It’s finally official.  The offer is signed and in the mail.   I will be going to Pixar Animation Studios as an FX TD Resident working on the Bear and the Bow starting July 6th (with Chris Wilson).

In the meantime I’ll be finishing some systems projects up at Montgomery Hall, and getting everything prepared.  I was thinking about dedicating a section of the blog to the roadtrip, maybe?

San Francisco here I come!

Welp, college is over.  I’ve officially graduated with a BFA in Visual Effects.

I have a little less than week off from EVERYTHING now. Been taking the time to catch up on that internet thing, this, and myself. I’ve also brought my flickr page back to life a little. Decided, now that I don’t have classes, I should at least be taking pictures everyday.

Just click my vorticle picture to go there. On another note, this really makes me want to figure out a way to properly visualize vorticle data at rendertime again.

So for my World Mythology final I decided to use a revamped version of my Lava Shader, which is still a work in progress. I finally got everything setup to work much more efficiently, and within Houdini.

The veins are just a bunch of lights with vein textures on them, which brings out the SSS in the shader. The particles were done in a few hours and need a considerable amount of work. This was more for fun than anything though, so it’s on the back burner for polishing.

This is the first post of a few trying to catch my blog up to where I am now, now that I have adequate time.

A graduate animation collaborative class approached me to do a leaf simulation for them. This is what I developed in the bit of spare time I had. I just wrote a simple MEL script to help me populate the scene with leaves, and then combined all the leaves into a few meshes, then applied my preset, which is just a modified version of Duncan’s settings he used on his paper airplanes.

The trickiest part was getting the proper amount of curvature in key areas into the shape of the leaf, so that it would naturally sway and swirl the way I wanted.

I’ve been fairly busy lately.  I put all the portfolio stuff on the back-burner for now.  I’ll get back on that when I have some actual content to add, otherwise I’ll just distribute what I currently have.

What time I have outside of work here at Montgomery Hall, I’ve been devoting to a graduate level collaborative animation project, under the working title of “sleep”.  They originally had approached me to just add motion vector based motion blur to all of their shots.  However, there were many quick things I could do to improve the overall visual quality of the piece, so I’ve been doing exactly that!  Below are some of the finished shots.  I still need to add the dust particles to the last one, and I would like to eventually setup a “poof” system for hard impacts in all the necessary shots.  Here are some before and afters of what I’ve been doing.

NOTE: These are playing really choppy for me in Firefox only… not sure why. Will figure out later.

Before and After

Before and After

In other news!  Last night while trying to get these movies exported for my blog, I was presented with the horrible “washed out” H264 look from QuickTime.   This has plagued my video compressing existence for as long as I can remember.  I had always thought it was some gamma or color profile weirdness.  However… for those of you who don’t know, there is a very easy slap yourself in the forehead solution.

The QuickTime washed out fix

1.) You have a QuickTime movie that has been compressed and has been washed out from this compression.

2.) Open the compressed movie in QuickTime Pro and goto Window -> Show Movie Properties or just press CTRL+J

3.) Load the Video Track and goto Visual Settings you will be presented with these options

4.) It’s set to Dither Copy by default, change this to Straight Alpha
EDIT: It has been brought to my attention by Ashwin Inamdar that using Straight Alpha creates a strange process load from the movies (which would explain why the movies here are playing choppy), to remedy this simply use Premultiplied Black instead.

5.) BOOM, fresh contrasty perfect color’s and values should come careening straight into your retina’s.

6.) Now all you have to do is just Save.  No more nasties!

Other then that I’ve been doing some pretty cool stuff at work, none of it is exactly blog-worthy though.  Will post some more shots here and there as they finish.  I outta start pumping these out pretty soon.  Yep.

Final Note: Sorry, this is wrong. It does fix it, it doesn’t matter if it’s Premultiplied Black or Straight Alpha, for whatever reason (on Windows anyways), if it’s not Dither Copy, it gets really slow in it’s processing when it plays within Firefox from the Quicktime plugin.

My solution, keep it as straight mp4, and play through JW FLV, looks great, plays great.