2010
04.19

New demoreel!

I have put together a new demoreel. I hope you like watching it as much as I liked doing the work in it. :)

Best enjoyed in fullscreen HD:

I’m looking for a position around Toronto and also available for freelancing.

Click here for my resume and if you’d like a 1080p quicktime download this link.

2010
08.24

I wanted to shamelessly plug a non-3D blog/project I started this month titled…

One Artist A Day
One Artist A Day - music recommendation blog

 

As the name implies, I intend on mentioning 1 (likely awesome :p) musician or band I genuinely enjoy, every single day for the forthcoming future.

It’s been almost a month so far and it’s been a fun challenge to mention artists while trying to stay away from mainstream names. After all, I want to show you music you haven’t heard before, not what’s pumping on MTV or some lousy Top40s’-like radio show. (I miss when MTV had music in it; don’t you?)

So… check out my new blog! :) I will of course continue to keep this one and as soon as production slows a little where I’m working at I will be posting a backlog of educational content I have been meaning to submit for a while. (I currently have 9 drafts of coolness in my WordPress waiting for you.)

Last but not least, I welcome any music suggestions if anyone’s reading this and want to leave a comment down below. I promise to give you credit and link to your blog if I use your suggestion.

2010
06.05

This post surged from a question at a forum where somebody tried to use the ctr_dist() function — that returns distance between two object centers — in a Softimage script only to realise that actually it only exists for expressions, not scripting.

Here’s my take on said function for both Softimage and Maya…

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2010
05.19

Which is the fastest way to do this or that? Why not try them all and benchmark! :)

All you need to do is lock at the time.clock()

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2010
05.04

Environment variables are no secret and neither is the system-set “TEMP” variable, but what is not really mentioned in the SDK Docs is that Softimage overrides the TEMP and TMP environment variables with a temporary folder made by XSI:

LogMessage( XSIUtils.Environment("TEMP") );

If I run that (JavaScript) I get something like: C:\Users\Alan\AppData\Local\Temp\XSI_Temp_15076

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2010
04.02

This was completed and aired recently. It was fun job. I did all the rigging. :)

Oh, and it features a brand new Excel critter, Garlic!

ps: Check out Donut when he goes into the x-ray machine.

2010
03.27

These two new Dairy Farms commercials aired and completed recently. I did the rigging of the characters and props.

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2010
02.21

I used to think refmodels were buggy, annoying and out to get me. After some exploration, they exhibit a couple patterns of fixable issues. Let’s bring them to light, shall we?

Here’s some of my observations with them in the context of artists animating a referenced rig in production:

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2010
01.18

If you do rigging in Softimage you probably know when trying to Mirror Weights it only pays attention to the last created Symmetry Mapping Template for that model. There’s no interface to append to or join mapping templates. It gets annoying having to recreate them and verify that Soft guessed all the correct symmetrical equivalents, so…

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2009
12.24

Ever noticed that Ambient Occlusion doesn’t happen in the real world in lit areas? It’s more of a darkness thing… so why apply it everywhere?

With this Rendertree compound you have AO in darkness and that’s it. Simple! :)
Notice how there's no AO in lit areas

Shadow AO compound

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