Sizzle

So here's a quick rendering I made of a fireball coming toward camera in an alleyway. Actually, it was the shot set-up and texturing that were quick, not the rendering. The rendering took a few days with the computer processing all day and all night, and running up my electric bill. Fluids devour RAM!

Tutorial on creating a carpet in Maya

http://blog.cgsutra.com/2010/06/29/maya-fur-how-to-create-carpets-using-maya-fur/

The Price

Christopher Salmon raised over $160,000 on Kickstarter to produce a CG-animated adaptation of Neil Gaiman's "The Price"...

http://www.theprice-movie.com

Star field ball made with sprites

Usually I make a star field using PaintFX, but here's a quick whack at a star field made with sprites. I didn't bother making an alpha channel with the sprite sequence (4), so it's by no means perfect, but this might be the most superior way of making a star field, especially if used with something more complicated than a nodal camera pan.

Hastily-made interior

Thought I'd try my hand at a quick interior. The frame below was rendered with Mental Ray, Global Illumination turned on, using an Area light (scaled to the size of the window) with an intensity of 0, and a photon emission of 1900. The scene is roughly the size of Maya's default grid space. A directional light with an intensity of 1 is present to illuminate the photons emitted by the Area light.

Best CD of 2010!

I'm much more of a rock 'n' roll kinda guy, but Kanye West's "My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy" is without question the best release of 2010! Below, have a look at the video for one of my favorite tracks: "Runaway" - enjoy!

More fun with Dynamics...

Dynamics

I built this crude brick wall to try some dynamics out. Considering re-doing and texturing to really make it look good.

THX short

I'm making a THX trailer to try my hand at character animation. The letters I made below were the easy part. Now it gets hard!




Technical reminder to myself: the letters are shaded with DGS_material with the Diffuse set to pure black, and the Specularity set to pure white. Rendered in Mental Ray. Two lights (an ambient and a spotlight) with intensities set to 0, provide the shadows. Raytracing is turned on. Final Gather is turned on with the number of FG rays set to 500. Caustics and Global Illumination are turned off. The actual light source is Image Based. To set this up, go to Render Settings, and click on the Create button. Then apply a 2D Noise texture, and experiement with the noise type to get best result. The noise type used above is Perlin with the following values:
Threshold = .174
Amplitude = .744
Ratio = .707
Frequence = 1

If I were a character on Family Guy...

...I'd look like this:

Boring, but felt like putting something up...

When this baby hits 88 miles per hour...

Above is a picture of me in front of my boss's DeLorean - mocked up to look like the one from "Back to the Future".

Tomorrow (technically later today - in 10 hours!) is the Table Read for my script - very nervous - fingers crossed that it goes well!

Happy birthday, Pac-Man

The video game Pac-Man turns 30 years old today. Consider yourself young if you don't remember the Pac-Man craze of the early 1980's. It spawned a breakfast cereal, Saturday morning cartoon, game watch (mine broke shortly after I got it), and even this hit single:

Glass shader tutorial

Putting this post up here for me so I don't forget!


http://exodusdarkmatter.blogspot.com/2010/02/blinn-and-phong-glass-shader-tutorial.html

Star Trek Season 2 Opening