More Random Renders from a Generalist

Generated a Milky Way particle sim for a fly-through effect
Houdini Rock Generator & Procedural Texture
M230 model draft
Also, a fan's blurry picture of Erykah Badu in front of some of the animation I made for her show in Oakland:
 

Music &

Here's some scraps from sound stuff I was working on before I came to SanFran. Music and I have promised to start seeing each other more frequently.



and a turnaround of a work-in-progress for the giant city-sized bad-guy ship for the Survivalism project:



Texturing is next for him and the four-legged protagonist ship from a couple posts ago.

This is a rough draft of a Matte Painting/Transition I'm working on for a scientific animation side project with Valentin:


Also, some renders from 3d texturing with Derek Flood. This frog was pretty fun; replaced the model with my own and made textures and displacements:
This mouth was interesting, not my model, just my textures and displacements.

Old Work

I brought an old external hard drive (named puck for how beat up it was) back to life and found some random files I'd forgotten about, so I'm posting them along with some other random illustrations and style sheets.

Four graphic redesign pitches for the same website, open in a new tab to see full size(in lieu of blogspot's weird lightbox viewer):

One of the stylesheets from the same series as Warmongers was from. Electricity.
D R I V E T H I S C A R
Click on and use arrows to drive the car around in this old test flash program. Not many of my flash files can get placed into blogspot because of their reference hierarchy, but this one fits.

Some of the UI and gameplay concepts. You could pick two main character types in this game. One would be typical of most top-down rendered games where you can expand your sight radius by improving your lights and leveling.  The other, since the game was a lot about hiding, you could commit to lights-off and expand the radius of your different sensors, rendering the game's aesthetic more like vector art and icons, something more like geometry wars. This concept was to reinvent the graphical stealth system.  Remember Majormud?  Ever since the mmorpg world went graphical, the idea of stealth has been a flaky one; this sought to fix that and simultaneously create two very different game experiences in the same engine.  Badass, right?  I would love to see this idea get incorporated into a full game with or without me.  This was part of my UX Design thesis when I was in my first MFA program (Interactive Design, New Media) at AAU.  Click to enlarge.



*Edit: PlayPlace logo reveal from around the same time. Designed logo in Illustrator, AfterEffects for motion, Logic audio.

Texturing with MODO

I've avoided texturing thus far because I like cell, angle, and procedural shaders way too much, but this is my first legitimate texture painting project. Not my model, and some fixes left to make, reduce the spec a bit, not to mention the heel clip and the slight pirouette in the turntable, but here's my so far after a couple hours.

Modo & Maya

Thesis Previs, Sketches, Animatic

A loose sketch of the main character:

























And a quick stab at building him in 3D:



He's going to crawl out of a hiding spot, fly through a mostly procedural landscape that looks a bit like coral reef for humans, fly up through the clouds (out of the water), and toward a moving city that looks like a giant spider or squid or predatory fish or something--haven't quite decided yet. I'm looking to change it up a bit once I get things built, I want there to be the epiphany moment of 'woah, that city is alive!," or "that spider is made out of humans!"

Here's an animatic with drawings and blank solids for placeholders:

Warmongers & Random Moving Things

One of the graphics from the Survivalism project:

Photoshop, Illustrator, AfterEffects, Flash
This is the motif of the bad guys, reds, soot, metal and fire.  Needs a preloader...

Made in Houdini:

by the way, Luka Stolyarov's Houdini class is awesome. That is all.


Made in Cinema4D, AfterEffects, Flash:

I like the gif better than the swf..


Made in AfterEffects:



This is a product shot made for the UX designer for an high end interactive table. You know, watch movies, access the net, control a central jukebox, order drinks, ask for dishes to be picked up, instant message other tables in the club, that sort of thing. The Art director for this environment and the designer of the idea and UI interface that isn't part of this shot is Michelle DeLeon. Made in C4D, Maya, AfterEffects:

Houdini Particles

Matching reference footage with Houdini particles.. Snow & Rain

Wanted to try the modelling and texturing tools in Houdini, and made this launch animation with it. It needs some detraction of exhaust particles away from the ground to keep that sprite-clipping from occurring.  Also a little slipping on the matte paintings because I threw the sky stock in last second by tracking it to the rendered stars, which was just a giant dome with smaller spheres copy stamped to random vertices.

All 3D made in Houdini, with some Photoshop for texturing, Aftereffects for comping/editing.

Nautilus UFO Tentacles Project

The idea was to shoot with a mediocre consumer camera and attempt to matchmove and matchlight completely horrible-looking grainy slippery rolling-shutter footage.

Tentacles from houdini (exported as fbx), then modeled the rest and textured/rendered everything in Maya.


I matchmoved with Matchmover and PFTrack, and ended up using the PFTrack results with assistance from the Foundry's rolling shutter plugin. There were a couple different versions, but I like this short one the best.

The fun part was chasing around the auto-exposure in comp. This was for Vince DeQuattro & Kenneth Ferro.