A Trip to Granny's won Best of Show, and Best Animated Short at the Newtek Wavy Awards!
Archive

04/04/04

I am trying to finish up this huge project. It consists of using the human muscular system model/rig I created last year to show what muscles are flexed/used during different exercises. I am about 3/4 the way done animating 120 exercises. This DVD is being made for one of the largest fitness chains, and will be marketed/sold internationally. I had to model ~80 different exercise machines as well, which was a lot harder than I thought it would be, as it's hard to gauge the size right to fit the human in. I also made the 3D menu system on the DVD itself, which I put a video of in the Artwork section. This is the first project I have 'produced', and it's weird to have so much on my plate, but then have to keep everything in perspective as far as managing the people working under me, and making sure we're on taget as a whole to meet all deadlines.

11/13/03

I have been working on some facial rigs; posted a vid of one in the Animation section here. I'm also working on an interesting project. Can't post any pics though, maybe in a bit.

09/17/03

Someone told me that "A Trip to Granny's" has been playing on television in Sweden!? That's really odd. I hope we don't somehow get sued by Dewolf Music. But then again it was used without our permission, so I doubt it. I'm so glad that I still frequently hear about the animation a year after it's completion.

I found some time to start working on a Self Portrait: [Wireframe], and have added some new MEL and batch scripts available for download, as well as some Maya and Houdini powered games.

The Lightwave 3D Visual Crash Reference Guide is now up and online at Lightwave.Embarrasses.Us.
Send me some unique LW crash screens!

08/27/03

I was talking to someone last week about a prospective job, and they asked me how difficult it would be to adapt my open ocean shader to have the water fall into a huge crack or gap; as if the earth just cracked open and the ocean swells rolled right into the crack. Originally I thought it would be a very, very difficult shot, but in the car I figured out a pretty easy to way to achieve the shot, I only wish LW would allow you to change the deformation order (displace _BEFORE_ bones and morphs please?). I never really had much time to mess with HyperVoxls, but everything's faster on my new laptop. In the end I used HV sprites to speed along the render, the "swatch" is created in a way that would allow you to easily make a really long shelf by replacing 1 object and 1 image. Here is a test I created in about 2 hours of foolin around:
[OceanTest - 200K DivX]

07/04/03

A good friend of mine is going to start at a studio creating a cel shaded skate game a la ~ Jet Set Radio Future; we started talking about vertex shaders and real-time cel shading, and I explained what I thought was a great stylized cel shade trick. A long time ago I had thought up what I believed could be a really great way to make thick lines around the contour of objects, and I was surprised to see it used later in JSRF (I'm pretty sure they used it for power-ups and other items).

In the past few years a few people had asked me to write up a little tutorial about it, but it's so simple in theory, I never really took the time. Though recently a few people in #Lightwavers and #Maya on IRC convinced me to write this quick tutorial, So here it is:

Thick Lines for Real-Time Cel Shading

UPDATE: If I would have known CGChannel.com was going to link this, I would have spent more than 5 mins throwing it together! I will make an in depth tutorial when I have more time.

06/07/03

In the past few months I have worked on some pretty interesting projects. Unfortunately I can't post any images of most of them. Not for a while anyhow. I have created some simple characters from my sketchbook outside of work, but it's hard to find the time to do anything decent/complicated.

[Penganzee] (600K QT)

I have also been working on a fully animable human musculature system. It has pretty much every muscle you can flex, all rigged to flex correctly linked to a global flex amount for said position. For instance if the rig is raising his arm lifting something, he flexes accordingly, but I can then tailor the amount of overall flex of those muscles depending how heavy the object is/looks. I have to animate this through 130 shots, so the rig has to be solid. Here's a test render:
[Muscle Simulation01]

More to come later.

01/14/03

I’ve been working on some nationally syndicated commercial spots. This was a rush job I did in a day or two, but I like it. I actually got to break some new ground. The strength of the luminosity map for the lights on the dark side of the earth is proportional to the inverse of its incidence angle from the ray casting light [sun] via a nifty gradient ramp. So as the earth tapers into darkness, cities start turning their lights on. Here are some stills:[Earth01] [Earth02]

10/31/02

Here are some newer expressions I modeled for the kid. Nothing great yet. Aaron and I are slowly revamping some things in our award winning animated short "A Trip to Granny's". After fixing some deformations, floaty bits, and expressions, we will be entering it in more festivals next year.

10/30/02

A lot of places out there are looking for hard body modeling skills. I created this photorealistic M3 Grant Tank in about 3 days for this project I am currently working on. Here is a Turntable. (3mb DivX) And here are some stills:[Top] [Rear Left] [Rear Right Detail] [Tread Detail] [Front]

Another thing I have been working on, Lightwave tutorials. So far I have only created this Intro to Modeling with SubPatch Weight. It is currently a MHT archive, and only viewable in Internet Explorer, or another browser with a mht plugin. MHT and MHT.GZ will soon be standards, until then I will be converting the tutorials to HTML.