Fighting the urge to be unproductive, I locked myself in the house for the past few days to get some work done on a new character TD demo.  Been under the weather anyhow and didn’t feel like doing much else, not even surf *gasp!*.  Here it is in all it’s beautiful animator friendly simplicity.  I plan on extending this demo with character animation tools.  I can’t wait to get away from creating demos and rendering video and go back to actually programming and rigging stuff!  I have so much more advanced rigging techniques to show and some that haven’t gotten to a finished stage on my characters yet so stay tuned.

Read more

 

My résumé is regularly updated and can be downloaded/viewed here.

Animation/TD Show Reel

Read more

 

It’s been long enough. The intention to get back to blogging, probably the most enriching things that the internet can be used for, is not as easy as it the benefit would lead one to believe. It is often the hardest these sort of things in life that have the greatest benefit that go without being utilized, but that changes now with the mother of all instigators, New Years Day.

What’s the topic of the year that is a continuation and solidification of growing interest in the previous year? What else, the ubiquitous topic across the blog-o-sphere; filtering, utilizing and leveraging the mind-numbingly viral growth of open source hardware and software, DIY, Hacktivism, Public Domain, and Creative Commons information to engage in gratuitous amounts of geekery, life/career hacking.

Expect expositions in 2012 on topics in addition to the aforementioned and the regular posts on 3d animation and tech art ranging in this list of interests:

Linux
C-Shell Scripting
Python
Arduino
Use of hobby as a way of making money
Dynamic DNS
Game Dev
Futurism
Virtual Computing

Hopefully shedding some light on some of the fundamentals will blaze trails for others that are interested to get started in the most noble of activities of the modern era, one that is being affected by movements like SOPA; developing and sharing software and media and artist entrepreneurialism.

 

How I've felt for so long about working in VFX/Anim industry.

My first project

Done!  After a few weeks of back and forth and interviews I finally landed the job of my dreams, well, for the time being.  Blue Sky has always been on the radar as a potential and it’s finally a reality.  It’s everything I could ask for in an employer and more.

Don’t think that it’s going to stop me from being active on my blog though, quite the opposite!  Well, maybe the first month or two starting now there will be a pause, but after that it will increase.  I’m super excited to learn and share knowledge with people and stay really connected and dedicated to innovating personal and industry wide workflows, tech, and of course animation.  Technical animation and tech art to be specific is what I’ll be working on in the coming months, same as usual.

Thanks to everyone that’s been involved in the process of landing this, you know who you are!  I don’t think they know yet what a valuable asset they just acquired but soon they will find out just how serious I am about the work I do and how inspired I can be!

 

I took the VRay shader library from what Oliver Markowski, creator of Full Blown Images, compiled and married it with the shader warehouse resources provided by Sunday Pipeline, took out this and that, renamed, dusted off, and reorganized everything.  All assets were renamed according to strict naming convention to minimize confusion and to facilitate faster searching.  All this on my free time, which I’ve had quite a lot the past few days.  Well, go ahead and grab it because it’s quite a library to have in your arsenal.  It’s all free to use.

Sunday Pipeline is the way to go.  If you haven’t installed it yet, head over there, read up on it, and give it a try.  They are updating it with new scripts often.  It’s a simplified asset manager that houses everything from shaders to geometry to a script repo, and best of all, programmed in Python.

I’ll be updating this .rar from time to time now with VRay shaders from the internet and what I create or use on my own.

Sunday Pipeline Warehouse hosted by CGHijinks

All links in this post

Browser for the Asset Library

Add and Remove Assets

Create/Customize/Get Crazy!

Read more

 

A fellow classmate from a while back, Jeff Gabor, has been putting up these really interesting reels that exhibit the capturing of a performance of an animator and translating that to a character.  We in the animation biz like to call that animation.  Tried and true, it’s the best solution there is to getting characters full of life!

use password: “education”

On a serious note, take a look at this post (link below)  challenging Andy Serkis’ statements that actors deserve Academy recognition at the same time completely disregarding the role of the animation team it takes to make a character lifelike and engaging.  While I think this shouldn’t be put squarely on Andy’s shoulders, He being the mocap spokesperson and Weta both definitely should have something to say about their actions most recently displayed in a making of video that completely neglects to have any footage about animators working hard to translate and polish the performance onto the digital character.

They must have some highly pissed animators working for them. It’s also stirring up emotions of other animators who are or who have been in the same position.   I know how it feels as an animator being left out of credits and getting no recognition working at Image Metrics, again a production run completely as if the software was doing all the work.

Be sure to take a look at the video half-way through Tim’s post.

 

From Director/Animator Alex Curtis comes his debut animated short that I luckily got to work on as a freelance pro bono character rigger/td.  Here’s a work in progress reel and Kaylee the character I rigged and supervised rigging the hair and goggles with the help of my friend Suchan.  Keep in mind this demo is months old at this point and a newer one is out that is password protected so I cannot share until later.

Kaylee showin' off her moves

Stay tuned!  The final is looking good!  Should be any day now…

 

Suchan, a buddy from Nepal, just broke the independent game dev facial performance capture animation barrier.  He deserves kudos for getting it to this stage.  This would be such a valuable asset to any gaming company if he brings it to the next level or even at this stage I suspect.  Suchan is on a solo climb of Mount Mocap and while he is a base camp right now, I expect he could make the difficult summit by himself!    Nice job!

I wonder how much harder it would be to actually be able to do facial mocap from your smart phone directly to a character in Maya or Unity app without any markers, to me that’s Everest.  It is, however, a tangible goal these days for developers and all the freely available mocap tech that’s on the market these days.

 

This demo illustrates the steps taken to develop a character from concept sketches to finished facial rig in a simplified format. This is an actual rig I developed with the use of proprietary rigging tools in Maya utilized daily at work so I’m not going to demo those tools. However, future installments will incorporate the use of tools that I have written and that you can use to aide the building of complex facial rigs such as this, and include overviews of more advanced rigging techniques. I would also like to break the process down into chunks to really go into more detail about things you should be thinking about if you are trying to rig a face. This is an ongoing process so stay tuned, I have lot’s of useful tips to share.

Read more

 

Find Out How to Turn Custom Text to Realistic Metallic Objects

Read more