I’ve moved from a VFX Intern at Zoic Studios, to a programmer at Zoic Studios to being CG Artist at Ka-Chew all in a few months. My time at Ka-Chew! has been amazing, but production is winding down. I’ve got a new demo reel up that contains three of the six or seven commercials I had a part working on. Mostly modeling and texturing, though I did all the hair and fur (a first for me) and even some work in After Effects as well as one shot hand tracking and built an entire scene for the first beach shot of the Campbells spot. Variety! Stupendous!

Recently I tried out a great rendering program called Indigo. It is an unbiased renderer like Maxwell. The only issue was the scripts written for Maya to Indigo translation had a hard time with large data sets (20,000 plus polygons). I decided to write a plug-in to work with MTI. Download the scripts here and the latest plug-in here.

Here is an Indigo test render with a 500,000+ triangle scan of the bust of Ajax exported with MTI and my plug-in:

Materials in Indigo are simple, but render with extraordinary real world complexity. Enjoy the plug-in!

I’m uploading a minor update to my lighting challenge from this thread. The model is by Dan Wade, Lighting and Textures by myself.

The various lights and Final Gather:

Since the physical sky shader in the latest version of Mental Ray is not exposed for Maya users, Fredrik Brännbacka of Mad Crew has written his own version. It is called mad_physical and you can check it out here. Francesco Banterle implemented the same sky (Preetham) for HDRShop. Its nice to have the actual tools in maya though; and a convenient way to link a directional light to the sky map.

CG Underground just went down, so I guess I won’t be hanging out there anymore (looks to be for good). A great new Mental Ray only site just opened up called My Mental Ray (cgtalk thread here) that compiles together a ton of tutorials and shaders for the venerable rendering software. There are already great V-Ray and Maxwell Render sites out there, so it is about time! Please thank Julian Sarmiento.

I’ve just added three more working links: demo reels, resume, contact and about.

Still to come is Scripting, Modeling, and Animation pages. Admittedly, there was not much work to be done there. This site is barely in alpha status folks. More soon.

This site now has wordpress running the backend. Posting new content is wonderful. In the next two days the links for the images, demo reel and other content should be working. Personal links generally are working, as they point to older content.

The links on the right-hand side are provided by del.icio.us linkrolls. If you have del.icio.us, try them out here. As I bookmark more sites (del.icio.us uses tags instead of folders to organize as they are more flexible), this page will automatically reflect that as the linkrolls are dynamically created every time the page loads.