Our Green Screen Stage

Posted on September 22nd, 2008 in The Company, Technical by Marc Bourbonnais

A nice thing about having a lot of space: one thing we wanted to get going at Modus was to set up a ready-to-use shooting stage. We’re trying out a permanent green screen for the moment. We have already used our studios for shooting extra FX material for one of our film projects, so we are very happy to have a dedicated setup, right in our building!

As you can see in the pictures, it’s a very simple build, drywall, plywood floor and luan sheets for those nice rounded corners. Next in the process: lighting. We do not know if we want to build a permanent fixture or go for rentals when need be.

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Montreal Houdini User Group

Posted on September 17th, 2008 in Software, CG Community by Marc Bourbonnais

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The Montreal Houdini User Group will have a showing tomorrow, Thursday September 18. It will be hosted by François Duchesneau, Houdini artist and technical animator at Modus. He will be doing a presentation on shattering and controlling objects with Houdini. Similar to “BlastCode” and comparable solutions, he will be using a texture to break up objects and then driving pieces with particle setups instead of straight simulations. The meeting will take place at Oxy-Jeunes at 2020 rue De la visitation in Montreal.
François has been driving the MHUG for a year now; you can check out his website for Houdini tutorials, demo files and of course news from the User Group.



ADAPT 2008

Posted on September 6th, 2008 in CG Community by Marc Bourbonnais

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The //ADAPT 2008 site is up!
The third edition of ADAPT will happen on September 22-26 at the Pepsi Forum in Montreal. A good change from the Hyatt; good hotel but not the best venue for a conference like this one.
Modus will be around, lots of stuff to check out, hope to see you around!



Will Smith and VFX

Posted on September 4th, 2008 in Uncategorized by Marc Bourbonnais

This just resurfaced on a few discussion lists… Here is a short excerpt from a Will Smith interview on 60 minutes(2) a few months ago:

60min: “You’ve been in a lot of movies with special effects. Was that calculated?”

WS: “Absolutely! … [My manager and I] got the top ten movies of all time, and we realized 10 out of 10 were special effects movies, 9 out of 10 were special effects movies with creatures, and 8 out of 10 were special effects movies with creatures and a love story. So, Independence Day and Men in Black were really no brainers.”

Priceless.