11-20-06

I got some very exciting news today in the form of the first pass of the video for the slaver ants project. The sound effects and music still need to be added in, as well as a round or two of adjustments to the post production special effects. I also think I might need to rerender one scene of the ants due to a bit of a jarring shift in lighting between two of the scenes. All-in-all though it's coming very close to being completed and I am very happy with how it's looking so far.

The ninja is progressing steadily. I'm working on getting his skinning done now and I'll be moving on to the rig in the near future. Once the skinning is complete I'll be posting his skinning test, exciting as that is to most folks besides myself.

11-12-06

I've made quite a bit of progress on the ninja that I started so long ago. The model is, I think, finished and the first round of textures is complete. I think I'll revisit the textures to do some file textures for his hands and feet, instead of just procedurals, but I'll wait til I've gotten more feedback. I've begun the rigging process: I have the bones in place and I've just smooth bound the geometry; so the skinning will be done shortly and then I'll be on to some of the fun challenges for setting him up.

I was also planning on putting my latest painting up in my 2D Gallery but when I opened up the file in Photoshop I discovered that there had been some scanner glitches and I need to rescan it. So I will be waiting til my next update to get this new piece in place.

I believe the video portion of the slaver ants is complete and now it just needs the audio added. I have to talk to Abe, our compositor, to see if I can get a copy of the non-audio version to post up here but, regardless, I think I'll be posting a link to the finished version soon.

10-25-06

The slaver ants project has, most unfortunately, been put on indefinite hold for the time being. Our compositor had an unrecoverable hard drive crash and he lost a ton of stuff. Consequently he has to spend his time recreating a number of projects which are of greater priority than ants stealing clone babies (at least they're a greater priority to some people). In the meantime I've still been able to construct a generalist reel from the pieces of footage I have. Since I've gotten some criticism for having used someone else's model to do skinning tests with, I'm going to go back to the ninja to finish him off completely. Once he's done I'll have another piece to round out both my rigging reel and my generalist reel. Updates should come to that section soon.

I've also added a new section to my gallery for the web design and development I've done in the past couple years.

9-20-06

Progress continues to move forward on the slaver ants project. I've posted almost all the footage in the gallery but a lot of it is in unfinished form. A number of special effects are missing from the shots, which are being put into place now, and some of the footage needed to be rerendered, mostly some shadow work and fixing some bad background problems. I also put the animatic and finished previs up, so the story will make a little more sense. The animatic still cracks me up, especially the turret scene. I've also gathered enough footage to update my rigging demo reel, which is always a good thing, and once the project comes to completion I'll also have enough material to create a generalists reel.

My learning process with rendering has continued, as I discovered that the beginning footage of the ants needed to be rerendered. It turns out that when you render objects into different layers they have to have a black background or they don't work so well with compositors, especially with motion blur. Good to know.

9-10-06

Well I quickly got swamped with a ton of work for the slaver ants project. I thought I would be updating on a more regular basis but I found myself needing to sink in a lot of time just getting it done. As I write this, however, the last render is busily cranking away at work. Not everything has been composited yet but it is well underway and about half of the footage is viewable in the gallery now. I also placed a new video of working with the exploding ant rig, although that will be significantly less interesting to most folks. I must say that I got into a lot of areas of 3D that I hadn't touched before and I learned a ton from the project. I had to do a lot of work with textures and lighting and I had to learn a boatload of stuff to get the rendering to be managable at all. I'm pretty sure I'll have enough material to cut a generalists reel once everything gets completed. The exploding ant has also given me some new material for my rigging reel so I'll be putting that together again in the next couple weeks.

7-17-06

Things are starting to pick up pace with the slaver ants project, I just finished off the first draft of the hover tank's textures and now I just have to add the controls for the animator. A lot of the assests are getting finished now and the animations are almost all blocked out and move closer to completion every day. Soon I'll be having to light and texture all the environments and start dividing them up into render layers. Excitement is building.

7-8-06

At long last I've finished a new demo reel for this year! I've also added another two projects to my gallery, the slaver ants and Leon.

The slaver ants are a continuation of the robo ant animation but is a much larger scale project. Everything is coming together quickly and I should start having some polished looking pieces in that section by the end of the month. The termite was also supposed to be a part of this series, however it was canceled, which is why I got moved over to this project instead. The majority of the rigging has been finished since we're reusing the robo ant rig, but I'm getting to do some modifications, including making it so the ants can explode, as well as a handful of other small rigs.

Leon is the first in a series of projects that I'm undertaking to increase my skinning ability. The model came with The Art of Rigging from the fine folks over at CG Toolkit and looked like so much fun that I couldn't resist starting with him. I have several small videos of skinning tests as well as a pose test to check out.

5-8-06

Another decent update to the website, but this one was a bit of a hodgepodge update rather than one large project. All the video on the site has been converted over to Flash video, which means streaming, smaller file sizes and it will work with any browser so long as you have the Flash 8 player (shame on you if you don't).

I have the start of a new project listed in my gallery for the robotic termite. The model is complete and the texturing is mostly complete. Once the termite gets in its actual environment I'm sure some tweaking will have to occur but otherwise it's in its final form. The next step is rigging, which, like the textures, will probably just be an adaptation of what's already there for the ant.

The last addition is a quick runthrough of the ant's rig. I thought it might make sense to post a video of it, since that is my main focus in 3D. I'm most happy with the antenna setup on it; I was pretty proud of getting the nice adapted spine control for it.

4-2-06

A number of good things to talk about today. First and foremost, the robot ant is finally complete. It has met with approval from those above me and we have begun preproduction on the next animation, a termite mound creation. This next one will be a bit more complex and present some new challenges, but I'm really excited about getting to continue work on these.

Next up, I have a new section for the scripts I've been working on. I also have a new script in there for putting clusters on a curve. Not nearly as complex as the last one I created but still very useful. I will continue to write scripts and post them here in the future, but I will be writing them as the need arises instead of taking a huge amount of time to go off on a script writing tangent. Now I'm going to start focusing in on getting a lot of models skinned and setup.

Last and not least, I have a few new additions to my 2D art gallery. I've started working on much simpler pieces that can be finished in a couple hours instead of a couple weeks. So far I'm happy with the results but it's a definite departure from the extremely detailed style I had when free time was in greater abundance for me. It's been a careful balance between keeping up with the job training and my 3D work as well as having the free time to do art work; I'm just happy that I'm still producing artwork.

3-19-06

Excitement! I have completed my first real script. The Ik Fk Switch script is complete. It was a great learning experience and I think I got something very functional out of it all. The last step, the UI, took longer than I thought it would. It's very similar to and completely different than HTML. Learning how to work within the layout and then find the various inputs to pass to the main function was just different enough that I had to look things up at almost every step of the way, but overall the layout concepts were the same. The download contains a text file with instructions on installation and usage. Please email me if you have any comments, questions or find any bugs.

3-8-06

It's been a while since my last post. I'm so very close to being finished with a few projects but I wanted to get at least a small update for the site. The person who was supposed to do the lighting for the ant project ended up not being able to do it, so I had to try and figure something out, which was a brave new adventure for me. I tried doing final gather, which looks awesome in still images, but I found out it falls apart during animation. So I ended up doing a lighting array and a shadow light and trying to get as close as I could to what final gather had promised. It's not quite there yet but there was enough for Abe to composite a first pass of the project. The video is very compressed and much, much smaller than what the final will be.

In other news, I have decided to put the Tech Ninja on hold in favor of practicing my skinning a lot more. I'm talking to various good modelers around my school and seeing if they have some spare character models they can donate to my cause. Even though I will be focusing on getting really good skinning, I plan on creating full rigs for all the characters I get. In an effort to speed this process up I'm working on a number of scripts that will dramatically decrease my rigging time. My first script is something to set up ik fk switching automatically on any length of joint chain. The script is completely working and even has error checking in place, but I still plan on putting a GUI in for a few options. Once that is complete I'll have a whole new section for scripts in my gallery, which will be free to download and hopefully some other people can get some use out of them.

1-16-06

Here it is a new year and a new update and I have quite a bit of stuff to be updating with. I've had the exciting opportunity to be participating in a 3D production for my university. It's going to be several animations to help market a new degree that the university is offering, artificial life. The first animation is using an ant to show some of the principles behind a robotic insect learning to walk. This is the first time that the university's undertaking a 3D animation production, so there's a bit of a learning process going on right now, but I'm getting to do quite a bit more than just rigging. I created the concept art, model, rigged it and textured it. Trent Kollodge is working on the animation right now (and is almost finished with it), Sam Hernandez is working on the lighting, and after it's all complete Abe Stopani will be editing it together. The ant is starting to look pretty polished and I'm excited to see it all coming together. After this there will be another two animations in the same vein, so it looks like I'll have some nicely completed work for my demo reel. I have to admit the most exciting thing is getting to actually work on 3D for an entire shift every few days.

The other part to the update is that I've actually started work on the Tech Ninja project I've been wanting to do for a while now. The concept art went through several refinements and now I'm starting on the modeling. I don't have too terribly much to show now but this project should see continual updates for the next couple months.