Last November I jumped with two other friends, off a plane, tandem parachuting. It was briefly terrifying, then amazingly blissful, exciting and unforgettable. Everyone should do it!

Skip to 11:32 to see me play it cool while I come to terms with the floor being ~12,000ft below me.

(If you’re curious why I’m posting it now; I only just got around to splicing our 3 dvds together.)

Hey guys, it’s been a while. Here’s some more commercials I did the character rigging for. Enjoy!

Dragon candies:

Excel critters yet again:

Baygon: [a.k.a. RAID]

Happy New Year to you all! Hope this one brings even cooler stuff than the last.

Here’s a video I took of how I spent my new year’s eve.

I was responsible for rigging the jellyfish (tentacle sim. included) in this commercial for T. Rowe Price, produced by Psyop:

Enjoy! (Best appreciated in HD.)

Oh and check out the art of this concept artist that worked on it.

I hope you’re not lactose intolerant because these jokes can get cheesy… However, I’m certain at least one will bring a smile to your Friday.

Check it out: http://CGjokes.com/

It all started when I wrote the very first joke (the one at the very bottom.) I wondered if I could think of more, and so I did, but then I challenged myself to come up with a one-liner every workday or so. (Quality varies as it’s hard to write brilliant ones all the time, but I try.)

I looked online for more material but only found a really old thread from CGTalk, and many of their jokes were worse than my worst. I figured, if there’s sites out there listing trigonometry or Physics jokes, why can’t we have one more just for CG-related jokes? And so it came to be.

I will eventually run out of puns so I’d like to invite you, yes you, to think of hilarious material and submit it on the site. I will review any and all that come in and publish those that make me smile or chuckle; with your name as the post author of course. (If you leave a link to your blog I’ll link you if you get posted.)

You can call me a numerophobe when naming rig objects, but the reason I personally avoid numbers in my rigging naming conventions (99% of the time) is so that when I duplicate something, a number at the end won’t increase by itself because there isn’t one. (The issue can be circumvented by having numbers somewhere before the end, but I’m the kind of weirdo that prefers to go with letters altogether.)

We humans work numbers in what’s known as the “Numeral system“, also known as the “base 10″ system (as we have that many fingers…) but hold on… the alphabet has 26 letters, not 10, so what do we call that system? It has a name: it’s the Hexavigesimal (or “base 26″) system.

As the ever-so-handy Wikipedia denotes,

Any number may be converted to base-26 by repeatedly dividing the number by 26.

Pretty easy stuff for Python.

This is how I’d do it:

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First things first, you need a QR code scanner app for your smartphone, be it an iPhone, Android, Blackberry or Nokia.

Then highlight the bit of code below and drag it to your bookmarks bar on your browser.

javascript:location.href='http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?chs=300x300&cht=qr&chl='+encodeURIComponent(location.href);

Next time you want to open a page you’re browsing in your phone, press it, a QR code shows up, scan it and the url will be on your phone.

These were completed earlier this year but I forgot to post them here. Enjoy!

This one involved geometry tracking (PFTrack) for full head replacement. FaceRobot was used in production for the first time. The original plan was to use the automatic lipsyncing feature (introduced in Soft 2011) to save us time. It did work, but the client wanted 1:1 lip performance with what the actor did so in the end we didn’t use much of the automatic lipsync. — See for yourself how close the final is to the source footage here. Hats off to the animators.
 

I rigged the popcorn/kernel guy and helped set up the rigidbody simulation of the M&M’s pouring at the end. — Also wrote a little Python script to do a fair randomization of all 6 colours. You’d run it after the sim was happy to make sure the colours were random but in equal amounts.
 

I did the ICE instances setup for the lights and the rig of the lumpy bottle at the end. — By the way, the environment is 100% CG. There was a ton of rotoscoping done to make it work. There’s something like 60 shots, almost all shot against blackness (because if it were green/blue-screen it would have shown up in the reflections.)
 

Hope you likey.

[I shared this on the Softimage Mailing List the other day and thought it was worth posting here.]

Here’s a fun trick for parsing an ICE string attribute, identifying the letters and typing out the text with particles:

Download the sample scene here and read more about it below. (Soft 2011+ required.)

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I propose a way of using ICE to split symmetrical shape halves. Here it is in action:

(Download here and read more about it below.)

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