Monday, October 11, 2010

Tuesday, October 5, 2010

My First Maya Render :)

I've been going through Maya training with Joseph today. I finally got deeper into the program. There are certainly things I like about Maya, but there are a number of "wishlist" items. First off, I'm going to miss the camera tools within cam view. Its going to take a while to get use to the camera never being "locked down" like in Max. Having the same orbit options for both "perspective" view and camera view will be confusing. I really like the Frame feature, snap to vertex, the global sub-object mode, Extrude, Bevel and the Split Face Tool. Plus the History panel with editable attributes is extremely helpful, truly a great feature! I wish I could escape out of a tool, instead of jumping to the move tool. The curves are a royal pain in the "a". However I like the fact that Beizer handles are selectable, but breaking the handles into a Beizer Corner is very wasteful and critical to pipeline. I will miss the renderable spline feature of max, hopefully that will get added. The outliner is awesome, I love the parenting feature. So much more intuitive than max. Another nice feature is the way you can edit the frame range display similar to After Effects. That was always a hassle in Max. I did have a nice Pez dispenser modeled as an exercise, but Maya crashed. Not having a "save scene on crash" feature will be missed. That has saved my ass so many times.


This is what I get after 12 years in 3ds Max ... watch out now :)

Thursday, September 23, 2010

WIP - Character Set


Character's I'm designing for an upcoming animation project.

Wednesday, September 15, 2010

WIP - Music Video

Lately, I've been spending my evenings working on a music video for a nation recording artist with my friend Derrick Dawson. We're developing around 30 seconds of anime inspired flashbacks within the live-action video. Cuong Tran has been helping with matte painting. Here's one of the finished shots. We're planning to present a breakdown at MG Collective.

Tuesday, July 6, 2010

finally painting in 2010

It took me a while but I got out and painted a couple weeks ago. Its been almost a year for me. Anyway, here are flicks from the day. The killer Whale is mine, inspired from a book I was reading to my son moments before I left. For me its less about "getting up" and more about "being up".



Sacred

6 Cents


Relic

Wednesday, May 19, 2010

WIP screens

We've been working on a large animation gig at the studio. Here are some of my stills. Pretty rad setup in AE ...maybe I'll do a breakdown at MG Collective if anyone's interested.


Tuesday, April 13, 2010

"Boss Frog" scene WIP / Breakdown

Lately, we've been working on a shot for an upcoming agency presentation. We developed this Toad character (Jacob calls him "Boss Frog") as a concept. Joseph, Dan, Amy and I did a quick brainstorming session to get the general direction.



Once we agreed on a general direction, Joseph developed the pose drawings and began the modeling process. We are in the process of integrating 3ds max 2010 into our pipeline and wanted to tryout the new Graphite Tools. We're very pleased with the the improved edge loop tools, especially the Flow Connect. Although I've found 2009 to be a more stable release. Once we had the base model, Joseph used Mudbox to sculpt details and paint the texture which he then refined in PhotoShop.





The biggest challenge was the rigging and skinning process since the character doesn't have any define features such as a neck. So getting a balanced weight blend on his envelopes was a great exercise. I used a rigging technique that starts with a character studio biped, snapshots it to a mesh and refines the rest of the rig using standard IK solvers and constraints. Here is the first walk cycle:



In addition, we're working MatchMoving into this concept. Here's the raw plate we are using.



I'll post the final shot once it's complete.

Monday, February 15, 2010

Freestyled Head Model

Last night I started playing around in max and wanted to work on my character modeling techniques. Anymore, I do not get to work on the "craft" as much as the "hurry up and pitch". So I started with this technique of laying out my edge loops with a plane and building out the face from it. it worked really well!! Here's progress on a model. It feels good to be inspired, although its frustrating to be rusty. This is starting to look like a guy I use to work with named Dave.



Wednesday, February 10, 2010

Tuesday, February 2, 2010

2010 Oscar Naminations for Best Animated Short

Here are the 2010 nominations for the Best Animated Short. I'll keep my vote to myself.

French Roast:
Fabrice O. Joubert, director (Pumpkin Factory/Bibo Films)


Granny O'Grimm's Sleeping Beauty:
Nicky Phelan, director, and Darragh O’Connell, producer (Brown Bag Films)


Logorama:
Nicolas Schmerkin, producer (Autour de Minuit)


A Matter of Loaf and Death:
Nick Park, director (Aardman Animations Ltd.)


The Lady and the Reaper (La Dama y la Muerte):
Javier Recio Gracia, director (Kandor Graphics and Green Moon)
http://212.227.136.88/press/