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!