[DIGITAL] [ANALOG]  [PHOTOGRAPHIC]

Digital Projects  

Here you will find what is becoming almost like a timeline of my digital work.

SIGGRAPH 2007 Crytek ET Footage  [40MB XviD]  08/11/07
Our SIGGRAPH 2007 Electronic Theater entry was more of a realtime 'tech demo' showing some of the technological advances of CryEngine2. This video amounts to years of work from many talented people that I am proud to call coworkers and friends.

SIGGRAPH 2007 Crysis Keynote Footage  [40MB XviD]  08/15/07
Glen Entis gave the SIGGRAPH 2007 Keynote, and he talked a lot about the future of realtime rendering and games. In his talk he showed this Crysis gameplay video that demonstrates a lot of the tech in use during real gameplay. This is the child of an enormous team of hardworking people, and I am but one small part of that team.

Shoulder Deformation Studies  [2.2MB DivX 5.1]  05/14/04
These are some shoulder deformation studies I did, male and female. The male model was created by Ryan Vance, I created the female mesh quickly to test this scapula rig. The video employs some techniques from my tutorial Simulating Musculature in Maya.

Complex Muscle Rigging  [2.2MB DivX 5.1]  04/14/04
Here is an example of the complex muscle rigging and animation I have currently been working on. All muscles of the back track correctly with bone insertions through hyper-extension. This is becoming a very versatile rig, as I keep making changes to speed things up, and fixing little issues.

3D DVD Menu System  [4.7MB Quicktime Video]  03/25/04
These are some interactive DVD menus for a project I recently finished. The animation can also be skipped by pressing [menu] so that it just instantly jumps past the animation. The video shows one button being selected to go to a sub menu then returning to the main.

A Trip to Granny's  [Full short at External Site]   05/20/02
"A Trip to Granny's" was my first animated short. It took me and my roommate, friend, and long time conspirator Aaron Conover, 4-5 months to complete. These were months of 19 hour days! It took a lot of work, but we finished. It is over 6 minutes long, and has over 65 shots. I am very proud of our fledgling effort, and I feel like we more than accomplished the things we set out to do, mainly: tell an interesting story!

Granny Facial Rig  [200kb Divx Video]   03/20/02
This video shows part of a facial rig I created to drive morph targets my friend Aaron sculpted for the Granny character in our animated short. A year later, Jason Osipa published his great facial animation book 'Stop Staring', which revolutionized this type of joystick-driven facial setup, which became the industry standard.

Outdoor Scene from A Trip to Granny's  [500KB Divx Video]  02/08/02
This was one of the most important shots as it set the tone for the entire short. Aaron and I worked on this shot for a while. He modeled a lot of Granny's house and the large tree. I modeled, lit, and set up the scene, using Sasquatch for the grass with some custom scripts and such to make the grass accumulate more near the fence/house/rocks etc.

Dynamic Terrain Level of Detail  [200KB Divx Video]  11/18/01
Here you can see the dynamic camera-based level of detail I used for my ocean scene below. This video was captured in real-time, so it's a tad laggy. The tesselation/subdivision takes into account the camera's motion, and subdivides the surrounding terrain with a user-defined falloff amount. The terrain deformation is procedurally generated, and in the example above not animated, to show how the LOD tesselation matches perfectly and does not 'pop'.

Rolling Ocean Waves  [700KB Divx Video]  11/18/01
I scowered the net trying to find good information on creating photorealistic waves; in the end I culled the techniques and tried my own approach to making procedurally animable ocean waves that also incorporate level of detail based on camera falloff.

Fallen Angel Shot12b  [1.4MB Divx Video]  07/15/01
I rudimentarily modeled most of the items in the scene to catch shadows, as well as the wings. The scene is lit from HDR lightprobe data I collected. Its an 18+ layer shot in Flint, I had to render out lots of shadow alphas.

Pantheon HDR  [404KB Divx Video]  11/09/01
This composite shot of the Pantheon as one of the first decent HDR renders I created. I took the pano/lightprobe in the Pantheon when on vacation with a script I wrote for my Kodak DC290 camera. If anyone's interested in this script email me.

PRMAN Fluids  [242KB Divx Video]  10/12/02
This was perhaps my 3rd Renderman project. The first complex one anyway. I wrote a shader to displace a liquid when the container was bumped. I didnt program collision or anything, you need to tell it where and when the object hits, it does the rest. It was done in SimpleText and BBEdit on an old version of MacRenderman and a beta version of Air.

PRMAN Shaders  [JPEG image]  08/15/02
This was my first Renderman project. It was written in SimpleText and rendered in MacRenderman. The entire scene is constructed/generated in prman, and built completely from the text file and utilizing some image data. It was created for my prman class under Malcom Kesson.

MEL Animation Controls: Horses  [116KB Divx Video]  03/08/01
This was one of my first animations done in Maya. Also my first taste of mel. More of that below. The speed at which the horses run can be controlled pretty much in real time via a mel slider. (That is, if there's one horse, and he isn't subdivided.) The gait changes to match it's velocity.

Interactive MEL: Driving Game  [644KB Divx Video]  05/12/01
A vehicle that you can drive, real-time in Maya via sliders. It can drive over uneven terrain, knock over boxes barrels, and even launch off ramps crashing into any of the above (utilizing Maya's physics). Talk about an expensive game engine! All this, in real-time (on my 1ghz with a Geforce 2 MX anyway). Here's a vid where I drive off a ramp and crash into about 10 boxes in real time: Launch.avi (DivX 254KB)

Interactive MEL: Paddle Ball Game  [1.5MB Divx Video]  05/03/01
This is one of my first Maya games. Don't be fooled, it's actually quite hard to keep the ball up. Once you have the ball moving try to move the paddle around, or if you screw up, you'll need to change paddle positions to compensate. Eveything is expression-driven and interactive (except banking, how hard did you want it?) A few people have asked for the Maya Binary, and I posted it in the Turorials/Files section.

First Maya Character  [409KB Divx Video]  05/24/1998
I created this my first day using Maya 2.5, this was the first Maya character I ever rigged!

SIGGRAPH 98 Presentation  [12MB WMV]  05/24/1998
We were asked to present at SIGGRAPH about our Highschool production studio and the award-winning work we had created. This was the intro of that presentation. We actually presented nothing, we were about to begin when it looked like the PC crashed revealing that we humans were mere puppets going through the motions while a fish and crab were running the presentation from a control room. They gave the entire 1 hour presentation. This was my first SIGGRAPH!

ORB  [20MB WMV]  04/16/1997
Orb won the 1997 Universal Studios Highschool Film Competittion. This was one of the first 3D projects i worked on. In highschool my friend Aaron Conover taught me Lightwave, and the sky was the limit! This was actually shot on set at the Universal lot.