strawberry

It wasn't any kind of plot point, but when we were working on our film we came to choose a pie type for each of the characters.  Pete was apple - the quintessential American classic - even the stunt pie standing in for him in the live action scene was an actual apple pie.  Sheriff, we decided, was a meat pie.  Narrator came to be a strawberry pie.  Of course, by that point, it only seemed proper to outfit him with an appropriate bandanna.

don't cry over spilt milk

Not everyone catches this little gag in our film, it goes by pretty fast, but you can catch it at 1:14.  I did the lighting in this shot, Uri did the comp, and then I painted the milk residue and drop animation in photoshop to layer back on top and finish off the shot.  Since Blue is really the only thing that moves in the shot we were able to simply layer it on instead of having to map it or anything.  For consistency, the drop residue was painted in and then duplicated and erased as I animated.  Also, her refraction in the mug is a total cheat, which let us get it to look the way we wanted.

tie the knot

The first ecard I worked on this summer was "Tie the Knot".
It was animated about a year ago, and already had a working edit with some keying and effects. Initially I was just brought on to the card just to do some rotoscoping in areas like the clamps holding the shoes. That didn't take too long, and I was given the choice to work on the backgrounds for it too, which I jumped on. From there I kept doing more stuff like keying, some motion tracking, sound editing, and the end cards until the piece was done.

These are what the raw shots looked like.


And here are the backgrounds I made. Shot three has all the elements separated to create a multiplane effect in after effects. That second row of shoes in the shot is just the first row of shoes duplicated and moved around.





Props that needed repeating I would make as assets and then skew as needed. I Dug through some psds and made these gifs. It's so much the actual progression, just turning layers on/off, but you get the idea. (click them to see them not cut off)



For the end cards I made the lettering out of shoe laces! I pinned them to a template (printed backwards to keep the backside of the letters as the working surface) and super glued them to hold their shape.

lipsync!

Turned this in just the other day after working on it since January.
Maya/Renderman for Maya/Photoshop/Nuke.
Responsible for Everything.
(:

push pull!

Here's my push pull natural animation. An exaggerated version is in the works.
It's my first legitimate foray into the world of compositing as well, which is lots of fun in and of itself.

See it in HD here! (7.1MB)
You may want to right click, save as. The colors look pretty cruddy in firefox right now... at least on this computer.

Time crunch got pretty bad towards the end of this project too so it's likely that I'll go back and touch up the animation and possibly the rendering as well.

still life

This is the last post from the sophomore projects, I swear. The still life project was our last one, and one that I thoroughly enjoyed. It was nice to get such a project to finish the year out with. Not to say this project was a walk in the park, but texturing is very different from animation, and shares so much with drawing and painting, areas I'm far more experienced and comfortable in.

This project was a short and simple one. We were given files of assets, plain models and some simple props/sets that we were free to slightly modify/fix and arrange into a composition to light and texture. I ended up using a total of 8 lights (6 spot, 2 directional), and it was my first time using raytracing. We had to create shaders networks for all our materials, and it was my first real time getting into that too and building them from the ground up. I tried to keep things simple and render times low (I think at the end it took about :48 seconds to render the frame with depth of field, but then again the computers we use are wicked fast). I worked to keep all my maps low. Everything is procedural except for the fruit and paper towel bump, which is a small tiling raster pattern that I painted. The outdoors, bananas, apple, and pears are 1024 maps, the orange, cherries, and grapes are all 512. My knowledge of photoshop was very handy on this project, though sometimes there's just no substitute for enhancing and painting noise patterns yourself.


Not many renders/paint overs ended up getting saved on this project, but here's a few I found.

Here is a video showing, quite literally, a day's work. A lot of frames were dropped with the screen capture while scrubbing through the day's saved renders, and the quality's not great enough to show the subtle changes in things, but it gives a nice overview of the progression regardless.

Reference was of particular use of this project. Most of it was high res fruit photos pulled from flickr, but a fair amount too was just reference for color, mood, and design aesthetic. These three were some of the ones I kept open a lot to keep my head straight and stay focused.