Allan McKay's VFX Showreel _ follow him at http://www.allanmckay.com/courses/
27Cebas VT interviewed Allan McKay, FX Technical Director / Trainer:
http://cebas.com/index.php?pid=testimonial&tid=100
On his amazing creative destruction with thinkingParticles 5 and 6.
Allan is also an expert in several vfx software. Here is an excerpt from the interview:
Cebas: With your incredible skills mentoring like the CGSociety.org 'Destruction Dynamics' (of course, with thinkingParticles as well), are there any other areas of work you have used thinking Particles, besides the film industry? Did you find good avenues for creative work in the advertising field as well?
Allan: I have used Thinking Particles here and there since the version 1.0 and, much more extensively on Blade Trinity and various other films when Thinking Particles 2 came out. In recent years, Thinking Particles has become the backbone for my creative juice and my artists' Destruction Pipeline as well. I have built many custom and proprietary tools around it and invested much of my time in customizing it to be streamlined with my needs and those of my artists. In more recent years I have used TP extensively on everything from Star Trek 2, Transformers 3, The Equalizer, Flight and also for the highly acclaimed super bowl 'God of War' commercial ‘from Ashes’ which involved the lead characters' entire world turning into ashes and breaking apart in a very dramatic sequence.
I use many different software packages, and so my opinion isn’t biased but I will say Thinking Particles is one of the most powerful and flexible pieces of software I have come across, for me – especially for destruction – it’s the foundation of most visual effects pipelines I see. Pretty much every big disaster movie coming out this year (including many of the ‘bigger studios’) utilize thinkingParticles for a lot of their destruction shots. It’s powerful in many other areas too.. but I usually get calls always for destruction!
".... Thinking Particles definitely has a technical mindset. It’s built around the foundation of programming in the sense that it uses rules and conditions to control everything you do. I love this, because in the past scripting particles (which is typically what you had to do in the 90’s and early 2000’s) would require heavy amounts of trigonometry and math, which for me ... hurts my brain! Thinking Particles lets you have access to all of these, but you can visually build it all. You have the building blocks (literally, they’re called nodes) to define almost anything. I personally think this is how everything in 3D outside of animation should be as it means you have total absolute control but while creatively and visually defining it all. Thinking Particles for me means that I can develop a lot of power on the back end and then, I can expose it all to the tools I develop on the front end, this way artists do not necessarily need to worry about the complexity of their set ups (nor share with other team members their tools), they can build tools and make it as easy as clicking a button or changing some values and see all the power come to action ‘under the hood’."
Read full interview http://cebas.com/index.php?pid=testimonial&tid=100
Get more info on Allan's FXTDT 32-weeks intensive, thinkingParticles educational license fully sponsored by cebas Visual Technology, go to http://www.allanmckay.com/courses/