Beetle Animation

My friend Zach Gillespie animated the rhino beetle for me. It's a good feeling to see your work come to life. 

Robot Arm in ACTION

Hello everyone,

I was asked by one of my peers to rig a mechanical arm for a game environment. The model is by Luis Perez.  This rig was fun because I could just play with connections. I had a lot of fun rigging it. It took about 2 hours and it is completely scalable which you will see and has a pretty intuitive set up. The video was one I sent with the rigged file to show him how to use it. Hope you guys like what you see. 

The Neck Test

So it worked! I was worried about the neck for the character because I had the idea of it being suspended by several springs and reacting to the movement of the head. This is just the test rig but I'm confident it will hold up in the final. 

Some Screen Shots of The Copper Soldier

Hey all,

This is the Copper Soldier. He is spliced between a concept by Mr. Jake Parker and Hellboy's Golden army robots. I am taking a lot of liberties with this one to really make him my own. I've got some fun things planned for this characters rig. I have been modeling with the rig in mind for the last few projects but this guy presents a few new challenges. Although his model is far from finished I will be posting some rig tests to ensure my theories on how he will move are correct. Hope you guys like what you see.

My beetle is Now Complete. Responsible for all aspects

VSD Blog Post

 This month I dove deeper into lighting. What I really want to show off in the above image is the purple light on the floor. This is called caustics, it's a very appealing effect that does a lot for the shot. After I saw this effect I started thinking of ways that I could incorporate this into characters. To make it look right though there are several aspects from the global rendering options to the light and material that all need to line up so this works.

 This was the very first time I made UV's, created the textures and mapped them onto an object. It really opened my eyes to the whole texturing process and I learned a lot of pro tips and tricks to stream line my work flow. Not only was I shown how to be faster but to work with higher quality for less of a cost.

First Tutorial

Hey all this is the first in many tutorials. This is the most basic thing you can learn. How to set project files. Once you have this down you have 90% or your pipeline organization down. I will show you how to do it and what benefits you get from working within project files. I hope you enjoy it.

3D Blitz 2014

Click the link to see my entry to the Full Sail Sponsored 2014 3D Blitz. The animation was made from scratch in 24 hours. All the characters and assets were modeled, rigged, textured, animated and rendered in that window for the final result.

Had a great time with some of my hardest working peers.

VEF 2 Project

For VEF 2 we were introduced to Maya fluid effects along with Houdini. For the project we were given two days to recreate a fire/smoke effect using this set up in Maya and Houdini. I had a lot of fun playing with maya fluids primarily because the look even before render was really easy on the eyes. Maya's fluid effects are fairly easy to get the hang of as well. We were taught in two stages how to create our simulations and it worked very well. The first stage was how to get the look and shape of the fire or smoke we were going for. We went adjusted the size, speed, direction and several other parameters that make up the general and refined look of our effect. From there we had a second lecture that went into shaders, lights, and textures. 

We were given free range to research anything relating back to VEF. I got my hands on RealFlow and it was amazing. The interface to this software is by far one of the most intuitive I've had the pleasure to work with. I noticed that when i created emitters and geometry into a scene they we automatically aware of each other. There was a no need to create rigid bodies of colliders. This was made possible because of the central hub node. Everything when created is initially plugged into the hub node and is aware of each other. This made your set up much faster and a lot easier to get to simulating.

Vixon Ambient Occlusion