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!