Nearing The End... And That's Okay!

I GRADUATE IN LESS THAN 2 AND A HALF WEEKS. 2.5 WEEKS. That's nuts. Wild. Overwhelming. Insane. Exhilarating, terrifying, where's my thesaurus...

As the end of the semester and my college career draw to a close, we also near the end of production and post-production for our senior short film. It's been a hell of a ride and I honestly think my crew members are with me in terms of saying we are excited to wash our hands of it. Frankly, I'm excited to just be their friend again, and not their coworker. That's been one of the biggest challenges for sure. They're all incredibly hard workers and very driven to succeed, but there have undoubtedly been challenges that have certainly been useful for equipping us for the 'real world' and jobs, but maybe at the cost of some friendships. Not having webcams on from them or human interaction for the entirety of production was really challenging as well - producing a short film from start to finish in quarantine was not a walk in the park. I burnt out towards the end here but we powered through, and I'm very proud of both myself and a lot of my team for the work they put into the short.

But enough about that, we're here to see renders and talk creative.

The biggest thing that's been done since we last spoke is that the hair and cloth networks were all put to use. I put out the majority of the cloth caches and otherwise the team has been a lifesaver as they help put in the work to bust out the hair and cloth using the networks I set up. Some cloth in the short was simmed in Marvelous and Christine, our production manager and other major Character FX artist, did an insane amount of work with me and on her own to help make HDA and tools for hair and cloth use and reuse. She and Ryan, our other production manager organized a meeting with CU Denver Alumni Jessica Smith , who did breathtaking hair work on her senior short and now works at BRON Digital for Character FX. She helped us troubleshoot our hair (.ass files for Maya were massive and causing unrealistic issues for rendering/scene loading) and gave priceless critique on my network setup as well as grooming tips for Christine.

Here's a longer render of the cloth in action. The rig is less than ideal and has some interpenetrating geometry but I was able to counteract the majority of it in Houdini. The last little bits you see of skin showing through the cloth are fixed in Maya by sculpting in the character mesh before render.

The hair is a lot lower res. than I would've liked, but as those issues popped up at the last possible minute and I wasn't as available to help, I certainly cannot complain. I can't get my hands on any high res. renders at the moment but here's a sneak peek:

Everyone had a hand in this shot, from rigs to textures, so I can't even list them all. I definitely encourage you to check out their websites on the right side of this page! I just did cloth and hair sim/networks for this shot. Svetlana and Christine did eyebrows and eyelashes.

Somewhere amongst everything else I also helped do some light simulation for a vacuum tube as the sim. they were doing in Maya was too stiff and I was able to do it relatively easily in Houdini using curves and deforming the geo to it. I'd never done anything like it before but was able to figure it out pretty quicklike which was a relief.

I figured out what my issue with that wine bottle smashing sim. was and have since fixed and exported it for the scene to render. It's pretty far in the background of the shot but here's a playblast for a closer, but not as pretty, look.

I broke up and sent the large pieces to Eric to hand animate, then brought them back in and added them for collisions with the rest of the fractured bottle and cork/liquid.

Finally, we've got progress on the burp:

This is a playblast; I've since changed the animation so it doesn't hit bounding box borders or have a strange trail. Ryan lit and textured it and here's a frame of that (note; Daisy's hair is pink because of a failed texture, she's not got crazy hair dye):

I'm excited to see this, and honestly everything else, rendered into the short.

As always, to see our latest animatic, check out the link in the top right. It will be finalized (first pass anyway) Saturday 5/1, and it'll 100% be finished two weeks or less after that; we just will be doing final renders with AOV's and Comping, as well as finalizing any paraphernalia - Every other senior thesis' group is begging us to make Aldo plushies, and don't get me wrong I would love one too, but those are certainly the more expensive option. We are going to at least aim for some enamel pins and the usual posters and such.

We got this. Only a couple more weeks. Just am trying to fight this burnout as I prepare for the next chapter of my life - a new apartment, a new job(!!!), and then some... on top of remaining motivated to finish the short.

We got this.

WE HAVE A TITLE!!!

Hello!!! I want to start by saying that our short film is no longer "Monster Roommates (Working Title)" but it is now (drumroll please)...

Monstrous Mishaps!

We all pooled a bunch of ideas and with votes from both ourselves and friends, colleagues, and family to whom we sent a survey of options, this finally won out. A little secret between you and me - I came up with this title, and I'm really really flattered and proud it got chosen. There were so many good options and it was a very close call, but hopefully you like it as much as the rest of us!

In the meantime, I have finalized our cloth network and set up our hair network for plug 'n play as our animators are hard at work and exporting alembics for us.

Here's a couple examples of my hair work to show the group as POC:

Gravity isn't working as much on the point deform when they lean forward, but this was good for POC. Also, this is before a groom and Christine has their hair quite a bit shorter so it should work much better.

This is also a temporary groom but I do quite like it. I'm very grateful for Christine's patience and resilience as the network update to include .abc's reset the hair grooms. Every iteration she does looks better and better though so I'm constantly amazed by her work.

The animation is also using mocap. from Sabrina, hence the intersecting geo that she's since hand-animated to clean up. It's so exciting to see our characters in motion, and not bald!

...and also not naked. Here's a shot of Syd passing by as they vacuum showing off some cloth sim on their pants.

This shows how we get it ready to follow the animation, but the cache's take so long that it was hard to get the whole animation in. In the last couple weeks especially I've been working on making that as streamlined and fast-caching as possible. UV's are maintained for texturing, and I even invested in a cloth for production tutorial on CGCircuit that was really enlightening and useful - definitely worth the cost.

Finally, I took the procedural ivy and turned it into a subnet tool that has a much easier UI for our set dressers to use wherever they like around our set. Christine has requested I do the same for the hair/cloth networks so I'm going to try to do the same for those in the next week.

I'll have a more in-depth video updated on this post soon, but this is the ivy tool I'm talking about. We can have it automatically grow to/on as many objects as we want,

We got rid of the leaves, but I did put in cards that are imperfect but at least a good starting point for the set dressers to manipulate should they decide we want leaves anywhere. I'm proud of my little tool, and hope it saves our set dressers some time.

It's also been a busy season of applying for internships and jobs alike, so if you want to, please go look at my new demo reels - either through the demo reels page on this website or through my Vimeo linked at the bottom of every page. I graduate in less than two months so am only slightly terrified about the future... ha!

We've got a couple of new contributors to our short as well: Sandra Furman, who has returned to the DAC program after a few years and is an absolute powerhouse at everything she does - she's assisting hugely with our textures - and Cameron Sprague, someone I've known a while from our program and is a fantastic person and incredibly efficient and talented - he's helping with our lighting. I'm happy that they've been able to help us on top of their own main projects, and their portfolio sites are added to the list on the right of this page if you want to check them out!

Our short is rendering as we speak and we're in the final stretch. Our future awaits, and I look forward to showing you more of Monstrous Mishaps (yay title)!

P.S. As some side work I've been commissioned by friends to do 2D artwork - I did a tattoo design and a logo for my film major friend's live action short film:

Here's the tattoo drawing, though she didn't go with this exact image, she was grateful and seemed to really like it. (Such a sweet doggo, and so flattering that she liked my style enough to request this!).

And here's the logo. I've been commissioned to make a poster for "Grocery Store Flowers" so will be working with the director to get a better sense of motifs, images, and storyline that they want me to highlight.

These two pieces are ~exclusive~, meaning I haven't posted about them anywhere else! That said, if you ever want to see more of my 2D work check out my Instagram where I post the few doodles I get to do in my spare time!

That's all for now folks - see you soon!

Into the New Year

Hello! Long time no talk. I hope this finds you happy and healthy after the holiday season and new year. Keeping a social media presence is not my forte, but I can promise you we'll be seeing a lot more of each other moving forward. This is the home stretch; our final short needs to be finished in less than three months and it's absolutely surreal.

I have a new demo reel uploaded to my website which you can find on my home page as well as the demo reel section, and I've got a shiny new resume as well (also to be found around on my website).

Here are some of the things I've been getting done and making progress on:

We've got our hair networks set up for both of our main characters - these are some renders I did on the Dana rig before our character mesh for Daisy was finalized. The cloth design/Marvelous work is done by Sabrina.

Since we've gotten our character's base meshes, I've been able to throw them into some clothes. Alembics of animation are coming soon so I will have more than cloth resting on the static mesh, but these are renders after a few seconds so the cloth can be affected by gravity.

Daisy's base mesh is by Svetlana and the cloth/Marvelous work by Christine.

Syd's base mesh is by Mason and the cloth is once again thanks to Christine. I'm seeing some grid-like faceting in the cloth that I need to troubleshoot, as it is not a result of low polys. But it's ongoing and I'm eager to actually simulate the cloth on an animated mesh.

Meanwhile, I've finally been getting to blow things up!

For a stovetop fire that will be in our destruction scene, I was able to progress from this:

To this:

over the course of a few weeks. I'm proud of my improvement and the amount of pyro FX I've learned in so little time. The models/set dressing in the renders are thanks to Jasmine.

I've also used my new pyro knowledge for this:

There are a couple issues I'd like to iron out and am getting voices on from faculty and classmates alike, but this render is after several critiques and iterations from my group and they seem much happier with it now!

Last but not least, we've got a wine bottle smashing after a character knocks it over.

This definitely feels like a first iteration, of the level that we saw in that first stovetop fire render. That said, combining RBD and fluid simulations together has been fascinating and a gratifying challenge. There are some obvious issues and more subtle critiques I've received, so I look forward to having something better to show soon. This effect will be in the background of a shot, though, so I'm also going to have to better learn to compromise and will likely not perfect this as much when other FX become a higher priority for our pipeline.

In the last week or so I've been getting some much needed R&R as my body has sort of forced me to pause after crunching hard over winter break and the week before especially to create a demo reel and begin the internship application process.

That said, now until April is crunch time, and I'm nervous but excited to see what happens, and how our short turns out. Frankly, I'm terrified. But talking to connections I know this is part of the production industry, and other studios are currently in the same boat to their own degree. So I'll just chalk the crunch time and stress up to "practice"! :)

Either way, in less than 3 months we'll have a short film, and in less than 4 I'll be graduated from university and therefore the education system as a whole. It's absolutely surreal to think about and I hope you'll join me as I continue to bust ass up to and past those deadlines.

Until next time! Stay safe out there!