New reel!

After tons of great feedback from awesome resources during my trip to LA I re-cut my reel. Below you will find it embedded as well as my breakdown sheet. I would love to hear more feedback from everyone, should they find anything. Enjoy!

Where am I now?

Today was an interesting day, to say the least. I got to experience my first public transportation moment, in none other than LA. Not only did I get to ride the bus(with a giant suitcase) I got to ride the subway. It was an interesting experience. I did two things wrong though. I went the wrong direction on my first bus ride for a whole stop(ooooh that was a fun half mile walk), then when I was supposed to get off I stayed on for another stop. I felt like punishing myself apparently. Was a good experience either way. Though, I should have worn shoes!

So here I am sitting in SFO airport waiting on a friend, Dorien Gunnels, to come pick me up and whisk me away to Foster City! Woo. I will start adding my daily experiences from the LA trip here soon. I was just exhausted every day I got home during the trip, so I kept putting it off. I will also be opening a flickr/picasa account(dono which at the moment) to add pictures, both artsy and touristy, in a couple days. I have something like 600 photos from the trip so far, so I need to sift!

As well as the daily thing I will be putting posts out directed at companies I have visited and what I learned from them. Just a side note, if you have not seen Jared’s Awesome list of Companies, you should as this is very much related. Have fun!

LA Day one, California Day three.

So I have been in Cali for 3 days now. Spent my first two days in San Diego(no not at Comic Con, sadly) hanging out with my aunt and uncle. San Diego for one is beautiful, and is a lot bigger than I thought. There are a lot of military bases around there as well. Every 5 minutes it seemed like my Uncle was pointing out another one. Went to many fun places and ate a lot of great food. Got to see a painting I studied in my Medieval Art and Architecture class. Bartolomeo’s Portrait of a Lady in a Green Dress. Absolutely stunning standing in front of it. Besides that I got many great photos and hopefully am starting to improve my technique with macro, even with my crappy lens. I will post those around somewhere to show off. Probably.

Anyhow, I got into my hotel and I thought I would move off my pictures from my camera and write this while it transferred. I have a large card with no transfer speed. I don’t mind it. It works for me and even if I got a “fast card” I would still only be able to take 10 pictures before having to wait for them to process. Though it takes a long time for them to transfer over. But hey, 900 pictures on any card would take a while(specially those lovely raws).

Not much to say about LA yet. Got in, unpacked, shuffled off to a part of town I couldn’t lead you back to and had some food with the group. Met some people I kind of recognized from Monty. And here I am. Typing. I have seen a lot of Bentlys today though. Which was awesome. Yay Richville, USA.

Pre-trip! A journal before the beginning!

Below are a listing of the companies I am told we are going to visit on this awesome trip. So now for the information! As well as some questions I can think of for when we get there. I will continue to work on this and update within the next day.

Psyop

They are a relatively small team, even compared to some ad/animation firms, consisting of 6(listed) people. While it is a smaller team they have quite an extensive list of past ads. Many of which I have seen and a few I didn’t but was still impressed with. The most notable of them, at least for me, is the “Happiness Factory” campaign for Coca Cola way back in 2006. To this day I still love these commercials. Their site does not list any current projects but I can guess they are hard at work on multiple projects, mostly from reading comments a graduated friend of mine posts at 5 in the morning. As of writing this, I could find no listings for jobs but I assume they are hiring. Questions to ask them: 1) Project load wise, how many are motion graphics compared to full 3d animation? Does this vary between your LA and NY offices? 2) How closely do you work with your sister companies for projects? Do people float between them for projects? 3) For your more effects heavy ads(such as the Dante’s Inferno ad) what package do you use for FX?

Rhythm and Hues

Rhythm and Hues(hereby referred to as R&H) is a very large company, considered one of the big 3 VFX houses, next to DD and ILM. They have two out of country locations in India and Malaysia, and are moving to a new facility as we speak. There are 3 main parts to R&H, film, commercials, and design. From talking to recruiters in the past there is some interchange between film and commercial as far as staff but it is much more rare because of project schedules. R&H as far as low level spots is generally a project hire with the more senior positions being a mix between staff and project. R&H on the film side(which I will be concentrating on) does around 6 films a year dating back to their first film of T2. In development are 7 movies: Cabin in the Woods, Charlie St. Cloud, Hop, Little Fockers, Moneyball, Red Riding Hood, and an un-named Yogi Bear movie. Credits include Hot Tub Time Machine, The Wolfman, Night at the Museum(both of them), and many of the anthropomorphic animal movies(Garfield, Chipmunks, etc). As far as listed openings they have a Compositing apprenticeship only. Questions for them: 1) Do your TDs tend to stick as generalists hopping from department to department or do they specialize? 2) What do you look for as far as good qualities for a TD and how can I push my reel to show I have those qualities(scripts are hard to put into a reel). 3) What languages do you recommend a TD know to have better re/hiring chances?

Motion Theory

Motion theory has a team of 23(if we are to believe the photo on their site, which why shouldn’t we?). After browsing around their projects I was happy to see they were behind some of the more viral commercials and music videos, including the EA Sports Jesus shot and Weezer’s Pork and Beans. Like most Ad companies they do not have a listing of their current projects on their site. I don’t know how much I can trust the listings as they seem to have been posted in 2008, though for all I know they could just leave them up to encourage applicants. Listed are: Art Director, 3D Generalist, CG Supervisor, Designer, Lead TD/FX Artist. Questions: 1) Since you have the Lead TD and FX artist combined into one listing are all of your TDs FX artists? Or is that just for that one listing? 2) What is your pipeline for TD and FX? 3) Do you try to keep a consistent artistic style throughout all of your commercials or do you let it vary between them based on the clients needs?

Dreamworks

Dreamworks animation, one of the big boys of 3d animation for feature films. Dreamworks is a large company with two major locations, one in Glendale and their PDI branch in Redwood City. Past projects include the Shrek films, How to Train your Dragon, Over the Hedge, Monsters Vs Aliens, and many more. Current projects include Megamind(hopefully wrapping down soon) and Kung Fu Panda 2. They currently have 3 listings for openings 2 for PDI and one for Glendale: Benefits Coordinator, Temp Technical Resource Admin, and Character FX. I have to say I am rather excited to visit Dreamworks, not only for the possibility of helping me one day get a job, but also to see their wonderful campus. I have heard only the best of things for how nice this campus looks. Not only that fact but the fact that Dreamworks is also one of the best places to work. As to my questions: 1) Do you have many project hires? Or do you tend to try to have permanent hires? 2) Will you continue on your current path with FX of having stylized effects rather than accurate ones, along the lines of the fire from How to Train your Dragon? 3) Do you have multiple people work on the same effect? Or let one artist do an effect start to finish before going to compositing?

Walt Disney Feature

Walt Disney, the masters of classical feature animation. Honestly there is not a person in America that can say one of the Disney classics, or even recent films, has not had an effect on their life. Walt Disney, even to grown ups brings us back to a time in our life when we can be kids. With classics such as Beauty and the Beast, Snow white, and many more brought classical animation into the main stream. With recent releases such as Meet the Robinsons and Bolt and a re-launch of traditional animation with Princess and the Frog they have shown why they have been going since 1929. Currently in production are Tangled and Winnie the Pooh. Questions: 1) Do you find it difficult to keep both a traditional animation and computer animation studio going? 2) Will you keep down the current pattern and do a traditional movie and then a computer animated film? 3) Do you find it hard having such a large catalog of these wonderful movies to live up to? It seems that having the pressure of these 49 movies from your past would mean that most of the criticism would be staggering.

My new reel.

I thought I would post this quickly as my blog is being used AS my site for the time being. Below you will find my reel and even below that will be the breakdown sheet to go with it! If you have any questions to any of the pieces please either comment or email me.

To go with it is a wonderful breakdown sheet! Woooooo!

A trip to end all trips.

Also known as my big trip to LA! I am very lucky to be going on the SCAD off campus trip to LA to spend a bit over a week being taken over the greater part of LA to see, as of writing this post, 16 awesome studios. Yes, 16, in just a few days. SO I missread the sheet of paper, and it is more accurately 6(with one of the trips still up in the air). The next post has which ones they are as of right now. Oh and Siggraph. I get to go to Siggraph! Sadly none of the awesome panels, but enough of it to know just how awesome of a trip this is. One of the awesome things lined up for this trip, actually set in stone(not much of this trip is right now) is a very awesome event during Siggraph, the launch party of Houdini 11! Woo! You have no idea how excited I am for JUST that event. I have been feverishly getting ready for this trip, including business cards, re-cutting my reel and preparing a total package for myself(sans site, SORRY). Package is done, cards are done, now I get to start doing tons and tons of journal entries detailing my every movement through LA! Coming to a blog near you! Actually I will update this post with a link to the tag so you can just look at all the tagged entries.

End of line.

So the quarter is officially over, and I have left Savannah for the summer. It is always interesting coming home. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy the house I grew up in, it is just I want to be out and about and do stuff and see friends and everything, but all of my friends(except for the ones from my home town) are in their own state and far far away. As to my friends here, while I do love them, I can’t really connect with most anymore. I got so used to talking about voxels, and field data and thousands of other nerdy Visual Effects things that it is hard to stop. That and they have their own lives now with their own career paths and I can’t relate to that. Not to mention my girl friend is many states away, which is never fun. Ah well, this is the last time this will happen. I have just one more year(Spring 2011) until I graduate and I will hopefully have a job by this time next year.

As to the end of this quarter you ask? Or any of this quarter for that matter(I have been rather lax on updates huh)? I had 3 classes, 2 were visual effects and one was my last art history(Yay! though this class sucked so much). I took Studio 1 with Joe and Houdini 2(Particles and Procedural Effects) with Ken and had a blast in both. I have never worked as hard as I did this quarter, nor slept as little(I averaged 4 hours a night on good weeks), with it all piling up at once at finals(which it always does). Studio 1 was a blast, and Joe is an excellent teacher for this class. Since all of our projects were one man projects Joe went around and asked where we were and where we were going to be next class. He kept on me hard and ultimately made sure this project got finished. I know I scared him a few times because I was behind in a few things but he made sure I kept on track to finish it. And, finish it I did. I will be posting the finished product here and around the net in a couple of days, I just need time to rest and unwind from this quarter. I had a lot of problems during this project and had a lot of hectic stressful nights trying to solve my issues. I ultimately pulled through and finished though and that is what is important. A few of my problems I will be making posts about in the coming week, so look for those.

What was my project you may ask? It originated from a dream, well sort of a dream. You ever have those really vivid visions or sometimes full senses flashes right before you fall asleep? It is usually what you were doing that day but I tend to get my creative sparks from these as they are mostly random for me, anyhow, I digress. I had this, lets call it a pre-dream of a boat emerging from the clouds. Just a sailboat breaching from a cloud formation. That was it, start to finish. As you will see soon, this evolved, a lot, to what my final was. It became a 17 second animation with houdini bred clouds(and interactions) and an amazing flying dirigible ship thingy…. with wings. Anyhow, it ballooned(haha, pun) up into something with a much larger scope than my original dream. The ship is amazing for multiple reasons, one it has 643 different pieces of geometry(more on why and how I know that later) with one of the coolest rigs(which was unfortunately only 30% utilized) on the wings. You can see some basic info of it here and a quick use of it in his demo reel. Honestly Jaryd did an awesome job with the rig, and I am sad what I turned in didn’t get to use the rig to the full potential. The model itself was a collaboration between Patrick Siren, Jared Reisweber, and myself. Animation was done by the wonderfully overworked Shannon Dingle and myself. Jared also did the matte painting(which he came in at the last minute and saved me… again.) I also did all the shading, lighting(which sucked), and dynamics for it.

This project, while it was turned in(even made the breakdowns) is not done. Not in the least. Because of time constraints I had to effectively halve the render resolution, as well as not have the animation completely where I wanted it. I learned a ton from this project, from directing a team(which I admit I wasn’t the best and rather indecisive), to shading(more), and a metric ton of houdini. I also learned what it feels like to be exhausted completely, not the most enjoyable things I have ever learned, gotta say. I absolutely loved this project, even when it kept throwing problems to me, and dear god did it throw a lot of major issues at me. The last 4 weeks of school was primarily spent trying to get something to work, cutting corners to optimize, more optimization, and getting more stressed and worried I wouldn’t be done in time. I will expand on this later as well as go in depth to my solution, but the biggest issue I had was for whatever reason(I have a few ideas on why) I could not get my boat from Maya to Houdini with animation in a FBX. MAJOR ISSUE. If I couldn’t get the boat into houdini I couldn’t do ANY of the interaction between the boat and the clouds. I don’t think I need to explain how freaked out I was for a day until I figured out my solution. I solved that issue and ran into multiple others. It was a hectic couple of weeks.

As to my Houdini 2 class? It was fun, even if it was Ken’s first quarter teaching it, I enjoyed it immensely. There were a few quirks to the class, a few bugs(coder joke haha), but ultimately enjoyable. As was put so eloquently by Ray the class can only move as fast as the slowest person in it. While I wouldn’t openly say it I do agree completely with that statement. I have had that issue in every class I was in with Ken, and that fact is kind of upsetting. VisFX in and of itself is a very fast paced major, with some of the smartest, most passionate, and hardest working people at SCAD. The problem with the TD minor(I think I have said this before) is it is more than just VisFX, it is every major under the School of Film and Digital Media, and (no offense to the other majors) not on the same level as VisFX. Let me explain that before I get an angry email and burn a few bridges. VisFX in general deals with the entire back end of a film or 70%+ of a major animation. We do shading, lighting, rendering, dynamics, modeling, scripting, problem solving, optimization, and more. We, as a rule, have to have a huge work ethic and eye for perfection. True, people find their niche in one or a few of those(usually) and specialize. If you don’t have that work ethic, or that passion for what you do you aren’t up to the cut of VisFX. Sad to say, but it is that simple. So assuming this is a VisFX only class it is safe to assume that the pace will be fast and intense and get really deep, right? Not necessarily. The other thing about VisFX kids is we are curious and have a passion to learn, which can get us into trouble. If you aren’t meant to do something, or you aren’t wired to do something, in VisFX that is fine and you find another niche and pursue that. Sometimes that curiosity to learn more or learn a specialization can end up being completely wrong and hurt a class overall. It is not fun not understanding what is going on in the class and even worse if you realize you are that person holding everyone else back. I wasn’t that person this quarter, in case you were wondering, but I know the feeling. Would I have benefited more if everyone was on the same pace? Sure. Will the class be a lot better in a few quarters when Ken has ironed out the kinks? Definitely. Do I regret taking this class, now? Not in the least. I still learned a ton and still enjoyed every minute of my time spent on Houdini. Did I mention I will probably be switching my focus to FX? FX gets to not only have fun with simulation and stuff but they also get to shade all their effects in a shot. Two of my loves, rolled up all nice and neat in one.

So, whats on the agenda for this summer? I have a few side projects I want to do, as well as more exploration into houdini. All of which I am keeping hush hush for now. Well I will say I do want to come up with a dynamic frost shader, but that is it! Oh, and hopefully I will have an internship somewhere in town(or at least a job). Then in the middle of it all I will be heading out to LA for an intense week of studio touring(LA trip, hells yah). I also want to continue work on the boat project, as I think it has a lot of potential as a showcase piece. I will also be working on very quickly redesigning my website and having that back up, updated this time.

Major thanks to Joe Pasquale, Ken Huff, Jared Reisweber, Shannon Dingle, and Patrick Siren for making this quarter a success. And good luck to all of my recently graduated friends who are going out into the industry!

Swamped

I am very swamped right now. I have had “redesign my website” on the list of things to do for a week now, and it will stay on that list for another week or so. I am sorry about that, I am especially sorry to any potential employers who want to see my gallery page. I do have work up and still on my webspace, I am just so ashamed of my design I really don’t want anyone to see it. I wanted to give everyone a little heads up about what is going on, and if you REALLY want to see it I can send you more information if you contact me. Anyhow, I have to get back to work to make time to do other things.

How-To: Reflective surfaces

Reflective surfaces are tricky, to say the least. What makes them so tricky is, unless you are looking at a truly reflective surface or a truly matte surface with no specularity, all surfaces change reflectivity based on the angle you are viewing them at. If you don’t believe me, go find a puddle and start at about 20 feet away and slowly walk up to it. See the change in reflectivity? Still don’t believe me? Go find a polished metal, look at it from a glancing angle all the way to looking directly on it. Those are the easiest to see, but every object has it. I want to make a quick note, no object in this world is 100% reflective at ALL angles. Chrome is super reflective, especially at glancing angles, but it is NOT completely reflective. The preset for chrome in material_x even says so, the real world also says so, and I say so!

For anyone that has ever used mia_material_x this is phenomena is found under the BRDF section. BRDF is wonderful if you are using material X, but as most people don’t use it, I thought I would write out a mini-tutorial on how to fake BRDF in non-mia materials. Keep in mind ultimately for any shader based on life, you want to study that real world material completely. You have to be that guy or gal that is staring way too intently at a wall or object(it is more fun that way anyhow) in order to ultimately get it right. The closer you look, the more you pay attention, the better your shader is going to be.

So, as to my mini-tutorial, we are going to be using 4 whole nodes in this shader network. In actuality you only need 2, but 1 is for artistic control and the other is considered better technique. So here is the basic network:
So that is the basics of it. The multiply is the node that you may want in there to add extra artistic control, though at the end of the day it is not necessary and costs a bit in render time(it would be microscopic but optimizing is optimizing.) The other node you don’t necessarily need is the luminance node. You can easily pass one channel of the outValue to the last connection. Just keep in mind that if you have color in the ramp instead of a gray scale ramp you will be dealing with only one channel of the final color and they will be different. The luminance node simply flattens out the 3 channels to one. Again this extra node will cost extra in rendering time(still very small added time), but it makes it easier for others to follow the shader.

If you have ever read a tutorial on how to make a velvet shader you should notice they are almost entirely the same, except instead of dealing with a ramp as a way to store and blend between colors we are using it as a way to blend values. If you think about it, at the end of the day a color is made up of a percentage of Red, Green and Blue. In this way we can store data in a new and visually intuitive way. I have never seen the data that a sampler info node gives, but I can only assume, based on its interaction with ramps, that it returns a normalized value going from looking directly at an object to looking at the most extreme glancing angle, or 1 to 0 respectively.

In the ramp node we put the value of the looking directly on an object at the top, this should be your lower value of reflectivity. Inversely the value for reflectivity at a glancing angle should be at the bottom. I like using the ramp in this way as you can much more intuitively see what is going on with data, rather than material_X’s BRDF slider. Below is the final render with material_X and a Blinn:

Material_X is on the left and Blinn is on the right. As you can tell they are not EXACTLY the same in terms of reflection, but it has been a while since I have used material_X and I forget all the ways that it interacts with other values. In terms of being straight forward to follow and having a straight path to what values are doing what, Blinn wins. It may not be as physically accurate but it is much simpler to use the method above. Especially for TD’s to give to shading artists in a professional setting. I am a heavy believer in giving simple to use artistic controls to artists.

Keep in mind any material, even one we perceive as matte, has some kind of molecularity and reflectivity, using reflectivity that changes with facing ratio will tremendously add to the believability of an object. That’s what we are all about isn’t it?

How-To: Playlist exporting from iTunes

I recently(well a few months ago) bought a Motorola Droid as an upgrade to my old phone. I must say I love it, and the fact it came with a 16gb SD card means I can replace my iPod. After starting the transition I realized it cannot read the playlist file type that iTunes uses(though I should be surprised.) After about a week of searching I found this script. For the record I have never used TCL nor do I know any of the syntax for it. Thankfully with jEdit I opened it up and learned a bit of the code(at least as far as what I am gonna explain.)

Most programs and mp3 players uses either .m3u or .pls format for the playlist, and the Droid specifically uses an older version of .pls. I will only go into the specifics of the Droid as it is slightly different format than other .pls files. I have a modified version of the script that eliminates two lines from the pls section. Droid only needs to know the file location for it to understand the playlist. As I said earlier I don’t know TCL and as such when the script spits out the final .pls I have to go in and replace part of the location to the relative path I have for my Droid. Thank god for find/replace eh?

Anyhow, you will need to install TCL dev kit in order for this script to work, as well as setting up environment variables to get command prompt to work. Go here to get your TCL install it and set up your variables. Once that is finished you will need to open up a new command prompt and get to wherever you saved your script. In the command prompt type “tclsh85 itunes_playlist_export.tcl”. If everything works you should get a listing of the commands you can use. Type “tclsh85 itunes_playlist_export.tcl list” and it will list all of your current playlists. It is important you do that first as the numbers to the left of the playlist names are used for the next step. Next type “tclsh85 itunes_playlist_export.tcl export (playlist number) (filename with extention) pls”. So say I want to export the 5th playlist in the populated list as a file named playlist.pls I would type “tclsh85 itunes_playlist_export.tcl export 5 playlist.pls pls”, the script will save the file in the SAME location as the script itself is stored. So if you have it saved on your desktop it will put the file on your desktop. Open up the file in your favorite editor(jEdit here) and you now have a nice looking .pls playlist, with one problem. You have direct path names leading to the files as if they were on your computer. Not good, we want relative paths.

The files you put on your device(or Droid) needs to be in the same folder structure as iTunes has. So if you have iTunes organize the folder it should be something like ..\Music\iTunes\iTunes Music\[Artist]\[Album]\[file].mp3 for my Droid I have everything in the iTunes Music in a folder called music. So when I replace the direct path (up to iTunes Music) with a relative path it looks something like \music\[Artist]\[Album]\[file].mp3. Easy as Pi! The .pls files should go in the same folder as where you put your music. So there you have it!

Ask any questions in the comments or shoot me an email.