Digital Drawings

Here are a few digital sketches from our Friday figure drawing sessions. They were just studies, as I was trying to feel more comfortable with a stylus and tablet while sketching...

Updated Demo Reel - 2009

Here's my newest demo reel. It includes a lot of stuff that I have previously posted on it's own...

My First Foray Into MEL

Cool, but not the most fun thing in the world.

Biped Auto Rigger...Not finished yet. It's still missing a lot of stuff. It's just an IK spine with no facial rig, no stretchy limbs, etc. I'll have to keep going on it.

Making Hair with ZSpheres

So I was looking around and I saw some guy who did all of his hair on his models with zspheres, so I thought I would try it too. Turns out it works REALLY well. This was just a test, so it's not a final sculpt. Just messing around, but really cool nonetheless. The head is a standard preset from Modo, but all of the hair is from ZSpheres.

Low Poly Arm Tutorial

Here is a two part time lapse video where I build a low-poly arm in Maya. I used Maya and Go Tools for the modeling.

Part 1


Part 2

2009 Figure Drawings

So I finally got around to taking pictures of my figure drawings. Click on the slideshow to go the album for hi-res images.

Some thoughts on workflow...

I'm one of those artists who is rarely satisfied with the tools at my disposal. Even with the advent of ZBrush, Mudbox, Modo, etc., I still find myself wondering why the software designers created the workflow the way they did. Yes, anyone can get very comfortable in any package, but it usually takes years of practive and customization before that happens. It is rare that a piece of software is so straightforward right out of the box.

One of my biggest pet peves (sp?) is a software package that has features that seem to never end, and yet those features are so hard to get to and use, that it almost negates the fact that they are there in the first place. Years ago, I was hired at Avalanche Software in Salt Lake City (I still work for them, but we are now Disney Interactive Salt Lake). We were using a piece of software at the time called Hash's Animation:Master. I had never seen it before. I had been studying at BYU in the animation department, barely making it through creating characters out of NURBS primitives, and hated every second of it (Nurbs, that is). Now I understand that they have been made easier to work with in some packages, but still, back then, it was a total pain. You could not do what you wanted without it being a total paiin. When I began in Animation:Master, I found something different: that the feature set wasn't huge, and the paradigm was different (using b-splines vs. polys or Nurbs), but I found that authoring what I wanted to was an absolute breeze. Things like bones didn't have joint orients. Assigning a mesh to a skeleton was a manual, but an easy and simple process. Rigging was a joy compared to what I was used to. It had almost every tool that I needed to use, and it was EASY to understand and implement all of them. Different, but when easy is the different part, I willing o go for that. I loved it.

They had a dirty little secret: make tools easy to use and understand, and the artists is empowered. Such was the way that you could correct a mesh's deformation when it was animated. Who would have thought - just pose the character, sculpt the mesh, and have the character remember what it looked like at that point! Truly amazing. So simple, yet almost all software packages today that are so much more "robust" fail to realize that. They take pride in how "deep" their feature set is. What I see is painful authoring. Even though I CAN do it, I have to do it an inefficient and difficult way. the result is the same, but I have lost valuable time I could be spending on other things. I have much more important things to to than make corrective blend shapes, influence objects, etc. I want to animate. This is where Hash came in. If more packages would implement things like these two videos I made, artists would go nuts. The power that comes with correct authoring methods cannot be overstated.

The first video shows "Smart Skinning". Move an object, fix anything that needs to be fixed, and it remembers. The second shows how I create a facial animation slider, blending skeletal animation and a corrective shape in one step, and one simple to use interface. Now remember, the tools are pretty rudimentary, but the implementation is genius. No wonder I continue to compare Maya and Softimage to A:M. It was one of the most genius packages ever.






Ahhhh. Those were the days.