2001 demo reel
This demo reel is over 20 years old, so please bear with the quality, as digital copying was quite new back then. This reel got me a job at Bioware in 2001.
I was the main artist on most shots working primarily in Sidefx's Houdini ( and a tiny bit of Action). My college stuff was done in Softimage.
I was the technical producer on:
"Joseph" cow ( artist: Paul Harvey )
"Joseph" pit scene ( artist: Yi Zhao )
"Joseph" wheat monster ( artist: Kyran Kelly )
I was technical artist on:
"Antz Test" ( artist: Frank Falcone )
"DKP promo"
"Tecate" beer ( artist: Virginia Chan )
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Some recollections from my poor memory :)
- Since the Interac hands are a graphic element converted to 3D, some of the gap lines between the fingers failed to register properly as a graphic element, and Steve, the producer, and I spent hours hand-painting a fix. That procedural animation rig was a joy to work on. Chad Nixon got pulled in to animate a few of the commercials to help me out because of the tight schedule.
- For the scene in "Yellow Dog" of the tugboat heading towards a building wave, I had to manually track the water in SideFX's Action. It was hell. Software trackers came into prominence just a few years later.
- The Antz test was for a possible straight-to-video sequel that was created for the Director, Eric Darnell.
- For the "Joseph" dreams with paint strokes, the director wanted to see painterly animated strokes like in the Robin Williams movie, "What Dreams May Come." I scanned in real paint swatches I made on glass panes as grayscale textures and set up a procedural Houdini network to pick up the color from the background and animate the strokes along splines. If I could do it again, I would introduce physics to allow point stroke blending and interactions like in the "Dreams" movie.
- For Boston's Fenway Park "Green Monster," Yi Zhao did an excellent job of modeling the hand. The animation rig actually had to transform from a flat surface to the fully articulated hand. The process to get there was challenging but rewarding, with the hand built procedurally to provide that transition.