... 1 To Go

Well the Winter 2014 quarter has ended, and it appears I am getting some decent grades (2 A's and a B), but what is really exciting me is what is to come ahead.
First of all, my graduation.  I will be graduating next quarter, and as such I have to prepare.  I have ordered a cap, gown, stole, tassel, class ring (custom made by my awesome professor, Matthew Maloney) invitations, and a partridge in a pear tree.  Well... no peach tree, this is Georgia.  So if anyone is interested, the graduation will be May 31st, and will be down town Atlanta (you can find details on the SCAD website).
Other than that, I am working on my senior film, Last Light.  It is coming along nicely, but I have a long way to go.  I helped a bunch of friends on different projects last quarter, including an awesome short by Michelle Ionescue called Leaping Place, and a group project short called Nor:  A Cloud Story.  Now it's my turn.  I watched these students go from scratch to a finished film in 10 weeks, while missing almost 2 weeks of class due to unexpected snow storms.  I also watched my friend Nora take her senior film from a a project with no models, no rigs, and no animation, and complete it in the same amount of time WHILE directing Nor.  That is inspiration right there.  If these amazing folks can do it, so can I.  And I probably don't have as far to go with it either.  So I will be spending a lot of time on my film and perfecting everything I can about it.
When I'm not working on my film or my other class, I will be working on a very important project... I like to call it GETTING A JOB.  Or at least an internship or apprenticeship or something.  I have had a lot of awesome opportunities come up, and this coming quarter has a lot of them hitting me all at once.  The career fair in Savannah is soon, followed by several internship opportunities, and then Out2Launch (sort of a reverse career fair where the students set up booths and the employers go around looking at them).  I have a LOT of stuff to do for this including fixing up my portfolio, and I have to do it all as soon as possible.
So I'll be working a lot this break, although I still plan to have a little fun.  I have to meet with some of my friends to go over changes to my film, and get some feedback on my portfolio, and get my iMac fixed, and my printer, and my scanner...  There truly is no rest for the wicked.

Well I better get back to it.  Right now I'm fixing up some of my older works that I really liked, starting with my Diner.  I'm liking this 1950's feel I got going, maybe I'll do more with that theme.
Oh, and then I have to get a hair cut, and shave, and get a picture... and go to the printers... and get my images approved... and submit for my monitor.......

Image Based Lighting and more

So last time I showed some photographs I took studying light, specifically time of day outdoor light changes.  I have been working on a short animation that involves an outdoor shot of a market as the sun sets.  Right now it is suffering from rendering errors that our renderfarm occasionally puts in, so my next step is to fix all those.  I also have a slight displacement problem, but the other big factors include the light colors and positions of the street lights.  I have a lot of work to do to make this scene work, but once it is finished, it will look really nice.

Time of Day lighting test 4 from David Hixon on Vimeo.

But that isn't all I've worked on.  I have also been taking this to another level and creating a scene that uses actual photographs and actual light information from the environment and integrated by own CG element into the scene.  In other words, like action plate CG integration.  I went out and took a series of images at SCAD Atlanta's DMC, where I captured "background plates" and environment maps.  These environment maps are made as HDRI so they hold more information than a regular image, and are then manipulated in a program called HDR Shop to fit into my CG scene.  I can then use this to capture the light information in the scene to capture the ambient light, and then tweak it from there.  I also had to render in passes, so I could isolate everything from the shadows to the reflection of the chairs to the ambient occlusion.  I finally used Nuke to composite it back together, and voila!  Movie magic!

 
Image Based Lighting with CG Character Integration from David Hixon on Vimeo.

But that's not all!  I've been a REALLY busy bee.  I can't show anything currently from my last 2 projects I've been working on (not to mention math), but you can check out my other blog to see updates to my senior film, Last Light, at LastLightFilm.blogspot.com.  Besides working on my film, I have been lighting and rendering and compositing Michelle's film, Leaping Place.  It continues to be a challenge, but this entire thing must be done in one week, so it's crunch time!  I'll update more on that later!

New Year!

Hey all!  This will be a short post.
First, I wanted to say Happy New Year!  Also, This is my last year at SCAD, as I graduate in the spring quarter (if all goes well).  Now that it is getting down to it, it is time for me to get an internship, apprenticeship, and/or job out in the real world.  So I am going to be preparing a new portfolio site, and putting together the best work I can to show.  I am also going to be attending the various career fairs and other events.  I will also be attending SIGGRAPH this year.  I just submitted my application for a Team Leader position, so here's hoping it gets accepted!
This quarter is supposed to be easier on me, but helping so many other people with their films is proving to make up for the easier class-load and I am already staying up late on assignments and deadlines.  Oh well, back to the grindstone.
Check out my latest update on my senior film blog, Last Light.  Got some cool new stuff up there.  Sorry about having to password protect my animatic, from here on out it is going to be getting too close to the final and I need to keep it from the public so I can prepare for film festivals.
So stay tuned for more work!  I'll leave you with a Sub Surface Scattering test I just finished that I think came out pretty good.  Still needs work on the highlight and bump, but it is a good first step.

No SSS (sub-surface scatter), lambert.

Adjusted SSS

Painting geometry and MEL scripts (Poplate)

I just added a new post to my other blog, Last Light Film Blog, where I talk a little about a MEL script I made a few quarters ago which was designed to allow me to randomly place as many different geometry files on a surface while controlling various aspects such as collision detection and scaling.  Long story short, my script had too many bugs to use in my forest scene for my senior film, so i decided to use another tool I recently discovered called the Paint Geometry tool.  No this tool doesn't let you paint on geometry (there are plenty of other ways to do that already, I prefer Z Brush or Mudbox myself).  Rather, this tool allows you to literally paint geometry on the surface of any geo you want.  So you could paint 3D bears on a sphere, grass on a plane, or in my case, a forest of pine trees on a mountain.

I decided to use this tool but there are a few issues with it I still need to work out.  First of all, it allows penetrating geometry, which may not be a problem in my case since the trees are all far away, but I will have to spend the time to see if it is noticeable and fix it if it is.  It also only allows one geometry to be painted on, which means I had to repeat the process with a different geo to get some variety.  Luckily it also supports randomizing scale and rotation, and even translation, but it does each axis by itself.  This means I could potentially have a flat tree, which is not desirable.

So while I am still using this tool for now and have made adjustments to make sure it looks good, I have decided to still look into fixing my existing script, "Populate".  Populate will allow me to chose how many trees I want (or how dense I want it), how close together they are (for collision detection), select from as many ma and mb files as I want (and eventually obj, fbx, and alembic), and allow me to not only have random rotation on one or more axis, but also control random scaling in one of 3 ways, uniform scaling, diameter vs height (x+z vs y), or each axis separately.  I don't have to time right now to fix this... it is finals week, but during the winter break I want to take another look at this code and get a final fully functional version out there and then share it on here for anyone to use.

I will provide more documentation on Populate when I get the chance to refine it.  It does have some specific requirements for the importing geometry, and I would LOVE to have it use rib archives or even instances of an object instead of just geometry, to fit the user's needs.  For now, enjoy a screenshot from the opening shot of my final film (not lit or textured yet).

Fall 2013, SCAD

Well I took a bit of an hiatus during the summer, but I'm back, and ready to go!  The first day of classes started this week, and it is going to be an intense quarter.

First, I have actually been doing some work over the summer, collaborating with others and planning things out.  I did manage to finish one book, and start another (look at the Dresden Files), finished a slew of games, volunteered at SIGGRAPH 2013 as a Student Volunteer, visited Downtown Disney in Anaheim, and helped my brother move into a new house many states away.  I am currently working on putting together a collaborative short animation to do for fun, but the majority of the work will start next summer, since I now have a huge animation project to continue.

This quarter at SCAD, I am taking a Models and Shaders programming class, which teaches Pixar's Renderman, and i am super excited!  I also have a Photography class; always a good way to expand your horizons and get a different view of lighting and composition.  Finally, I am taking Senior I, which is actually the second out of 4 classes dedicated to working on the senior film at SCAD.  The first class was Concept development, followed by 2 quarters of production (Senior I and II), and finally finishing with Post-Production.  I am also helping a few others with their projects, trying to get more lighting and texturing/shading behind my belt.

Since we are starting actual production now, and I already have some people interested in helping with my project, I am using a free online tool called Trello to keep organized.  It works on any web browser, plus it has apps for my iPad and iPhone!  If you are ever working on a project, especially a collaborative one, check it out!  It even connects to Google Docs and Dropbox.  I am also creating a new blog to chronicle the development and production of the short.  I have added a new tab to my blog, but you can also check it out at LastLightFilm.blogspot.com.

So for now I will leave you with a picture of a lantern I've been working on for another senior project by Michelle Ionescu.  I'll post a link when I get one from her.  I mainly focused on the glass, getting a bumpy frosted glass feel.  Enjoy!

Beginnings of a film

Today, I want to briefly talk about what the rest of my time as SCAD is going to be dedicated toward.  While I will still take pictures in Photography, Lighting, and so forth, I have to make a senior film, a project that showcases my work.  As thus, I have started working on a story that allows me to focus on lighting and compositing.  I have been working on some updates this this as well, and hope to have some of them in a new animatic before too long.  I want to add a particle effect to the main character, as well as reworking the story a little for a better flow.
Until I have the time to get these changes in here, this is my current animatic.  As soon as I get the changes in place, I will post a new one, and will probably be posting a new blog dedicated to the film as well later on.  So for now, enjoy this short animatic.  If you have any questions or suggestion, feel free to leave them in the comments.