Made it to Academy of Art's Spring Show 2013

I heard that I made it to the Spring Show for 2013.  My friends told me that I made 2nd place!  Good to hear!  Here is the poster that I made for the school.  Cheers!

Now in Georgia!

Thanks to all my friends and family for their support over the past few months.  I am now starting a new journey working at Tripwire Interactive!  The people here are super nice and great at what they do.  I'm lucky to be part of the team!  Plus Georgia is a beautiful place! :)

Just arrived last night for GDC!  I attended a networking event today and met some really great artists and programmers.  I'm super excited to attend GDC tomorrow!

GC DevKit for HTML5 Games

Check it out:  https://vimeo.com/59646792

UI Design Links

I started looking into  UI designs for games and came across some cool articles that I would like to share:

http://gamedev.tutsplus.com/tutorials/aesthetics/game-ui-by-example-a-crash-course-in-the-good-and-bad/

http://www.nngroup.com/articles/#popular-alertboxes

http://carynvainio.com/?p=1028

Digital tutors has a nice UI design course for mobile devices:
http://www.digitaltutors.com/11/training.php?vid=12210

Chimera nCloth Wing Sim Draft

I performed this ncloth wing simulation on the Chimera a while back but never got around to posting it.  It definitely needs a lot of work.  The Chimera had a really high poly count and I remember the render took nearly two hours to simulate.  Because the original Chimera had a double sided wing, I had to simplify it so the simulation would not take so long.  To accomplish this, I made a copy of the original creature but deleted everything except the left wing.  I used the top portion of the wing and deleted the bottom.  In hindsight, I would have made a simpler geometry with less polys to reduce the run time.  This wing geometry was made into nCloth where I ran the simulation.  I used the simplified geometry to influence the creature.  I painted out the influence of the wing simulation on the geometry (white or black depending on the areas that I want simulated).    The settings need tweaking to get the right deformations.  At the time of simulation, some of the attributes that I adjusted included:  thickness, input mesh attract, deform resistance, drag, lift, friction, collision interations and max iterations.

A trick that I learned to get the right deformation is to create several nCloth simulations that are piped into the mesh.  From that point,  you can paint out the influence of the blendshape.  The idea is to get varying simulations that give you the look that you want.   You can paint in the influence of the simulation (paint blendshape weights) and also change the weight of the blendshape.  Pretty nifty trick.

Free Rigging Webinar!

Escape Studios is hosting a webinar with Jakub Krompolc on his work in Total Recall! And its free!
http://www.escapestudios.com/the-vfx-behind-total-recall-rigging-the-synths/

Right Mouse Button Convenience Functions

For my two sea otter thesis projects, I added right mouse button accessible IK/FK Switching, Dynamic Parenting for the IK arms and for the Arm Pole Vector controls. These were convenience functions that were added for the animators. I used MEL scripts to add the custom feature on the Right Mouse Button menu and used Python scripts to run the commands.

Face Shape Corrective

I've been meaning to post an example of a face shape corrective. Here is the oo + frown shape when added together and the shape sculpted to look better using zbrush. I used some face tools and logic to trigger the corrective when both the oo and frown face shapes are activated.

Some Key Auto-Rig Features

I noticed that my showreel was quite fast and some of the rig features were not showcased. Some of features for the autorigger are shown on the poster.

Anatomy/Sculpture Links

Some great videos put together by John Vukelic on sculptural techniques:
http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL50AD31FBDF02239D
AnatomyZone:
http://www.anatomyzone.com/
General Skeleton Basic Tutorial - Anatomy Tutorial:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fIoBoGSPkws&list=PLwd7gXkWHeN6wT4CTi1MtT1vS9UyS_vW8

UI created for my Thesis Character

I created the UI using QT designer and then I wrote some code using PyQt so that the interface worked in Maya. The GDC 2011 Masterclass: Creating QT Interfaces for Maya and Motionbuilder was a good tutorial that I used to get the ball rolling.