDs have been developing for years, and the one i recommend to all, elephant MUD, has been around for about 15 years.


It would take me days to explain every reason why you should play a MUD. Suffice to say, in terms of your WoW comparison, they’re far more developed, detailed, and involving. Honestly. As to why you should play this one, because i play it, and i’ve played a lot in my time, and this one has kept my interest for about six years, and half of the players there still think i’m new.

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Over at theforce.net this year we’re running a new kind of competition, those of you who are familiar with the fanfilms forum will probably know about the the Lightsaber Choreography Competition that spawned work such as RvD and RvB, but i’ve got something a little different for you to take a look at, namely, the Harry Potter Wand Duel Competition.

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The new website is up. There’s even content in all the sections, although not as much as there will be. The code section specifically has taken a holiday for now, but will probably return sooner or later. But, most importantly there’s a lot of new tutorials up and i’ve got plans for a whole load more, so look out for that.


Oh yeh, and i have this blog thing now, so feel free to leave comments on anything. All the tutorials have an entry. Also, as a slight experiment i have a myspace page open you can find the link to at the bottom of the page for quick contact and random info, so we’ll see how that goes and what happens.

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A quick tutorial on setting up a multi-machine render using After Effects. Simple, but effective. This allows you to set up a system on your home network (if you have one) to utitlise your spare computers to render individual frames and return them to the server to get through your image sequence faster; very useful for those long renders and when you can spare the power.

The Matrix Raining Code:Reloaded, this time with Particular and a much more stylised kind of effect using a custom particle. I’ll be going on to make something on this in 3D but still in AE, using AE’s 3d space to adapt the effect which is looking pretty good at the moment, but you might have to wait a while before it’s finished. Regardless, this is a cool effect.


The font used can be found here

Another link in the chain on the Particular season, this one is made up purely using Particular (well, almost) and as demonstrated can be put to use to come up with a number of different and interesting kinds of effects, i touch on this a little in on the VFX page too.