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Shots Breakdown

Fantasy Aqueduct

Responsible for entire shot

This was a project where I wanted to push Maya to it's breaking point. The end goal was to create a set that would work well in HD.  To do this I had to design shaders that would hold up under close scrutiny but not go over 8k, the solution here was to use several tiled textures and control when and how you see them using 2k B&W maps where image A is white and image B is black. The windmill feature is an ncloth simulation, the speed of the blades is reflected in the gears on the opposite side of the tower and controlled by a derivative of the nucleus wind speed and the time node.  These attributes are also piped into the ocean shader in an attempt to reflect the wind speed in the pattern of the ocean waves.

Steam Engine

Responsible for entire shot

The result of a class assignment in procedural modeling and animation in Houdini, this piece features a "working" steam engine based off the Scott Bobbin mill in Ireland. The various engine parts are combined into a single digital asset wherein the speed of the pieces is also reflected by the controlled release of particle smoke and in the boiling of the water.

Mountain Climber

Models: Ahren Wert

This was a rig I had created for a project didn't quite make it off the ground. I didn't have the original texture map so I made one that was solid colors to make it easier to see certain parts of the model. The animation was part of a class assignment. I decided to try breaking up the production pipeline. basically I took one of the cleanup passes and geometry cached him then I imported the geometry cache into blender so I could create some custom blendshapes. the blendshapes were added back into the animation process and the shot was sculpted again. This was complicated because the character holds two different props, separated by a space where he is holding nothing. Each of these became like separate characters in the finished work and by breaking the final shot into several pieces I was able to achieve the look that I was working toward.

Londinium

Responsible for entire shot

Here we see a series of animation tests from a film I have been working on to test out some new techniques. all of the work is entirely composed in Houdini. First is a shot where the rate of playback on the animated businessmen is controlled by and instanced on a particle simulation. The particle simulation can then be adjusted around the animation by attaching collision geometry around regularly animated characters.

Next is a fluid simulation that is being controlled by animation. the animation data is provided where the character jumps through and settles on the ground plane. the fluid data lands around the same spot. this data is then rendered and mixed with a render where the fluid simulation particles are attracted to the animated geometry.

For Mr. Mystery I wanted to try something that would free me from a standard animation pipeline. I call it Multi-phase rigging because that's exactly what happens. I rig the character as usual, I then animate the character like he is pretending that his arms are able to fly off into space or whatever. Then the animation is geometry cached, and through the manipulation of previously created vertex groups I can remove, re-rig, or swap those parts of the body allowing me to re-purpose them. The example shown here was quite simple, but I hope that upon finishing the film that I could use the same process to change parts of the model into anything( like fluid simulation or even other models).

Transfer Scripts

Responsible for entire shot

Here I have created a series of scripts/workflows to help with using two or more software packages in a single shot. The first is a shot where I have taken some animation from Maya and imported it into Houdini where I create a fluid simulation based off of the data. The fluid data is then cached and re-imported into Maya and rendered with Mental ray.

Forest Spirit

Models and Concept: Sunny Kwon

This was easily the most complicated rig I made while I was at SCAD. I also added a custom UI that loaded through a rig Icon. Custom tools and features of the rig were added to meet the requests of the animation team. Included in these are a custom function to zero the attributes of selected rig icons, and separate buttons to prepare the rig for playblasts or turn on dynamic properties for automatic secondary animation.

Digital Eggs

Responsible for entire shot

I constructed this simulation in Houdini after watching an intriguing storyboard from Daniel Augsberger called Mad Cow, in which one of the "bad guys" fires eggs out of a repeating egg gun.  Combined in this simulation is a hard body shell, a cloth soft body yoke, topped with a particle fluid egg white.  It was interesting getting all of these pieces to work together but I was pretty pleased with the result.