Demo Reel

This reel primarily demonstrates my capabilities with simulation and effects creation; however, it also provides a good overview of my artistic and technical talents. Have a look then check out the reel breakdown below if you'd like to know more about a paticular piece. If the video won't play, you may need to download the latest version of Adobe Flash player. You may also download the quicktime file here.

Demo Reel 2009

Reel Break Down

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  1. Tummies

    Tummies is a short film created by myself and 4 team members over the course of a summer. The finished film can be viewed here. The effects and compositing shown in both shots are my own contribution. Also, in the second shot, the majority of rigging, animation, shading and lighting are my own. The project was modeled and animated in Maya and rendered with RenderMan. Through the course of the project I emerged as the team leader. In addition, my production responsibilities included pipeline creation and management, shader programming, and effects lead.

    The steam effect in the second shot was created by compositing several layers, each rendered using a unique technique. The main "puffy" steam layers were created with a particle simulation driven by about 10 fields. Each particle is a simple sphere instance animated via expressions to rotate around a random axis and increase in scale with time. The spheres are shaded with a procedural cloud texture and have their opacity linked to the camera's grazing angle to give each a soft edge.

  2. Intro for Tex Ags Studios

    This short free lance animation was created using various effects tools in Maya and After Effects. The lights were created and animated using MEL script. The animation was handled by writing a script that creates expressions to control the intensity of each light. The project took just over a week from concept to completion.

  3. Particle Choreography

    In this solo project, as described in the reel, particles are animated by having their velocities directly manipulated by a vector field. These fields can be quickly and easily designed in Maya to create detailed particle choreographies. A small cube around the particle is intersected with the leaf nodes of the tree and the amount of overlapping volume is used to calculate a weighted average of field velocities.

    The real-time graphics framework I used to produce this piece is also my own creation. This framework manages scene hierarchy, user interaction, simulation, animation, lighting, shading and rendering. It also has the capability to generate GPU shaders from material requirements at build time.

  4. Constrained Dynamics

    This simulation was created for an assignment in a physically-based modeling course. It utilizes the constraint methods described in the research of Andrew Witkin. Orbit constraints are used to keep each chain link a fixed distance from its neighbors. The magnet model defines a constraint that keeps the last particle adhered to its surface. This “mesh constraint” is not a continuous function and thus the particle is not perfectly constrained; however, the technique uses a spring force to correct any error that arises in the system.

  5. Raytracer

    These renderings were all generated by a custom raytracer programmed in C++. The first image in the reel is created using image-based lighting techniques. The environment light is sampled by tracing about 100 rays away from each sample point. The direction of each ray is taken from the position of a vertex in a geodesic sphere. In this way an even distribution of samples is guaranteed and fewer samples are required. In this technique geometry is allowed to occlude environment samples so that occlusion and lighting are combined into one process.

    The second image demonstrates the caustic photon capabilities of the raytracer. In the first of two passes, photons are fired from a light source into the environment. If photons that have been redirected by a specular surface strike a diffuse surface their color is written to a photon map. This map is stored as a texture on the object's surface. In the main render pass the color information in these textures is interpreted as additional light intensity for these diffuse surfaces.

    Similarly, the third image creates photon maps stored as textures; however, in this image the maps are used to achieve global illumination.

  6. Facial Animation

    I utilized various Maya tools to create this animation. The neck and jaw of the character were rigged using typical bone and skinning methods. The face itself is rigged using a combination of blend shapes, clusters, constraints and deformers. I made extensive use of expressions to control how these effects were combined and animated.

  7. Additional Still Work

    These four images demonstrate my artistic talents particularly with shading and lighting. The first image was rendered using caustic photons in RenderMan. The second image was modeled in Maya and rendered with Mental Ray. A substantial amount of 2D painting and touch-up was added in Photoshop.

    The third image is also created via RenderMan. The depicted form began life as a sphere, and was changed into the configuration shown via a custom RSL displacement and surface shader. The fourth and final image in the reel is a model based on a piece by Swedish sculptor Eva Hild. It was created using subdivision surface modeling and rendered with RenderMan.