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More Box Tops! I was the 3D Artist & Animator on this one, once again!

Pixel Farm Credits

Director
Tony Mills

Designers
Alicia Reece
Robert Mostoller

3D Artist + Animator + Compositor
Joe Russo

Additional FX Simulation R&D
Matt Pearson

Sound Designers
Ken Chastain
Jesse Marks

Teaser – 15s

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Launch – 30s

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Here are two spots we completed for Kentucky Lottery in early January. In addition to the digital animation treatment, we also used a practical puppet rig for the dollars to achieve a more organic visual look. A fun challenge for the team!

Here are some photos from the production shoot:

Pixel Farm Credits

Director
Rich Haesemeyer

Storyboard Artist
Joe Russo

Puppeteers
Alicia Reece
Joe Russo

3D Artists + Animators
Amanda Nelson
Joe Russo
Rich Haesemeyer
Zac Leckscheid

Compositors
Eric Schulist
Rich Haesemeyer

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3 weeks before the opening game and we need an animation that not only brands Pixel Farm but shows the relationship between Pixel Farm and the Twins. Can we do it? YES! And we did, and this is what is the result from those 3 weeks of quick milestone turnarounds, little exercise, and a lot of consumption of Chinese food.

This plays 40 minutes before the game starts, on the big screen. So if you go to a Twins game, look out for it! Enjoy!

Pixel Farm Credits

Director
Kurt Angell

Producers
Bill Kruse
Paul Sadeghi

Designer + Animator
Amanda Nelson

3D Modeling Artists + Texture Artists
Amanda Nelson
Joe Russo

FX Artists
Eric Schulist
Joe Russo
Rich Haesemeyer

3D Lighting Artists
Amanda Nelson
Joe Russo

Compositors
Amanda Nelson
Eric Schulist
Joe Russo

End-Tag Animators & FX Artists
Chad Retrum
Eric Schulist
Kurt Angell

Sound Designer
Ken Chastain

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At Pixel Farm, we recently completed the in-game graphics for the Twins’ new baseball stadium (Target Field). Since I was working on MonsterQuest as this project was in production, I only had a chance to work on one of several animations: the homerun situational graphic.

I worked on the end part where the ball collides with the text and everything shatters, using particles instancing & keyframe animation to achieve the effect. The main challenge of this project was figuring out the timing for the slow motion. To do this we animated a moderately paced timing, and changed the “by frame” at render time to get more or less frames. Because of this extended sub-frame sampling, we had to sub-frame sample our particles too, which took a really long time to simulate. But after all of that, we created something of insanity…and everyone felt great about it.

Pixel Farm Credits

3D Modeling Artists + Texture Artists
Chad Retrum
Eric Schulist
Matt Pearson

3D Artists + Animators + FX Artists + Compositors
Chad Retrum
Joe Russo
Rich Haesemeyer

Sound Designers
Jesse Marks
Ken Chastain

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Holodeck creature animation for MonsterQuest.

The final animation I worked on for the show. I reused & altered the sasquatch I created for the first episode, and added a younger version.

Pixel Farm Credits

3D Character Artist + Animator + Lighting Artist + Compositor
Joe Russo

3D Environment Artists
Amanda Nelson
Joe Russo

Additional Animator (Background Sasquatch)
Amanda Nelson

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Holodeck creature animation for MonsterQuest.

Pixel Farm Credits

3D Character Artists
Jim Van Den Bogart
Matt Pearson

3D Character Rigging Artist + Character FX Artist (Fur)
Joe Russo

Animator + 3D Environment Artist
Amanda Nelson

Lighting Artists + Compositors
Amanda Nelson
Joe Russo

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Holodeck creature animation for MonsterQuest.

Pixel Farm Credits

3D Character Artist
Billy Thiex

3D Character Rigging Artist + CG Environment Artist + FX Artist (Smoke) + Animator + Lighting Artist + Compositor
Joe Russo

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Another holodeck creature animation for MonsterQuest.

Pixel Farm Credits

3D Character Artist
Jim Van Den Bogart

3D Character Rigging Artist + Character FX Artist (Fur & Dynamic Wings) + 3D Environment Artist + Animator + Lighting Artist + Compositor
Joe Russo

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We wrapped up production for The History Channel’s MonsterQuest TV series recently at Pixel Farm, creating cg elements for 9 episodes over a course of 5 months, starting back in October 2009. It was around 30 seconds – 1 minute of animation per episode, depending on the content of the show.

This particular piece is called The Creature Holodeck which plays early in the show, describing the creature through V.O. and motion.

Pixel Farm Credits

3D Artist + Animator + Compositor
Joe Russo

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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.

Pixel Farm Credits

3D Artists + Animators
Chad Retrum
Eric Schulist
Joe Russo
Pail Wilson
Rich Haesemeyer
Tom Doeden

Compositors
Eric Schulist
Rich Haesemeyer
Tom Doeden

Colorist
Dave Sweet

First Mile

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Morning

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Hello! More professional work, and I’m really excited about this one!

For this, I built 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!

Pixel Farm Credits

3D Artist + Animator
Joe Russo

3D Texture & Lighting Artist + Compositor
Eric Schulist

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 .

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Breakdown

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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.

Pixel Farm Credits

3D Artist + Animator + FX Artist
Joe Russo

Compositor
Tom Doeden

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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.