3 Comments May 28th, 2010 by Steve
With Strings Attached is a 3D animated short film by graduating senior Jerika Melgar in which I was tasked with rendering, editing and final exporting. Upon reviewing the set and shots, my head was flooded with ideas for cool lighting. Consequently I proposed to relight the project in addition to my other tasks. This was my first foray into lighting for animation and presented a number of challenges.
For better or for worse, I decided to take charge of the visual look of the project upon receiving the first round of animation. Jerika had no plan for lighting, other than the established set lighting that was done by another student previously, which I personally found flat, boring and impractical to render for animation. Having done a significant amount of lighting design for film productions in the quarters before, I felt I could do better.
Previous established lighting. Original modeling, texturing and lighting by Michael Devore.
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Add a comment March 14th, 2010 by Steve
More photos with the ossim macro lens. It makes literally anything look interesting.
Add a comment March 12th, 2010 by Steve
We rented a macro and tilt shift lens. Had lots of fun recording video with the 5 and 7D. Photos by Dan, myself, Dave and Carrie.
Add a comment September 19th, 2009 by Steve
Window Chillin'
Making a limited effort to become more proficient on Brian’s Canon 40D before I’m required to use it for a film class I’m taking. Now, back to mel. Man, I hate how the elements on this wordpress theme don’t recognize the height of an image in a post when deciding how to relatively space themselves. Henceforth, I need to have enough text so that inline pictures are entirely surrounded. Lalalalala…
Add a comment September 7th, 2009 by Steve
Dutch Still Life
Along with the car, this is one of the projects I had been working on last quarter. I guess everyone has to do a still life at some point – I think I’ve done three or four – this one presented some interesting challenges. Although it was a simple project, it gave an excuse to play around with mental ray materials and some techniques I had never really had a chance to touch before, such as subsurface scattering.The cloth was particularly fun; it’s a bunch of flat planes with curled edges, turned into nCloth objects and dropped from above onto a collision plane which included a bunch of primitive geometry to break up the shapes a bit. I found the trick was to use several smaller nCloth objects rather than trying to achieve the shape I was after with one giant cloth. The other objects are all fairly straightforward primitive shapes. I scanned a lot of texture material for the roses, leaves, bread and fruit, the rest is from online sources.
Add a comment August 26th, 2009 by Steve
Honda Element Nurbs Model
Building anything useful out of NURBS curves in maya is like gouging your eyes out very slowly while doing mathematical calculations. Yes, they’re great to mock up a car very quickly, but you should leave it at that and convert to polys/sub’ds as soon as possible. For one of the projects this quarter, I had to model a medium-res car ENTIRELY out of NURBS surfaces. It was one of the most frustrating things I’ve experienced, and wasn’t helped by the fact that my car isn’t very curvy to begin with. I wasn’t going to post it anywhere because, frankly, it’s not very good, but perhaps there’s some maya users out there who understand.
