Epicity

^ Excited to start working on this as a Lighting Technical Assistant at Blue Sky Studios! Just finished my first week at the studio and it's been great!

For the past 3 months, I had the privilege of working as a freelance 3D artist at BLT Communications on some awesome movie posters. Unfortunately, only one of them has been publicly released. I only contributed to a tiny fraction of the pixels on this one (modeled the bases underneath the armors), but still! Click to view larger!

An Article About "Dissonance"!

http://visionsfilm.wordpress.com/2012/11/08/visions-looking-back-dissonance/

Lighting Sketches, contd.

More lighting and mood "studies" from reference. Did these while marathoning Mad Men. :) This is actually a really fun exercise! I'm challenging myself not to use the eyedropper tool while doing these.

Lighting Sketches

I recently bought a DVD of Jeremy Vickery's master class on Efficient Cinematic Lighting and got the idea of making quick Photoshop sketches of different lighting scenarios from film stills and photographs. Thought I'd begin with a portrait... I was mostly just trying to emulate how the face is lit (and also practice painting and shading in Photoshop since I don't do that enough). Hopefully, doing a lot of these will give me a subconscious and better understanding of color, lighting, shadows, how different subjects react to light, etc. etc. On a side note, I'm getting better at hand-eye co-ordination using my Wacom tablet. I still miss my Cintiq though :)

Reference

Dirt Poor Filmmakers Festival

Ripples, my thesis film, just got into it's first festival! It'll be opening the first night of The Dirt Poor Filmmakers Festival series. 

Oil Paintings

Work from my oil painting class this quarter. I have never really worked with oils before so this was technically my first time. I wanted to take this class to get a better understanding of color and light and I think I learned quite a lot from this class! I'm pleased with how the materials/surfaces turned out, because I was hesitant about my ability to accurately paint the reflectivities of materials. We used water-based oil paint for this class.

This was my very first monochromatic painting for the class, done in one night. I was mostly trying to get a better handle of the medium and technique in this one.

This one was a two-night still life painting. Started with a subtractive underpainting and then used glazing techniques on top.

Quick portrait painting. This one was tough because of the absorbent nature of the canvas. We stretched out our own canvases and applied gesso on them. It was hard to keep the canvas wet with paint.

And this was our 3-night final project of a still life with a model. We were allowed to choose any part of the set up with the model and objects in front of us and make a composition out of it. This was my first time working this big (20x16). I tried to push myself here by introducing and experimenting with more colors than I usually do on each object.

 This was a really fun class!

Lighting Reel 2011

Current lighting reel! I'll add my thesis shots as and when I complete them.

1) Group Project with Paul W. Gerla during the Summer Pixar Undergraduate Program (2011). We had to come up with a short, two-shot narrative. I was responsible for the lighting, set-dressing, layout, some of the modeling as well helping develop the concept and design of the piece. Paul was responsible for modeling, shading as well as the fog-effect. 

Time taken for all aspects of the visuals: 5 days. Rendered using Renderman.

2)Lighting from Reference: a one-day exercise during the Pixar Undergraduate Program. Rendered using Renderman.

3)Final Compositing Project for a school Lighting Class. I worked with a photography student, Jami Ann Plekon. We planned the concept together and set up the lights in the photoshoot. I then built the CG cage to be composited into the photograph. Rendered using mental ray. Time taken: 5 days

4)Final project during the Pixar Undergraduate Program. I was responsible for changing the time of day from the original shot in Toy Story 3- from day to night. All the lights from the shot file were removed except for the default character light rigs. I was responsible for all the lighting. Everything else was created by Pixar. Time taken: 10 days. Rendered using Renderman.

(I chose this shot for its level of complexity: it has both a main human and toy character and the focus shifts from one to the other during the shot. In addition, there are several props, toys with fur, and a human with sub-surface scattering. I also wanted to challenge myself by trying to light a playtime scene at night while still keeping it friendly and warm. I took the liberty of cheating a night-light screen left, which was not there in the original film)

Acting for Animation

Blocking progress for my acting for animation final assignment:

And heeree is a very flattering video of me acting. I'm not very good at being angry usually so this was a bit challenging. I was feeling pretty weird... emotionally...by the end of the day after doing a billion takes of this!!