Generally, if its been a long time since I’ve posted I start posts out with “Well, sorry its been such a long time since the last post rah rah rah…” but if you reference the previous post, you’ll know that this post requires no such introduction. I’ve been busy.

So, to catch up. Here is a bulleted list of whats currently up with the world.

>> Lacking access to my own computer, I haven’t been able to work on personal projects or really even maintain the site, so if you’ll notice things like how the extras page is full of links that all direct to the same broken page, you now know why. Now that school is behind me and I’m not under constant pressure to be producing things at all hours of the day (now its only from 9AM to 6PM) there are several things I’d really like to get back into working on, namely: Salvage.

>> The city of San Francisco is small but dense, and living more or less at the corner of Haight Ashbury puts the culture directly in your face. Not just the rich kid hippies who live on the streets for the life experience, but the tourists who are enamored with the idea of counter-culture and being able to smoke weed on the city streets. Nothing against Upper (and Lower) Haight in the least, its been fun living here, but there’s not much thats special about Haight and Ashbury. There’s a Ben and Jerry’s on one of the corners, and I have never eaten there.

>> Golden Gate Park is remarkable in its ability to be an overgrown forest in the middle of a city. Buena Vista Park is almost as good (I prefer the view from Strawberry Hill in Golden Gate Park.)

>> Working at LucasArts has been an experience and a half and I’ve learned more in 3 months here than I’d ever learn at an educational establishment (not to knock my SCAD education.) That said, I think thats pretty much all I’m allowed to tell you about work.

Unusually enough, thats about all I really have to say about LATJ (Life At This Juncture.) Words simply don’t do the city / the job justice. Its like Avalon.

And here’s the cast of Spongebob dubbing over film classics.

If you noticed things were a little different around here, well, they might be.

So this is the new design for the site, built upon a solid concrete-WordPress compound and thus far more easy to update than the previous design, which was a sofa cushion fort compared to the new fortress-like structure you’re seeing. I hate waiting for everything to be picture perfect before launching it, so while the main majority of things are up, extraneous stuff (like the aptly titled “extra” section) is being designed and tweaked and put up piece by piece in its natural habitat on the actual extra page. So if you notice weird stuff like text or columns positioned weirdly, or the walls are moving or anything like that, it should be fixed fairly quickly. To aid in such regions I might be doing work in, I made this little CSS doodad:

I may decide to use this liberally just so it looks like big things are happening around here. Hah!

In other news, in 5 days I graduate from my college life forever and migrate to the west coast to start an internship with LucasArts as an environment artist. You’d think this would be something I’d have dropped the day I got it, and in all CAPS, but the immediate and dire need to find cheap reasonable housing that was nearby to work (no car!) presented itself pretty much right away and I wanted to have this whole situation locked down first. For what its worth, trying to find housing in San Francisco from about 2700 miles away in a very short amount of time with a very limited budget is a lot like punching yourself in the face, repeatedly.

For my efforts, SCAD gave me a pat on the back in their JobWire newsletter.

Getting things organized at this point, throwing stuff out, boxing stuff up. After graduation is a small week long stint in West Virginia, visiting family and seeing friends before I only decide to pick up my belongings and leave everything I ever knew on the east coast and begin and whole new life thousands of miles away (which sounds like some sweet adventuring if you ask me.) So that said, I’ll leave you with people getting punched in the face in slow motion.

This is a big one.

So, today I have two little doodads to show to you. First off, lets just take a look at the new demo reel. It will continue to be refined right up until the end of school, but this is basically the 95% model of my final demo reel that will be sent out to employers and so on and so forth. This is just the YouTube version, so I can plop it straight to the front page, but for higher rez versions of this, see the Portfolio page.

I love hearing comments and questions and feedback and critique so please feel free to get in touch and unload your gripes onto me.

Second up, is the final animation for Urban Polyptych, my Studio 2 final. Again, like the reel, there’s a higher res version available for download on the actual project page, but for the purpose of being front and center, here’s the YouTube quality version:

Same rule applies with this one, go right ahead and email me with your thoughts and whatnots because I love to hear them.

That’s all! See you soon.

(EDIT: Also, because I certainly don’t intend to withhold credit, the music in Urban Polyptych is “Les Nuits” by Nightmares on Wax, and the demo reel music is “Overlook” by Tycho.)

Hey, also, by the way, meant to tell you.

My production blog for Studio 2 is up up up. In this chapter, I’m building a full urban high-detail CG environment and I’m excited about it. Go check it out right now, I just put up a very tall screenshot of the modeling so far.

(Crosspost from the Studio 1 page!)

Now, two months, some odd days, a new computer and a rebuilt effect, I can finally present the final JetSet effect and breakdown. I’m excited (and relieved) to finally have this out the door and are finally able to get to work more intently on the projects I’m in now.

Overall, not precisely the image I had planned from the start, but a solid adaptation and a pretty important learning experience I would say. I haven’t had much experience in live action work, outside of some small projects and compositing exercises, and I was excited to create CG that was going to be put into a live environment. I’ve learned an explosive (no pun intended) amount about compositing techniques, lighting, and even more about dynamics and particle rendering.

Anyway, hope you like it. A higher quality quicktime can be acquired here:

JetSet - QUICKTIME - (38 MB)

in Mental Ray for Maya 7/8.5/2008, do this:

- Create a mia_material MR shader.
- Set the diffuse to white
- Set the reflectivity to 1.0
- Make sure “Metal Material” is checked
- Set 0 Degree Reflection to .9 (under BRDF)
- Set 90 Degree Reflection to 1.0
- Don’t check “Fresnel”

You can get reflection blur by playing with the gloss values. Be sure to adjust your gloss samples accordingly.

NEAT.