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View a montage of recent work that includes some personal concepts and design. My latest lighting and generalist reels are featured here along with some other samples of my work. Enjoy.

Hélène CG Short / Shot Progression

February 20, 2018Animation, Animation*2D Animation, 3D Animation, Compositing, Digital Sculpting, Lighting, Look Dev, MARI, Maya, Modeling, Motion Graphics, Mudbox, Nuke, Redshift, Rigging, Texturing, V-Ray, ZBrush

This is the full length version of the Hélène short along with its shot progression. Hélène is a personal project that I completed a few years ago. One reason for creating this project was to spend a lot of time with the various features of the V-Ray 3.0 toolset. Even more important at the time, I wanted to complete a project with a clear narrative. Something my personal projects typically lacked. I wanted to experiment with a project that was very specific in terms of mood and lighting. To further challenge myself technically, I wanted a project that was larger in scope than my usual projects. I wanted to experiment with balancing the logistical complexity of a larger project, with the visual simplicity of message and mood.

Since it was suppose to be a live action project, I knew I would need to find a proper live action plate online or shoot it myself. A film shoot would certainly have added a lot of time to the project schedule so I was happy to find some online resources for raw live action plates. It was upon discovering this freely available live action plate at Hollywood Camera Works that I actually came up with the idea for the Hélène shot.

Hélène turned out to be the perfect project for me. This shot is a portrayal of Hélène of Troy; alone with her thoughts, high up in the walls of the royal palace as the city of Troy burns below. The shot takes place well into the night before daybreak as the Trojans are routed and are preparing to escape the city under darkness. The village burns below as she contemplates the carnage that is taking place; a hefty price for her love for Paris. Hélène appears remorseful as she looks away from the suffering below towards the night sky for solace.

I completed all aspects of post-production mainly using Nuke, V-Ray, Maya, Mari. I also used third-party tree and vine generators to create some of the vegetation. More on that later.

I began by creating a clean plate. The original plate had a lot of issues. It was an 8-bit sequence and the color balance was off by quite a bit which contaminated the green screen making pulling a good quality key in Nuke extra challenging. Things were further complicated by wrinkles in the green screen, distorted shadows and just the overall relatively poor quality of the plate. I knew all that from the beginning but I welcomed the challenge actually. I was mostly successful with keying by applying various keying techniques to different parts of her body to extract her. With a little post clean up, I was able to create the final clean plates. One of the girl, and one for her shadow.

After creating the clean plates, I tracked the shot which was fairly straightforward. With the shot tracked, I created a 3D camera. I then removed the cameras lens distortion to create a non-distorted clean plate. From there, I was able to bring everything in Maya to create the layout. I pretty much knew what I wanted as far as the background went, but I had to experiment with various foreground elements to work out the right assets. I wanted to use the right foreground elements to add additional depth to the shot and to also have a dramatic reveal of Hélène and the inferno. Finally, I settled on the hanging vines for the foreground along with an overhead trellis and additional hanging vines above.

From there, after some basic lighting setup, it was a matter of shifting the layout around until I felt like I had the makings for some interesting light pooling and shadowing from the sky, using the environment itself. Later, I would add additional lighting, Cucoloris light effects and blockers to assist with the pooling of light. With the layout complete, I began set dressing the shot with high res geometry. For the vines, I used a free app, Ivy Generator. It’s a neat little program but it doesn’t have support for creating animated vines that are blowing in the wind. To do that, I simply put a lattice deformer on the leaves of the vines and clustered of few of the lattice control points. I then applied multi-layered expressions to the clusters to randomize their positions and rotations to simulate wind turbulence. This mimicked wind blowing through the leaves quite well. Another way I could have dealt with the wind blowing through the vines would have been to use cloth dynamics. But, I did have a lot of vine leaves so I decided to go with the simpler less resource heavy clustered lattices. Once all of the vegetation was positioned, animated and shaded, I created V-Ray proxies.

From there, it was just a matter of look dev’ing, lighting, rendering and comping the shot. The matte painting in the background is comprised of cards and projected images using Nuke 3D tools along with my camera from Maya. Fire and smoke elements were also 3D cards in Nuke as well as the sky. I created some additional passes for the shot like dust, noise animated volume fog, clown passes and a few other utility passes like a uv and position passes. I also created additional passes like a true reflection pass and a fairly accurate depth pass to integrate Hélène better. Effects like depth of field, glare, flaring, blooming, lens imperfections, heat distortion, lens distortion and film grain added the final touches to the shot. Finally, the shot was heavily optimized using a few tricks here and there for an average render time of approximately 1 hour per frame on a 2014 circa 4-core Xeon.

I just created the title sequence recently in After Effects. It was really simple to set up that took no time at all. I rendered the glass logo using Redshift for Maya with two physical lights on either side of the logo, with a sequence of flames refracted inside the logo. I then added a few flares, some glare and embers to fit with the elements that were used to create the original shot back in 2014.

My ultimate goal with Hélène was to convey the mood of the shot very clearly using good spacial composition, light composition and color composition based on real-world photographic principles. For example, light and shadow were used to drive the viewers focus throughout the shot. The shot starts with the viewers focus generally on the foreground elements first, before shifting further to the background. Upon the reveal, we are generally looking past the silhouette of Hélène to the inferno in the background. Our focus then narrows and shifts back to Hélène in the foreground as the inferno becomes less visible and Hélène steps into the light in the foreground.

I’m happy to say that composition remained my focus in spite of the logistical challenges of the project. Visual complexity wasn’t necessary to tell the story. Instead, it was used as the underlying layer that would support the composition and add textural realism to the final shot. Sometimes, shots can get away from an artist quite easily when they’re working on a particular asset or their tasks appear to be insurmountable. but I’m am happy to say that I never lost focus and maintained a balanced approach to this project. I think that shows through in the final result.

-m

* Film plate of girl compliments of Hollywood Camera Work

Music by Epidemic Sound

MOH Blocks Animated Intro

February 16, 2018Motion Graphics, Motion Graphics*2D Animation, 3D Animation, Compositing, Lighting, Look Dev, Maya, Motion Graphics, Renderman (REYES), Rigging, Texturing

This is my old animated demo reel intro that was designed to match the MOH block theme on my webiste. It’s a blend of both 2D/3D motion graphics and 3D animation. Rendered in Maya using Renderman (REYES). Composited with After Effects. I rather enjoyed putting this on together. It was just as much fun putting it together as it is to watch it.

Enjoy

-m

MOH Blocks Image

February 16, 2018Look Development, Look Development*Arion, Compositing, Lighting, Look Dev, Maya, Modeling, Nuke, Texturing

I created this scene for my old flash website moh3d.com, which is still up actually. It’ll be going bye bye soon though. The design of this site is a bit of a homage to my old one. This was a relatively simple scene. Most of my time was spent texture painting the blocks. It’s a pretty straight forward setup as can be seen in the image below.

I set things up with a limited number of scalar maps and masks. I mixed and modulated the maps in Maya with procedurals to generate all of the attribute maps that I needed, including displacement. The final image, below.

I used Maya, Arion and Photoshop for all my texture work.

-m

The Story Behind Mike’s Apartment

February 16, 2018Look Development, Look Development*3D Animation, Compositing, Lighting, Look Dev, MARI, Maya, Modeling, Renderman (REYES), Texturing

I created this image a few years back after flipping through my copy of the Art of Monsters Inc. I loved the art in this book, but I was really blown away with the depth of mood and color that Dominique Louis was able to capture with his pastel sketches. There was one particular image that surprisingly captured my attention though.

I say surprising because it wasn’t the most beautiful, or the most detailed or the most colorful image. Nor was it the most beautifully rendered or thought provoking piece of Loius’ that appeared in the book. At least not in the traditional sense. I guess it struck me for the same reasons that many other pieces in the book had. While the sketch was able to pull me in to a high degree, it was more effective at getting me to wonder about everything in the space that the camera was not seeing. The wider space that was only hinted at. The super bright light, piercing through the darkness from the stairwell below, suggested a place from which they came. The warm light silhouetting the other worldly details of the upper landing gave them a place to go, along with the door at the top of the stairs. Perhaps Mike, and God know what else, was waiting for them on the other side of that door.

I saw Monsters Inc. and loved it. Pixar did a great job of making sense of how the monster world worked and differentiating from the human world. Not for a moment, did I question where we were in the story. But as I flipped through the Art of book that day, it was these worlds that I wanted to see brought to life next. So, I thought to myself… “Wouldn’t it be neat to flesh one of Louis’ pastel sketches out in 3D.” I immediately focused on the sketch above. As I alluded to before, Dominique Louis is a master of texture, color, mood and lighting. Strong lighting is one of the many tools that he employs to emphasize mood more immediately. He often uses bright stark soft neutral lighting to convey a lack of mood or pockets of colorful light punctuated by long dark shadows to evoke fear or danger. This is nothing new really. These are techniques that have been used in visual storytelling for quite some time. But for me, to see an artist so effectively employing these tools in a subject and a media that I care so much about was really moving.

The first thing that I did was to bring the concept art into Maya and converted the 2D space into 3D. I first matched the 3D camera to concept art then I began creating a basic layout using low res geometry to block in the space. From there, I further refined the geometry to do the initial set dressing of the shot. I later created additional camera angles once the environment was further fleshed out. I originally called this project “Sully’s Stairwell” for obvious reasons, but it’s actually a stairwell leading up to Mike’s apartment. At the time, I thought it would be neat to create Sully and Boo as pictured in the early concept. Maybe I’ll revisit that idea one day just for kicks.

From that point, I modeled, texture mapped and shaded the final assets. For the door, I borrowed from the door design that was actually used in the movie. Above is a close-up of the door (rendered in Mari). I used my clay set dress model to do the initial lighting and refined the light using the final assets with their materials in place. I chose not to go with super low key lighting for the simple fact that I wanted to show more shader detail. I actually regret that decision in hind sight and wish I had remained to committed to the original sketch. My concern at the time was that such a stark 3D rendering could not hold up on its own out of the context of the original sketch. I still believe that but I do wish I had taken the chance at that time. I used Maya, Relight and Renderman (REYES) to generate the images. I used volumes for atmosphere and Maya particles for floating particulate matter and dust. I composited everything in Nuke.

One note about the final images, a couple of other things I would change about this scene is that I went waaaay to far with the bump on the procedurally shaded girder in the final scene renderings. Also, I wish I had blown out the lower stairwell more in the second rendering of the scene to come close to the orginal sketch. Aside from that, I really enjoyed following Louis’ footsteps and getting closer to of his work. I just thought it would be neat to see some of Pixar’s early concept work fully fleshed out in CG. It really gave a lot of insight into what processes maybe undertaken and what considerations may be explored to bring a 2D scene into the 3D world.

-m

Beagle Pup Look Dev

February 16, 2018Look Development, Look Development*Digital Sculpting, Grooming, Lighting, Look Dev, MARI, Maya, Modeling, Mudbox, Redshift, Rigging, Texturing, ZBrush

I’m currently working on a new project that will be used to promote some future work. It’s a rather large piece consisting of a few environments as well as a number of characters. The project is stylized in full CG and I’ll be uploading samples here on my blog as work in progress. This is one of the first assets to be completed. It’s a beagle pup that I modeled, texture painted, groomed, shaded, lit and rigged. The pup was first sculpted and UV’d in ZBrush and later refined in Maya. Above is a shot of the pup as seen in the projects look dev lighting scene under neutral light.

Above, is my main piece of reference. In the interest of time, I pulled all my reference and texture from online resources like Google Images. In spite of the low quality of many of the images, I knew I could combine a number of photos to create a complete high res texture set for the pelt using texture projection techniques. I did all of my projects in Maya instead of Mari because Maya’s camera projection workflow is a bit more robust and allows for finer tuning and faster iterations. I was actually able to use the reference image above to paint most of the side of the dog. I gathered rendering with the textures after some processing would be pretty forgiving, considering, that most of the dogs body would be covered in soft fur. Using photo based textures in the first place always results in more believable surface materials; even with something as soft as fur. There’s subtleties in the piling of the various colored hairs in a pelt that are hard to replicate procedurally or with hand panted textures alone. The latter methods tend to lack the organic patterning and qualities found in the real world.

Anyway, here’s how I did it. I quickly rigged the model and posed it in a similar manner as the dog in the reference photo. That’s the final production model pictured above. I then brought the above reference photo into Nuke after flattening the lighting and cleaning up the jpg artifacts in Photoshop. I then grid and curve warped it to better match the posed dog model as best as possible before upres’ing the texture in Nuke. I then brought the Nuke rendered texture into Photoshop for a bit of clean up and then projected that texture onto the dog in Maya and baked it out. I did this with a few photos from different angles which gave me enough coverage to cover the dogs entire body. With this technique, I was able to extended the resolution of the original images quite a bit and preserved detail throughout the projection process. With multiple projections, I was able to fill in areas like the underbelly, under the jaw, the inside of the ears and the dogs backside as well as the bottom of his paws and around his mouth. I then brought in the projected set of photos, blended and cloned them in Mari to create the full pelt. The resulting pelt was my base for further texture painting.

From my base texture, I ultimately generated two base color maps. One for shading the dogs body, and the other, a lower resolution flat color texture for the actual fur coat color. It actually helped the “believability” of the fur to soften the coat color and knock back of some the fur detail. The larger color map for the pups body generally consisted of two layers. The fur color (slightly softened at original resolution) as the top layer. And a hand painted skin layer underneath. To create the underlying skin color layer, I first created a skin base layer in Mari using a texture repeat created from photos of pig skins. I flooded the base layers with a tiled texture of the pig skin. I then went in and painted additional detail using a combination of procedurals, projected photos and hand painting techniques. I then created a set of blend maps to combine the two layers to create the pelt for the body. The end result was a body material that supported the groom well and gave the groom a fuller appearance. It also made for better blending where the fur begins to thin out revealing the pups skin underneath.

From those two base color maps, I then quickly generated the remaining maps like normal, masks, ISOs, spec, sss, fur density, a base fur length and roughness. I then used the fur maps in XGen in Maya after processing them in Mudbox to create the final groom. In the end, the final materials consisted of intuitive layers of photo based maps and masks combined with 2D procedurals in Maya. The images were rendered with Redshift. Render times with 4 Geforce GTX 1080s is around 4 mins with full production settings at 1600 x 1200.

-m

VFX ARTIST REEL – LIGHTING 2018

February 2, 2018Showreels, Showreels*3D Animation, Arnold, Compositing, Feature Film, Katana, Lighting, Look Dev, MARI, Maya, Modeling, Mudbox, Nuke, Renderman (REYES), Renderman (RIS), Rigging, Texturing, V-Ray, ZBrush

I’m a vfx artist for the film and television industry. Here’s my 2018 lighting showreel.

A video montage of a few projects that I completed as a Lighter in the VXF and animation industry.

Showreel Breakdown:

* Film plate of girl compliments of Hollywood Camera Work

You can find more information about my work here on Linkedin

Contact me directly, here.

Music by Epidemic Sound

VFX ARTIST REEL – GENERALIST 2018

I’m a vfx artist for the film and television industry. Here’s my 2018 Generalist Showreel

A video montage of a few projects that I completed as a Generalist in the VXF and animation industry.

Showreel Breakdown:

* Film plate of girl compliments of Hollywood Camera Work

You can find more information about my work here on Linkedin

Contact me directly, here.

Music by Epidemic Sound