Cooking With Lasers v2.1

Chase Sapphire

administrateur — Fri, 21 Oct 2011 22:56:51 +0000

Well, I can’t claim too much credit for this spot. I did animation and then tweaks to the render setup, the latter had been made by another artist for another spot. I worked on two Chase spots at Yu+Co, and this one is one of them. Good design, props to Synderela Peng and Johnny Wong.

Green Lantern

administrateur — Wed, 14 Sep 2011 17:53:33 +0000

Green Lantern was my first project at Yu+Co. I was called in to help with lighting and look development on the title and all things green and glass looking. I ended up doing some modeling, compositing and animation and layout notes on some shots as well. Particularly, I finished the layout, shading and look development for the glowing WB logo, for the smouldering Green Lantern logo effect and the film title itself. Precomp/lookdev was done in After Effects, so was the stereoscopy.

I was handed fluid elements to comp and create a smoking/smouldering look with animated shaders which I created. I also created animated caustics shaders and passes to get the look on the WB logo and the Green Lantern Logo.

I love working with good people

Mendocino Coast

administrateur — Sun, 12 Jun 2011 01:13:52 +0000

Finally I get to post some personal work! I took advantage of being unemployed to do some personal work, and try to learn something in the process. I have wanted to use Corel’s Painter for a while. I bought it a while ago and it just sat there… My first project was to paint a landscape. I was inspired to use a photo I took while camping on the beach in Mendocino, 7 years ago. What a great place it is.

The Photo

#2 Pencil Sketch and the color palette I used

Right away, my familiarity with Photoshop cost me a crucial mistake, which, unfortunately, I didn’t catch until it was too late and I had to live with it. Not a big deal… The bottom Canvas layer cannot be arranged or duplicated. It stays there… So I put my photo in that canvas layer for reference, but it would have been better as a top layer to hide as needed. I created a line sketch with the #2 pencil tool for blocking out reference, and proceeded to play with brushes to get a feel for them and block out the first layer of color. Throughout the process, I learned that brushes from the oil tool set didn’t play well with watercolor, of even acrylics… I thought that the brush feel was the only thing that mattered, but actually, even the stroke behaves like the medium it is supposed to be… So I couldn’t blend oil and acrylics strokes together, for instance.

To paint, I built a palette of colors that I would sample from. I would then hide my paint layer, observe the source photo, then go back to my paint layer and work from memory. This was my way of pretending I was there, outdoors, with my easel, painting on a canvas. With the added advantage of being able to use the overlap in layers to make accurate placement, resulting in a more faithful reproduction.

I struggled with brush settings and eventually settled on thick wet camel brushes and a glazing round brush. I would lay in a base color that averaged the relevant area’s color, then a shadow color with the wet camel brush, and then would go over with a blender or a glazing brush when my strokes were too scratchy… Finally, I would do a highlight pass, again, smoothing with blender for broad lit areas and touching up with a sharp, fine camel brush for tight highlights. The process was tedious, but I had achieved a textural feel I liked and so I stuck with it. This workflow was very time consuming overall, and if knew better, I would have tried another approach. But that’s what learning is for… Next time, if I use a photo as a reference again, I will also extend the framing more to my liking. Finishing this piece seemed daunting enough at the time, so I didn’t want to make it any larger!

I painted different scene elements into different layers, from background to foreground. I wanted the piece to have a painterly feel, so I didn’t go in tight and tried to keep some stroke texture, like in the sky and shrubbery. Often, I would zoom out to see whether the feel of lighting was preserved when I painted, and then would go back to 100-150% zoom to paint in. Once the landscape was laid in, I painted some loose strokes which I then blurred and adjusted layer transparency to create the ocean mist. Finally, I took the file into Photoshop and adjusted a few curves to bring in some cyan, and was happy to bring this to a closure. You can view the full resolution piece here.

Filling out details after blocking in

The finished piece

Priest

administrateur — Sun, 12 Jun 2011 00:17:35 +0000

I came on Priest while it was in distress. There were lots of issues with the shots and we were right up against deadline. Initially, I comped a couple shots in Nuke, such as the shot of Priest crashing on the top of the train, after taking a flying kick to the chest (that part wasn’t mine), and of Warrior setting up TNT on the train tracks. However, what should have been simple set and prop extensions had many technical issues on the lighting and rendering side, as well as tracking. The windmill shots, for instance, may seem straightforward, but I can assure you that they were the most expensive cg windmills in the history of film making. I went to the 3D side, and did a fair amount of troubleshooting, from optimizing geometry, scenes, shaders, relighting, render setup… The camera moves were so subtle that fine geometry was creating aliased artifacts. There was a lot of re-rendering involved. This was done at Gradient Effects… Maybe they’ll want to hire me again for being such a handy guy!

California Lottery

administrateur — Tue, 07 Jun 2011 02:02:39 +0000

While at Superfad, I worked on a spot for the California Lottery directed by Richard Hickey. I was the 3D lead on this. With the timeline given, I knew that we had a challenge in articulating Richard’s vision. I had only worked with a few of the artists on the team, and at times wondered how we were going to finish this spot on time. Eventually I got a little panicked, thinking we were going to run out of time just creating proper assets for this spot. Instead of asking for more help and delegating, I took on a bit too much work and spent too little time coordinating the effort. It was a good learning experience for me. I also really enjoyed everyone on the team, which is always a great bonus!

Andrew Soria, perceptive as he is, captured my once frazzled state with a beautiful drawing.

Everyone put in a solid effort and the client was very happy in the end. We certainly gave them all the latitude they wanted while not compromising the delivery. Thanks Superfad!

http://superfad.com/work/project/ca_lottery_rabbit_foot_factory

THQ Motocross

administrateur — Mon, 07 Mar 2011 05:50:25 +0000

This trailer aired on a jumbo-tron during a Motocross event. My contribution to this project was some layout, a little generalist work here and there, and mostly shader and lighting work. We had some talented cats working on this. I think the animation could have used a couple more weeks of polish.’ Live action’ characters are just so unforgiving, compared to cartoony type work. The eye picks up every single detail of motion and throws you into that ‘uncanny valley’. This project was completed while at Bl:nd.

Fuel TV

administrateur — Sun, 20 Feb 2011 06:54:01 +0000

I did this identity tag for Fuel TV while at Brand New School. The budget was cut off, literally, before we had much to show yet the spot was well under way. We worked with a skeleton crew on this, and accepted a rate cut because we really wanted to see this spot through. I did the initial camera work, some modeling, and lighting. I also designed the skateboard park shaped end tag. The initial project was much more ambitious, with more shots and character animation, but unfortunately things were pared down to this lonely skater in a lonely futuristic cubic world.

Fable III

administrateur — Sun, 20 Feb 2011 00:50:28 +0000

While at Psyop, I worked on this cinematic trailer for Fable III. I only lit a few shots and did lsome layout and shader work as well. There was a talented team that cranked out this trailer pretty quickly.

Piranha

administrateur — Sun, 20 Feb 2011 00:26:37 +0000

Piranha was one of the funnest, and also most horrible jobs I worked on. It was fun because we got to create some outrageous mayhem, such as eyeballs being snatched and torn off. The more over the top, the more the client liked it. It was hell because we had 3 weeks to create 30 shots. With 3 lighters, a handful of animators, a Massive TD, and a tracker… And that was it. Also, it was decided that we’d not use the usual renderer, Mental Ray, in favor of 3Delight, because it would handle motion blur and Massive integration much better. We got the shots as overflow work when delivery schedules started looking unrealistic for the original studio and shots were distributed across town. Thus, we were handed a Piranha rig used by the original studio, which was being rendered in Mental Ray with proprietary shaders. So we had 3 weeks not only to produce all the shots, but while implementing a rendering pipeline based on a renderer none of us had used before, including re-shading of the piranhas, which was well done by Olcun Tan. I admit that rendering all this in 3Delight was a breeze once we figured out how to use it, and it would have been much more tedious to get that out of Mental Ray. Also, we had to figure out on the fly how to setup and render shots for stereoscopy. I came out really impressed with the renderer. In fact, we barely pulled this off with steady all-nighters and a lot of pressure. The cgi on this movie was done a multiple studios, and in the following sequence, I am showcasing the shots I did, which, I think, were amongst the most successful ones in the film. This was done at Gradient Effects.

WARNING: If you are adverse to nudity and gore, move along; this is adult stuff…

Target Field

administrateur — Sat, 19 Feb 2011 23:36:18 +0000

This is an animation for the Jumbotron at Target Field in Minnesota. It is a race where spectators vote for a winner. We ended up doing 3 win sequences, with a different finish, and this one is Skeeta’s. I did layout, shading, lighting and compositing on this project. There even was 2D animation in After Effects. The crew we had was very skilled, and I really like the look we achieved. This was done while at Brand New School.