Have a present…
March 6th, 2009
As it’s been a while since I’ve updated, have a freebie.
One print-resolution Honorverse Ship
26-odd meg. Enjoy.
Because People Want to Know These Things…
January 29th, 2009
I’ve added a link to my resume in the About/Contact section at the top.
Demo Reel 2008.
January 28th, 2009
Well, it’s been fun, and here it is! And now tucked under the page-break for your loading convenience.
Honorverse Update, Complete. Ish.
January 11th, 2009
Of all things, I cannot find the comp-atop scene with the countermissiles launching from Nike’s upper rails, or the missiles that are smashed apart by same. They’ve got to be something – aside from that, I’m *really* rather happy with this update. Thanks to RiK for lending me lots of CPU power for brute-forcing this, rather than having to spend the time I spent setting up that CFD air-blowout on breaking the first scene apart. Video under the fold…
More Honorverse Stuff…
January 8th, 2009
See, this is when it gets fun. I’ve got a nice fat hopper full of things to render now, buffed and polished so if they’re not actually making me happy, at least I’m not actively embarrassed by ‘em.
The first set of Honorverse shots are rendering on my dear old mate RiK’s Mac Pro – still apparently the cheapest way to get eight Xeon cores in one place, must get myself one of those – so I can stop messing about with trying to optimise it and worry about other things, such as the “Big Ship Gets a Steaming Great Hole Blown in It” shot.
Comme ça.
Still having a fiddle with my CFD solver, and I wish the darn author would re-license my replacement dongle… but I’m tolerably happy with the fiddling today. Might conclude that shot with the “down low” angle rather than the “up high” – seeing a honking great spaceship (with a steaming great hole blown in it) hanging over one’s head does seem a touch more dramatic. Wouldn’t you say? Anyway – now I’ve got RiK’s Big Mac (arf) grinding away on one shot, Lady Macbeth (the big rig) on this one, leaving me free to muck around tuning up a Vue render on Dauntless (the nice laptop I got in New Hampshire for not an awful lot of money).
Nine days and a wake-up ’til I fly, and I’d say it could be a lot worse. Yay!
January 3rd, 2009
Told you that glitch in the cheek was an easy retopo. Maybe not so much when I first built this, but NewTek make good kit with lots of yummy upgrades.
Still looks like Wogan, though. Ho hum. Onwards!
The more I look at it, the more I realise how crummy that sculpture actually was compared to the original head. Cripes. No wonder it’s all outta shape. A philtrum like that ususally requires some kind of facial wound.
I Don’t Do Humans
January 2nd, 2009
Funny story. A repeat client comes along and says “We really like your work, and we’d really like you to make a 3D version of this person, from his bust.” “That’s fine,” say I “if you can take photos of the bust from front and both sides with it on a turntable, using a locked-off camera then we should be golden”. While it’s true that I don’t do a huge amount of character animation, it’s also true that a shape’s a shape. So you’d think. So duly I get 23 photos with different zoom settings and centration for each and every one. I love my job, but a sense of humour really does help! So anyway, in the course of trawling through my old projects, I came across these.
A minor twang on the jaw s’patches – easy bit of retopologisation there – and the Fiber Factory IV settings don’t seem to have translated perfectly to FibreFX. The skin texture really needs a bit of work. But to get a little bit of human-work into the reel, it’d probably do for a mid-ground character. Besides, in a high-tech industry, it’s good to show your human side.
The really funny thing was that whilst all concerned were agreed that I’d made a reasonable facsimile of the bust itself, the gent in question was always thought to look like a photo taken 20 years earlier when he was equipped with a truly magnificent moustache. Therefore, this bit of work was never used. He might make a good pub landlord or something…. I’ll see where I can slot him in.
Flicking back and forth between these two images, I recall all the many places where drawing gridlines between the essential pieces of anatomy did me no good at all, as the camera height, position, range to object and zoom factor varied every single time. *sighs* Still, if this was easy, anyone could do it. Right?
Ancient History…
December 26th, 2008
This I did in about three, four weeks spread over about six months in 2001. Yes, I’m a geek. No, there is no cure. No, I don’t want to be cured.
This one was literally and only Just For Fun. Because this is meant to be fun. I don’t think there’s anything showreel-worthy in here (though feel free to disagree in the comments), but sometimes it’s good to animate for the sheer joy of it. Happy Boxing Day, people.
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YouTube DirektWizball
Hooke’s Notebooks
December 19th, 2008
This is about the most mechanically complex book re-creation I’ve ever done. The original folio was a wreck - Robert Hooke’s notebooks from his time as Secretary of The Royal Society. The folio itself lay forgotten somewhere for goodness knows how many years, getting chewed by mice and such, generally being treated in ways that make librarians go white and need a lie-down.
Messy. Photo credit: The Royal Society.
For the Turning the Pages install at the R.S., this was rendered on a plain surface, and with very bland lighting – fair play, it’s the book that’s important but as my demo reel’s not going to be high enough res for the text to be legible, having it in a tolerably appropriate surrounding seems to make sense. The environs aren’t finished, obviously, and I’d like to get some more interesting surfaces in there – some glassware, perhaps, or bring the Bunsen burner more into shot and light it. I shall continue to ponder the matter.
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Here’s a double-res still, with Monte Carlo radiosity enabled (incidentally showing that the wood textures I’ve got to hand are a bit low-res, but they hold up for the animation size).
I mention the Monte Carlo bit because the animation uses only raytrace lights. Interpolated MC and FG rad flicker quite unpleasantly during animations, and I can’t use an animated radiosity cache because the Endormorph-driven book-pages generate an unusuable superabundance of sample-points. I continue to flirt with the notion of rendering it in FPrime with MC switched on – but that would mean having to comp in anything with fancy nodal textures in atop it. We shall see where the process takes me.
I’m going to leave this as a standalone section in my showreel for two reasons:
- The book’s interest is in it’s mechanical complexity, unlike the gilded bling of the other books I’ve done.
- This book heralds the dawn of Science. Almost all the other books were religious in nature.
Because of these huge visual and thematic differences, I think it’s worth having two separate enteries in a demo reel. Though if I end up thinking “Too long, too boring – and too many books” I’ll be very hard-pressed to decide which to junk. Yeah, the Sherbourne Missal and such are beautiful – but this thing is just so cool. There’s more I want to do with this piece – I’ll probably add another page to this website for completed clips, aside from the main blog part.
Bit of a Quandary…
December 18th, 2008
Update #4 – Honorverse the Online Game
I should point out that these showreel updates are me going completely off-canon, by the way. The ships as represented in the original trailer are how they’re described in the books, to the best of my understanding, and that I’m wandering completely off-piste now just for my own pixelly pleasure. These ceased to be Honorverse ships the moment I did that, and are in no way, shape or form endorsed by Baen, Tor, David Weber or Nimitz the Treecat. So there, too.
Well… hum. This sequence was a pain the butt to render the first time ’round – the Impeller wedges have to be the way they are to look even remotely canonical, but that means they’ve gotta have refraction and transparency tracing enabled. I’ve turned my ray recursion down to 8, which is the minimum I can get away with without black spots occouring, and I’m not using any fancy lights – but the concussion waves and splodey hypervoxels just plain take time to render. This frame was 30 mins 40-odd seconds on my quad-core 3GHz XP64 rig. Click the pic, for some reason WordPress is messing with the aspect ratio.
Much splosion.
Not boom today, boom tomorrow. Always boom tomorrow.
Either way, it’s gotten a bit late so I’ll leave the camera work for the morning when I’m feeling a bit fresher. Hey, I did animate a particle accelerator today, too.
*update*
Moins volumes.