Here is my submission for The Challenge, over at The Challenge Forum. The Challenge was Winter. I chose to mimic micro photography with showing a small section of ice found in a cave or something.
Another two week illustration for the Minneapolis Art Community. The topic was an 8-bit re-design of a character. I chose Scott O’Connor from Kabuki Quantum Fighter, a Nintendo game.
Not sure if I correctly placed the Japanese text, or if it’s even written correctly. It should read the title of the game on the right, and my name on the left.
Here’s something for the revived Minneapolis Art Community. The topic was self-portrait.
Here’s another spot for Pioneer that was finished early July, and has recently started airing.
I animated the “Standability” section and the final hero shot of the Corn Bin building and transforming into the coffee mug. One of my co-workers figured out a efficient way to change rotation direction on the cubes using mel scripting and custom attributes. All you would need to do is translate it in a direction and it would rotate 90 degrees per grid unit. Without this the project would not have been possible within the deadline, since each cube basically needed to be individually animated.
For example, my workflow for the corn bin was to animate one cube or a row of cubes, copy, paste, offset timing, followed by manual refinement of each cube based on where the camera was. Particles, dynamic sims, etc were just not giving us the result needed, so we went with the most straight forward approach. It was a lot of grunt work, but a good learning experience for pipelining / animation efficiency.
Hello! More professional work, and I’m really excited about this one!
First Mile
Morning
For this, I had to build a new model shoe for New Balance and animate it in the same style as their previous commercials. They sent us the sole in CAD format which was converted in Maya to geometry. I took that into 3ds Max, cleaned it up a bit and separated the pieces out for animation. For the top, I used the CAD sole as my template for rough proportions and photographs / reference of the real shoe they sent us, breaking up all the parts I think would need to be animated.
I had to tweak the top part quite a bit before approval, in which I finalized the UVS and exported back into Maya. From there I used a combination of blendshapes and bend deformers with basic rotation and translation animation of the shoe. As I was animating we referenced my scene so we could texture / light / render simultaneously. It was about a 3 week turnaround, and I gotta say, it went pretty smoothly and had tons of fun!
I was responsible for the modeling, UV layout, and animation. Eric Schulist was responsible for the texturing, lighting, rendering, and compositing. We were not responsible for the live-action section of the spot, only the end tag.
Ah, finally some personal stuff! Here are animation tests for the characters of my next animated short: Ninja… Squirrel?!
These are mostly for motion timing / flow and acting. There are obvious intersections with cloth and skinning that will be addressed on a per shot basis (although skinning has been fixed now). These also have allowed me to set up my render layers and make master character files so that I don’t have to worry about render layer setup once my shots are done, for the characters at least.
Enjoy!
Hero Squirrel
Steve Glutton
My interpretation of our 3D Department at Pixel Farm…
Finally! Another post! I recently received the final ad images that I posed and rendered the Michelin Man into. It was a simple workflow, pose the Michelin Man, set up different render layers (fill light, key light, main, eye, reflection, etc) and tweak it like crazy in photoshop. He’s such a happy puffy man…. More to come!
I was not responsible for the ad design, just incorporating Michelin Man 
.
Ok, this update isn’t anything visually spectacular, and it’s not supposed to be. I want to show the technical process of something that is fast and looks simple, because there are still a lot of steps that go into live action tracking / integration.
The spot needed a 3D grapple with a rope to be tracked in, so I modeled the grapple, hand tracked it in maya using the footage as a backplate, simulated the rope using nCloth, and simulated the smoke using FumeFX.
Here’s the part of the spot with the grapple hook.
And here’s the breakdown.
This is a project I worked on with a colleague at Pixel Farm, Eric Schulist. The goal was to demonstrate visual effects integration into a live action plate rather than an in-depth story. It was entered into a local visual effects festival, Minnesota’s Electronic Theater, and shown. I was responsible for the modeling, animation, some simulation, and dust/plasma particle effects.
There is also a making of to show the breakdown. Enjoy! And look out for more updates showcasing the robot model.