the atomicbigwheel show

Maya / Max License Transfer Utility Error

2011-10-07T06:41:00.000-07:00

I recently had to transfer my Maya 2011 license between two laptops and the LTU wouldn't launch. With a little research I found the solution*. If the LTU won't launch and you're left in the lurch without your software, you can delete the following files and relaunch Maya:

Win XP / 7

C:\ProgramData\FLEXnet\adskflex_*.data

Win XP
C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\FLEXnet\adskflex_*.data

*Original post

Open Position - Full-time Interactive Designer

2011-09-22T10:27:00.000-07:00

Interactive Designer
The Basement Design + Motion
Indianapolis, IN USA

We are actively seeking a motivated, organized and detailed interactive designer to join our talented team. The right candidate has a passion for design, gaming, animation and innovation. They have a desire to learn, share & grow.

Must haves:

Excellent communication skills with clients and internal project team
Proficiencies with a pencil, PhotoShop & Illustrator
2+ years working within the interactive creative process
Eye for composition, typography & interface design
Proven agency experience
Bachelor’s degree in Graphic Design or related field

Good to knows:

Illustration, 3ds Max or Maya experience a major plus
Experience designing online display advertising a plus
Experience designing style boards for motion
Experience designing for mobile & tablets

What you’ll be doing:

Working with award-winning illustrators, designers, animators & developers
Collaborating with agencies on world-class projects
Working with international brands

How to apply:

Please send URLs of your work examples / portfolio site to jobs@thebasement.tv

The Basement Design + Motion is a growing digital design and animation studio located in Historic Fort Ben, in Indianapolis. Please refer to www .thebasement .tv to learn more.
EOE

AMA Flight School - Peek Inside

2011-07-13T08:37:00.000-07:00

Lately at The Basement, we've been awarded some very interesting projects. One I'm quite excited about is a learning platform we are developing for the AMA called the AMA Flight School. The AMA is the Academy of Model Aeronautics and has been around since 1936. The learning platform will be used to educate their audience on varying aspects of flight. Here is a first look at title screen design for the module - Principles of Flight.

An early pitching sketch during a brainstorming session with the client. We live on whiteboards here at The Basement.

We've done around 30 -40 character sketches up to this point. We studied poses, character lines and expressions. In our initial concept, we had an elephant as one of our three characters. We really liked the Elephant, but switched to a flying Walrus for educational accuracy.

Here is Dan's Elephant sketch and Joseph's model.

The logo was inspired from pilot wing pins. Here's my first sketch for the logo.

The Walrus has made his introduction into design at this point.

Another consideration for the logo and title screen was maintaining a pleasing silhouette with all the characters. We carefully posed each asset to create interesting negative space.

Actually, the plane was added to the top left to compliment the negative space and the vapor trail was used to visually tie everything together.

Some technical details: The characters and plane started out on a sketchbook, modeled and textured in Maya. The logo is all vector in illustrator. The vapor trail was built with Particle Flow in 3ds Max. All compositing and layout was done in PhotoShop.

My main objectives for this project are education and appeal. This is driving every creative decision throughout the process.

Hope you liked seeing our progress - stay tuned for the official project launch.

Also, the AMA is celebrating their 75th year with a family event this weekend. More information can be found HERE.

Announcing the 49 Hour Film Competition

2011-03-09T08:34:00.000-08:00

Grab four friends, a mountain of coffee beans and as many computers you can put on a farm.

It's time for the MG Collective's first annual 49 Hour Film Competition. The 49 Hour Film Competition is an animation ONLY event based on the 48 Hour Film Project with an extra hour for rendering. The competition begins April 1^st at 6pm. Registration ends March 30^th. Teams are limited to five (5) members. Two categories include Student and Professional. Students can enter in the professional category, however a professional can not participate in the student category. The competition will be judged by national artists and animators from Sony Animation, Fusion Digital Productions & Industrial Light & Magic. Films will be evaluated on these categories: Storytelling / Art Direction / Animation / Execution

Friendly recommendations:
Teams “should” consist of a designer, storyboard / concept artist, generalist and two (2) animators. Teams can use pre-modeled and rigged characters as long as they have rights to those assets. Start securing your location and production pipeline prior to April 1^st.

Registration:
Registration forms can be downloaded HERE.

This PDF is form based. Once you fill in your team's information, save it as TEAM_NAME_49Hour_registration.pdf and email it 49hour@mgcollective.com

After the competition and judging we will have a screening event and announce winners at The Elbow Room in downtown Indianapolis. The screening event date and time are TBD.

for more information contact:
Brian Phillips brian at mgcollective dot com
or Andy Beane at jabeane at bsu dot edu

WIP - Animation Scenes

2010-10-11T13:34:00.001-07:00

Be careful, you never know who is listening.

My First Maya Render :)

2010-10-05T13:45:00.000-07:00

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 :)

WIP - Character Set

2010-09-23T14:10:00.000-07:00

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

WIP - Music Video

2010-09-15T07:21:00.000-07:00

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.

finally painting in 2010

2010-07-06T18:09:00.000-07:00

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

WIP screens

2010-05-19T13:32:00.000-07:00

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.

Update on the "Boss Frog" shot

2010-05-14T13:54:00.000-07:00

"Boss Frog" scene WIP / Breakdown

2010-04-13T10:45:00.000-07:00

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.

Freestyled Head Model

2010-02-15T12:43:00.000-08:00

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.

UPTV ID

2010-02-10T19:47:00.000-08:00

WIP

2010 Oscar Naminations for Best Animated Short

2010-02-02T11:12:00.000-08:00

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/

2010 Show Reel Intro

2009-12-11T09:40:00.000-08:00

Here is the intro for my 2010 motion graphics show reel. I used a couple of new distortion effects on this: Flo Motion, CC Smear & Displacement Map.

Joseph's Rhino Man

2009-09-18T10:15:00.001-07:00

Joseph sent me a rough model he was working on in Maya at home. He said he wanted to stay "sharp" on his Maya skills. So I brought it into Max and started playing with VRay's SSS2 shader. We talked about the character being a Rhinoceros Samurai. Here's a simple test.

Virgin Millionaires Album Art

2009-09-02T06:11:00.000-07:00

Recently, I received an invitation to design the album art for the Virgin Millionaires' new CD. We ended up going with a DigiPack layout which is more friendly to design. Here is the outside cover (front, back and inner art). I don't typically do print, but I must say, there is something about holding my work in my hand. The CD is now in stores at Best Buy and FYE.

Artifical Paradise

2009-09-01T10:06:00.000-07:00

Here is an inspiring short film from JP Frenay.

This is from the Vimeo page:
Artificial Paradise, Inc is an experimental film anticipating a future where a major corporation has developed an unique software, based on organic virtual reality, which holds all the lost memories of humankind. A user connects to this database of the forgotten…what is he searching for?

Selected at the ONEDOTZERO festival in the WOW+FLUTTER 09 category onedotzero.com/programme.php?id=373&event=31216

Selected for the Autodesk 2009 Siggraph Show Reel
youtube.com/watch?v=Gj5tLOMxLOU&feature=player_embedded :

Production : Condor
Director / editor / compositing : Jean-Paul Frenay
Main 3D artist / compositing : Sandro Paoli
3D artists : Sylvain Jorget and Sébastien Desmet
Additional 3D operators : Otto Heinen and Okke Voerman
Sound Design : Seal Phüric feat. Neptunian8

PSST!3 Indianapolis Screening Trailer

2009-08-19T18:59:00.000-07:00

Here's the offical event trailer:

PSST!3 Indianapolis Screening 9.11.09

2009-08-12T20:38:00.000-07:00

After months of preparation, I can finally announce the event and provide solid details!!! PSST!3 is a series of 17 collaborative short films in which a different group of artists work on the beginning, middle and end. It's an animated version of an Exquisite Corpse. The screening is on Friday, September 11th at Big Car Gallery on Virginia Avenue and costs $5. The film will screen twice; once at 8PM and again at 9:30PM. This film has been screened in many cities including New York, LA, London, Tokyo and Amsterdam. This will be the first screening in the Midwest. Please come out and enjoy this surreal animated experience with me.

Presenting at the Flash Users Group

2009-06-24T09:23:00.000-07:00

I will be presenting tomorrow night (Thursday, June 25th) at the Indianapolis Flash Users Group meeting. I'll discussing a recent design project I did for Mr. Clean Carwash. Here's some text from the event description (in this case "He" is "Me"):

"He will discuss the idea, inspiration, sketch, process and final design comp. He will share some of his techniques in PhotoShop and 3ds Max. Afterwords, we will open the floor for questions about tools, concepts, and anything else design related."

The meeting will be at Nothing But Noodles (near IUPUI) with drinks afterwards at McNivens.

New Basement site 3D still

2009-06-22T13:46:00.000-07:00

Here is a still from our new release of www.thebasement.tv. Joseph and I have been working on this on and off for the past couple of weeks. Joseph killed the furnace model! It kinda looks like a spraycan. This entire scene was modeled and animated in Max 2009, rendered with VRay 1.5 and composited using the EXR pipeline in AfterEffects. We will also use Max2AE to implement the interface elements (buttons) that will be in the scene. I try and get out of Max and into AfterEffects as soon as I can. This is a WIP so I'll post progress.

VRay RT demo videos

2009-06-22T06:43:00.000-07:00

Here are some demo videos on VRay RT. VRay RT is an ActiveShade renderer that complements the VRay production renderer. Apparently, It uses CPUs on your network to provide the image. Mental Ray introduced the final gather preview which I found helpful when tweaking physical settings that can be counter-intutive at times. I found leaning Vray very challenging because of the "tweak and wait" pipeline. This should help artists new to VRay.

Conner Prairie Brand TV Spot :30

2009-05-06T11:36:00.000-07:00

Final Spot:

Here the newest spot we produced alongside Publicis for Conner Prairie. This was one of the smoothest projects I've worked on. I worked with the agency from initial concept and scripting through design and animation. I learned so much during this project. My biggest lesson was the importance of the pre-planning phase, specifically writing a treatment and the animatic. I've included our final animatic.

Visually, I wanted to create a world of cutouts similar to the ones I made in shoe boxes as a child. I wanted the frame as a whole to be rich and have depth, but individual elements needed to have imperfections. Darren and I wanted to do something visually different for this market. Hopefully, this stands out!

Animatic:

The animatic was extremely critical to the spot. It allowed us to effectively communicate our ideas to the client and spend more time polishing the layout and animation.

Credits
Agency: Publicis Indianapolis
Animation Studio: The Basement Design + Motion
Audio Production: Earshot Audio - Post
Creative Director: Darren Halbig
Account Executive: Kara Warner
Director / Art Director: Brian Phillips
Producer: Ross Woods
Photography: Darren Halbig / Brian Phillips
Illustration / Board Artist: Dan Thomson
Design / Animator: Joseph Cross