futbol!

Quick painting done today while watching Argentina beat Mexico in the World Cup round of 16! Done in Photoshop, about 2.5 hours. Next up Germany!

Series of Tubes

Made a quick portfolio site using flavors.me. It was pretty easy to set up and get looking good quickly, because you can interactively make changes to the site using their design panel. Their site system has its limits though so I might try one of the other portfolio sites like weebly.

I'm still working on this site somewhat, but I just wanted a place to be able to quickly put up my demo reel and other things.

Check it out!!!!

gray hills

Trying to do more speed painting. This one done in grayscale to practice value a bit, still needs more range. Done in Photoshop, about 25 minutes.

the pixar process

Found this cool little breakdown of the typical pixar process for a shot from Toy Story 3 on the facebook fan page. These are the steps they typically go through from start to finish for each shot.

First, the story artist creates the storyboard for the shot. This one is from Sequence # 300 - Warm Welcome, where the toys are welcomed by Lotso and tour the Butterfly room at Sunnyside Daycare, drawn by Jeff Pidgeon.

Then, a color key will be created to capture the mood, color, and lighting of a shot that will help the lighting artists. This one was done by Toy Story 3 Art Director Dice Tsutsumi.

Next is the layout phase where the camera is staged and the characters are put where they will be in the shot.

Now, the animation is done for all the primary and secondary characters. Textures have also begun to be applied.

Finally, lighting, shading, and cloth/fur simulations are applied and combined with everything that came before it to give us the final frame.

Nice to see the process like this in screenshots. There is a short article on Pixar and Toy Story 3 on the new Wired magazine, check it out!

R+H reel

Finished a new demo reel the other day that I submitted to Rhythm & Hues for their animation apprentice program this summer.

Tried to get a good range of different animation, some acting, some body mechanics, but also keep it pretty short. This reel is a little different than the one I sent in. The other one had a little bar at the bottom with breakdown info for each shot.

Hopefully I hear back from them at least!

north & south Trailer

Been a while since the last post, but was busy with finals and graduation stuff. I did get my animated short finished back at the end of April. I won't be posting the full short online just yet since I plan on submitting it to a few animation festivals. Many of you have already seen the full short in person, but here is a really short trailer I put together for those that have not seen it yet.

Should have some new animations and reel done soon.

passes

Been busy trying to finish this project. I am getting closer to the end, and I should have the animation done in a week. I wanted to do a few render layers for this project if I had the time, so I spent a day troubleshooting and getting things working.

After many different attempts I found a way that works well for zdepth and ambient occlusion passes. This is what the beauty shot that combines diffuse, zdepth, and occlusion passes. It also has a little bit of color correction.

Here's the render straight from Maya so you can compare.

Here's the depth pass.

And here's the occlusion pass.

All of these renders are still using fairly low final gather settings, but I might render with higher settings depending on how much time I have to render.