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.