Demo Reel Breakdown!
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The first piece on my reel is from a short film I had the oppritunity to work on during the A&M Vizualization Industry summer course with Disney! I was Rigging and Pipeline lead for the project. Other responsibilities I was tasked with includ cloth simulation and rigid body dynamics as well as prop modeling.
One of the more difficult tasks was taking the animation and layering cloth simulation on to it. For the head of our main character this was a long journey of trial and error until I was finally able to come up with a method that allowed me to effectively create a mask on the frills of the head and limit the area of effect the simulation would have. This would not have been possible without the advice I got from the great Disney Artists helping us with the project.
Facial Rigging has always been something I found to be especially enjoyable. I spent a lot of time on refining the facial expressions and creating special target shapes with intuitive controls. There was a lot of back and forth between me and the animators to make changes to his expressions and controls. The direct feedback from people using the rig gave me the oppritunity to learn and grow as an artist.
For the body of the character I wanted to give more control than just a standard IK/FK system. I was inspired by Jeff Brodsky's Variable FK system and it's implementation on an elephant trunk that he developed for Legend of Tempo. I spent a few days using python to protype and recreate the node network. Ultimately I was able to recreate the system he described and am very pleased with the results.
The second piece on my reel is a project from VIZA-615 Advanced Animation techniques. The task was to model a believable quadruped and create a rig and finalize deformations with a muscle system.
I chose to model a lion because they were my childhood favorite. For this portion of the project I had to study anatomy and the muscle system far before creating it. The topology flow was designed with the muscles in mind. For me the most difficult part was modeling the head.
The rig was scripted using python. Creating the rig in python gave me the ability to make changes easier and itterate over it much faster. The joints and controls were created from locator positions.
After the rig was complete I moved onto the muscle system. This portion was done manually in maya which gave me more contol over the deformations and final result.
The last piece on my reel is a project from my final year at the Savannah College of Art and Design where I recieved a undergraduate degree in Animation. I was given a lot of freedom to expiriment with this piece.
Making this guy was a lot of fun for me. I think the part I enjoy most about this character is the color changing. He had 2 initial textures blue and red. To get the inbetween textures they were put into nuke and using a color-blend node made into a sequence of hue shifting images. From there the keyframable control was done using a simple expression that shifted the active image on the shader based on it's position. Another fun task was the ribbon spine. A set up which involves using a nurbs plane as the base and attaching each joint to hair follicles that are set to the plane.
