Hit or Missile final
May 2010—I worked on this short film for several months as my semester-long 3D Production II project. The goal was to experience a little bit of each aspect of a production pipeline: concept, design, modeling, surfacing, rigging, animation, lighting, and rendering.
I threw in some particles as well because I'm a masochist.
This was done entirely in Maya and After Effects. It was rendered using mental ray with Final Gather.
Botany Gone Wrong
May 2010—This is my final for Animation Concepts class. The assignment was to complete around five seconds of character animation, during which the character goes from one emotional extreme to another.
I used the
Moom rig, by Ramtin. The background is a stylized version of my botany lab from last semester. It was done in Maya and composited in After Effects.
Aquanaut v2.0
March 2010—The previous version wasn't properly UV mapped or textured. Since this is an extra-curricular activity, I've been working on fixing it in my limited free time.
My original texture on the hull was a mixture of three hand-painted layers of tarnished copper, with an overlapping web of complex bump maps. It was beautiful, but the render was taking half an hour per frame. I toned down the bumps and the raytracing a bit, getting me down to 10 minutes per frame.
Horrified Ant
March 2010—Most of my concept art never sees the light of day since it's for my own personal reference. Here's an exception.
This styleframe is from a character design guide
(PDF) I made for my CG Design class. The protagonist is an ant who must lead his fellow ants out of a college entomology laboratory. This illustration captures our hero's sheer terror upon wandering into an insect specimen collection.
Save our Aquariums, Gardens, and Zoos
February 2010—This short animation was created as an intro to a short PSA for the Bronx Zoo, NY Aquarium, New York Botanical Garden, and other New York City cultural institutions currently facing severe state budget cuts this year.
I also made my screen-acting debut as "A Delivery Man," which was my first gig since my ill-fated turn as Dr. Gibbs in my high school production of "Our Town." Time to invest in some head shots. Links will be posted as soon as the video goes live.
Grumman Hellcat
February 2010—I built model planes in grade school, so it's not surprising that one of the first things I attempted to make after getting into 3D animation was a World War II fighter. Unfortunately, my early results were ugly, mishapen contraptions that would have caused all sorts of grisly crashes and deaths had they ever made it to the airfield.
This
Grumman F6F Hellcat is the first plane that actually came out right. It has a very clean polygon mesh, the UVs are mapped properly, and the textures look quite nice. The video was rendered in six passes using Maya Software shaders.
Hit or Missile
February 2010—My final project for my 3D Production II class will be this guy in a radiation suit popping out of a nuclear missile and juggling plutonium. If you happen to be a nuclear technician, don't try this at work.
This is a work in progress video. The models are nice and clean, and the textures fit nicely. The next step is rigging and animation.
Aquanaut v1.0
January 2010—I love
William Beebe—I currently work in his old laboratory—so it's a given that I'm into the
bathysphere, the metal diving-vessel in which he explored the bottom of the sea in the 1930s. It's on display at the New York Aquarium, and it is very much a tiny, metal deathtrap.
This is a reimagining of the bathysphere as a steampunk walker, complete with crab-claw arms and heavy diving boots. It was rendered in three passes using Mental Ray.
The Botany Lab
January 2010—This was a "model a room, then texture and light it" project. I created a college botany lab based on
an old photo.
I've been tweaking it as I learn more and more about lighting and rendering. My
first version used straight Maya shaders and software rendering. My
second attempt adding ray tracing. My
latest version was done in Mental Ray with the dials cranked up, giving me a 45-minute render. On the upside, I had plenty of time to re-read Jeremy Birn's
Digital Lighting and Rendering.
The Red Menace
December 2009—The Red Army has defeated its blue and yellow counterparts, and now turns its cannons on the capitalist dogs playing Monopoly on the other side of the living room.
This was my final project for David Halbstein's 3D Animation Concepts I class during my first semester in NYU's MS-Digital Imaging and Design program. The assignment was to model and animate 3D objects, then composite them into some photographic backplates.
Return of the Zombie Luchador
November 2010—A deceased luchador is angry at being buried in the frozen north instead of his sunny homeland of Mexico, and rises from the dead to seek a horrible revenge against anyone unfortunate enough to stand in his path.
My family helped me film this stop-motion short over the Thanksgiving weekend. Running around barefoot on frosty gravel wasn't the most comfortable thing in the world, but it was worth it.
