life drawing
other works and photography
work in progress - collab project with grant anderson
I'm currently working on a collaboration project with Grant Anderson. Grant is finishing up the modeling, and I will be surfacing/lighting/rendering the environment. Here is a work in progress render from the scene as it stands now. Excited to get into surfacing! Concept by James Finch from Princess and the Frog.
gala tiana
Programs Used: Maya, Substance, Mudbox, XGen, MASH, Marvelous Designer, Arnold.
blueberry ice cream
Programs Used: Maya, Mudbox, NukeX, Photoshop, PRman (REYES).
I wanted to explore the beauty of food styling and photography in this piece. Inspired by a photo by Hillary Moore and my own affinity for ice cream and the color blue, I decided Blueberry Ice Cream was a good choice. The scene was rendered using Pixar’s RenderMan and composited in The Foundry’s NukeX. All objects in the scene were textured and sculpted in Autodesk Mudbox using .ptex textures. The background pile of blueberries were shaded using primvars to help vary each blueberry.
backyard blueberries
Programs Used: Maya, Mudbox, NukeX, Photoshop, PRman, Python Scripting.
Clearly having some sort of blueberry obsession, I wanted to revisit food shading in this project I completed shortly after graduating. It was a collaboration with a friend (John Pagan) who did the modeling. In this project I used a Python tool I created in school that helped me assign random primvars I could feed as values into shader attributes to add variety and randomness to one RenderMan RIS shader.
whitney houston bust exploration
Programs Used: Maya, ZBrush, Mudbox, Photoshop, Arnold, XGen.
I'm a bit fan of Whitney Houston, and wanted to explore XGen more with this stylized bust of Whitney. It was cool learning more about the various attributes I could tweak to get various different looks out of the hair curves. Definitely want to do a more realistic portrait of her at some point in the future.
otis winston the otter
Programs Used: Maya, Mudbox, NukeX, Photoshop, PRman (REYES).
For this creature look development piece, I modeled and surfaced an otter within Maya. He is animated with a combination of simple rigging and blend shape techniques. Textures were painted in Autodesk Mudbox and Maya fur is used for his coat and the grassy environment. I wanted to combine a realistic aesthetic with a painterly, more stylistized aesthetic that I really admire. Shading, lighting, and rendering is all using Pixar’s RenderMan.
Responsible for all components except calamagrostis and big grass blade models.
father a film by katie low
Programs Used: RenderMan, Maya and NukeX
Responsible for lighting and compositing. CG Animation by Katie Low and 2D teardrop animation by Milena Goncalez.
gold coast, hong kong
Programs Used: Maya, Mudbox, NukeX, Photoshop, PRman (REYES).
This project is based on the room I stayed in while studying abroad in Hong Kong. The pillow, blanket, t-shirt, and flag were all placed using nCloth simulations. Modeling was done in Maya, texturing in Photoshop and Mudbox, and compositing was done in NukeX.
Responsible for all components except the Buddha, shirt, and Dragon statue models
floating pendant
Programs Used: RenderMan (REYES), Maya, NukeX, Mudbox, Photoshop, and Mental Ray
The emphasis of this project was to utilize camera projection to efficiently aid in photoreal rendering. The background plate was shot using my Nikon camera, and was composed with storytelling elements in mind. The contents and knob of the box are shaded, lit, and rendered using RenderMan. The box itself is a projection onto geometry within Maya. Other components were rendered using either RenderMan or Mental Ray and were then composited in NukeX.
the bird and the fox
Programs Used: Maya, Mudbox, NukeX, Photoshop, PRman (REYES), and Mental Ray.
This project’s main focus was to integrate an animated character into a previously shot live-action background plate of my choosing. The animation was done by my friend Kaitlin Petras for a class of hers. The fox was textured in Autodesk Mudbox and the bird in Photoshop. Lighting was done entirely within Maya using RenderMan’s physically based lights (two lights and an HDRI I took at the scene). The shadows were extracted using RenderMan’s render pass system, which was then composited in Nuke. Occlusion and depth of field were rendered using Mental Ray. Responsible for videography, compositing, texturing, lighting, and surfacing.
lollipop integration
Programs Used: Maya, Mudbox, NukeX, and Mental Ray.
For this project, the emphasis was to composite a reflective object onto a previously shot live-action background plate. I really wanted to tackle some sort of edible object, and I really connect with saturated colors that invoke a sense of magic and wonder, so my mind went to lollipops due to the childhood nostalgia they often illicit. Base geometry for the lollipop was modeled in Maya and then exported to Mudbox for detail sculpting and painting. Using render layers, I isolated certain features of the shaders and geometry that would help me rebuild the scene within Nuke for compositing.
voice
Programs Used: Maya, Mudbox, NukeX, Photoshop, and Mental Ray.
Voice was a collaborative senior film directed by Sylvia Chambers. It is the story of a boy (Leonard) struggling to accept who he is in relation to the world around him. I textured Leonard, lit, and composited a few shots from the film. The film was eventually chosen for the end of the year juried animation showcase for the Savannah College of Art and Design.
rib archiving teapot.
Programs Used: Cutter, Photoshop, and PRman (REYES).
I took inspiration from concept art created by Mary Blair for Walt Disney's Alice in Wonderland for this next project. I felt the quirky and intriguing use of shapes would be ideal, since I was limited to using simple quadrics to compose the geometry. The scene was composed, lit, and shaded exclusively using .rib archiving (RenderMan Scene Description Language) within Professor Malcolm Kesson’s Cutter text editor program. The texture maps were painted in Photoshop, and converted into .tex files. The .rib file was rendered entirely within the text editor.
c++ programming final - breaker
Programs Used: Visual Studio 2015
I programmed the game Breaker in C++ to exercise Object Oriented Programming. It was so much fun problem solving and trouble shooting the program when creating it, and it's even more fun playing it at the end! I enjoyed this class so much, and I feel like I have a better understanding of programming fundamentals.