Good news in many ways today. No I don't have a job yet (still working on that), but I did manage to get my computer working AND got my film, Lost Light, accepted into the Atlanta Underground Film Festival. I am really excited, since they said only about 10% of the films submitted were accepted. My good friend Raymond McCoy-Sanders also got his film in the festival (we worked on each other's films). So that's 2 SCAD students. Last week, I represented my other good friend Michelle Ionescu in presenting her film, The Leaping Place, which I was the technical director on. It's a great film I am very proud of. So while I am working on a new film, and working on updating my current film (updates won't happen till after the festival, sorry), and working on smaller projects designed to help me build my portfolio and learn some new techniques and tools, as well as looking for work, I am also glad to see the work I've done getting recognized! :)
Now that I am in this festival, it could be a gateway to more festivals and presentations. I am also really glad my computer is fixed, all I have to go is ship my old hard drive off. With that done, I will be able to continue my Starbucks project. I'm currently trying to learn how to get started with MARI, so give me a little time. Learning new software isn't always that easy without a guide.
Showing posts with label atlanta. Show all posts
Showing posts with label atlanta. Show all posts
Wednesday, October 1, 2014
Monday, March 17, 2014
... 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.......
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.......
Wednesday, February 26, 2014
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.
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.
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!
Saturday, October 5, 2013
SCAD Generate 2013
Hey everyone!
So I just finished a competition for art students here at SCAD Atlanta, called Generate. It is a 24 hour challenge where each department gets sponsored by a different company and we have 24 hours to break into teams and create an original work based on their criteria. They often give prizes, free food, and have a lot of fun. We had trivia (which we were surprisingly bad at), which helped lighten the mood, and waaaay too many sugary foods.
All that aside, our team was part of the Visual Effects challenge. But why is an animation major taking the VFX challenge you ask? Well this year the VFX department added a Technical Direction challenge which was right up my alley. Our goal was to spend 24 hours making an environment for a character. We didn't need to include the character, but we did have to describe the character. We had to include an element of animation and part of our project had to use Houdini in some aspect. Our character was a woman named Fern who lived in 1945 in Paris, France. She has been getting lettings from her husband, a soldier in the war, and the last letter promised to meet up with her at the cafe they first met at. Fern waits for him at Cafe Maison, but he never shows.
Sad, I know, you can blame me, I came up with the sappy details. And I did a ton of work on this with 6 other students, all contributing their skills to the project. Nicole and I were the two Houdini artists, so we made a billowy smoke effect for a blown out candle on the table, but she really did all the work there. I was mainly in charge of making sure the work got divvied out and shaded most of the glass work and such. I was also the only one who had significant experience in Nuke, so I was given the challenge of compositing the project with literally minutes till the deadline. I had a TON of fun, and we managed to finish a rather complex scene in JUST under the wire.
While I would love to say more, for now I will leave you with a single still image of one of our two shots. I know it isn't perfect yet, but with a little more work (and a LOT more sleep), it will look amazing! Enjoy!
So I just finished a competition for art students here at SCAD Atlanta, called Generate. It is a 24 hour challenge where each department gets sponsored by a different company and we have 24 hours to break into teams and create an original work based on their criteria. They often give prizes, free food, and have a lot of fun. We had trivia (which we were surprisingly bad at), which helped lighten the mood, and waaaay too many sugary foods.
All that aside, our team was part of the Visual Effects challenge. But why is an animation major taking the VFX challenge you ask? Well this year the VFX department added a Technical Direction challenge which was right up my alley. Our goal was to spend 24 hours making an environment for a character. We didn't need to include the character, but we did have to describe the character. We had to include an element of animation and part of our project had to use Houdini in some aspect. Our character was a woman named Fern who lived in 1945 in Paris, France. She has been getting lettings from her husband, a soldier in the war, and the last letter promised to meet up with her at the cafe they first met at. Fern waits for him at Cafe Maison, but he never shows.
Sad, I know, you can blame me, I came up with the sappy details. And I did a ton of work on this with 6 other students, all contributing their skills to the project. Nicole and I were the two Houdini artists, so we made a billowy smoke effect for a blown out candle on the table, but she really did all the work there. I was mainly in charge of making sure the work got divvied out and shaded most of the glass work and such. I was also the only one who had significant experience in Nuke, so I was given the challenge of compositing the project with literally minutes till the deadline. I had a TON of fun, and we managed to finish a rather complex scene in JUST under the wire.
While I would love to say more, for now I will leave you with a single still image of one of our two shots. I know it isn't perfect yet, but with a little more work (and a LOT more sleep), it will look amazing! Enjoy!
Wednesday, October 2, 2013
Photography assignment 1
This week we went over our photography assignment in my fundamentals 2 class. The class is really focusing on Photoshop, something I am incredibly familiar with already. This first project actually didn't involve any Photoshop at all, but did go over Lightroom editing tools I wasn't familiar with, so I am glad to have learned them.
My concept for this project was to explore the interplay of themes at the Davidson Arabia Natural Preserve, specifically the nature aspects versus the derelict man-made structures that still riddle the area. For now, enjoy the images.
My concept for this project was to explore the interplay of themes at the Davidson Arabia Natural Preserve, specifically the nature aspects versus the derelict man-made structures that still riddle the area. For now, enjoy the images.
Wednesday, May 29, 2013
Composition Final (TECH 420), version 1
Hey everyone!
I have 2 finals down, and (and a half) to go. Why a half? I have to take one of my projects and do a simple breakdown, but that's for another post. For now, I have finished my final for my Compositing for Technical Directors class, which has been teaching Nuke, as I mentioned before. Our final project was to take an existing live-action plate, which is essentially just a video taken of an environment (in this case) with the intent of adding a CG element to it later. The CG element we could add was our choice, and I decided I wanted to do something a little different.
In the end, I am not satisfied with the level of detail the model is. While I did a LOT of work to make it look better, including displacement, specular highlight, specular color, and more, which I did in Mudbox, Maya didn't properly import anything, and I had to fight with it to make it look halfway descent. However, as a result, I spent to much time trying to fix bugs and errors that I had to stop fixing minor problems and get to the point of the project, which was to integrate the object into the scene.
A LOT of work went into this, but too late I ran into a bigger bug that I've seen before and couldn't figure out. I'm not even sure how to describe it to get help, and I didn't have any time left to try to repair it or even remove it. If you look at the object in my scene, it has a sort of polygonal look to it, but I assure you this is a smooth model with no polygonal edges on it. The problem is the displacement I used fell apart. I've seen this before, where my displacement lost all definition and became a mass of polygons on the surface that no longer even tried to retain it's original shape, but it only shows up on high resolution renders, so none of my smaller test renders caught it. So I am NOT giving up on addressing this challenge. I WILL fix this, and then I will post it.
So for now, enjoy my little scene, and again, if you have any feedback on how I can integrate the CG elements into my scene better (and please refrain from mentioning the texture, polygons/displacement on the object, or the clipping yet because I am already addressing those), I would appreciate it. Ta ta for now...
I have 2 finals down, and (and a half) to go. Why a half? I have to take one of my projects and do a simple breakdown, but that's for another post. For now, I have finished my final for my Compositing for Technical Directors class, which has been teaching Nuke, as I mentioned before. Our final project was to take an existing live-action plate, which is essentially just a video taken of an environment (in this case) with the intent of adding a CG element to it later. The CG element we could add was our choice, and I decided I wanted to do something a little different.
In the end, I am not satisfied with the level of detail the model is. While I did a LOT of work to make it look better, including displacement, specular highlight, specular color, and more, which I did in Mudbox, Maya didn't properly import anything, and I had to fight with it to make it look halfway descent. However, as a result, I spent to much time trying to fix bugs and errors that I had to stop fixing minor problems and get to the point of the project, which was to integrate the object into the scene.
A LOT of work went into this, but too late I ran into a bigger bug that I've seen before and couldn't figure out. I'm not even sure how to describe it to get help, and I didn't have any time left to try to repair it or even remove it. If you look at the object in my scene, it has a sort of polygonal look to it, but I assure you this is a smooth model with no polygonal edges on it. The problem is the displacement I used fell apart. I've seen this before, where my displacement lost all definition and became a mass of polygons on the surface that no longer even tried to retain it's original shape, but it only shows up on high resolution renders, so none of my smaller test renders caught it. So I am NOT giving up on addressing this challenge. I WILL fix this, and then I will post it.
So for now, enjoy my little scene, and again, if you have any feedback on how I can integrate the CG elements into my scene better (and please refrain from mentioning the texture, polygons/displacement on the object, or the clipping yet because I am already addressing those), I would appreciate it. Ta ta for now...
Monday, May 27, 2013
Photography Final
So today, I delivered a presentation for my Photography final. In short, my assignment was to research an existing Photographer, and as I mentioned n a previous post, I decided to research Michael Eastman. Specifically, I decided to try to capture the feel of 2 of his projects, Urban Luminosity and Vanishing America. My project is called City and Country, and is meant to show a contrast between images of the city life and country environment.
For the City side of my project, I took pictures around Atlanta, including the beautiful Hyatt Regency hotel, and outside The Loft. In all, I took about 160 images of this set, but for the final project, I had to choose 5. I already posted several favorites that didn't make it into the final project, and I may add some more later. These images were all designed to focus on the transmission and reflection of light, with a low ISO for high quality, and long exposures to catch as much detail as I could.
For the Country half, I went to Pendelton, South Carolina, where I visited the historic areas and went off the beaten path to a few other areas, including an old train yard that was falling apart and covered in rust. It was my favorite place to take pictures, but I started to run out of time as the sun was setting and the last few images got too rushed. In the end, I took over 200 images from Pendelton, and chose 5 for my final, although I will post more later that really loved but didn't make it into the project. These images mainly focused on the textures and wear/aging of the objects and locations.
I did do Photoshop editing to these images as well, to try to match the aesthetic Eastman uses, or something similar at least. For his Urban Luminosity, he would saturate colors, clean up the dirt/debris (but not completely), and present a clean and vibrant image with patterns and colors boarding on the edge of abstract. I cleaned up the majority of my City shots where I removed distracting dirt/debris, while enhancing colors. For Eastman's Vanishing America images, he would often darken and enhance the sky, desaturating it while increasing the contrast and details. Other than working with the sky, I would apply a slight desaturation (using an adjusted "Black and White" adjustment layer at low opacity) and bringing details back into the highlights of the image. There is a huge advantage to working in 16bit with camera raw, which allows for HDR images and really pulling in the details lost in shadows and highlights. While none of these are actually HDR in my final, I did bracket my images which will allow me to get HDR out of them, and I did work with HDR on a few that didn't get into the final. I will be presenting more of these later.
Enjoy!
For the City side of my project, I took pictures around Atlanta, including the beautiful Hyatt Regency hotel, and outside The Loft. In all, I took about 160 images of this set, but for the final project, I had to choose 5. I already posted several favorites that didn't make it into the final project, and I may add some more later. These images were all designed to focus on the transmission and reflection of light, with a low ISO for high quality, and long exposures to catch as much detail as I could.
For the Country half, I went to Pendelton, South Carolina, where I visited the historic areas and went off the beaten path to a few other areas, including an old train yard that was falling apart and covered in rust. It was my favorite place to take pictures, but I started to run out of time as the sun was setting and the last few images got too rushed. In the end, I took over 200 images from Pendelton, and chose 5 for my final, although I will post more later that really loved but didn't make it into the project. These images mainly focused on the textures and wear/aging of the objects and locations.
I did do Photoshop editing to these images as well, to try to match the aesthetic Eastman uses, or something similar at least. For his Urban Luminosity, he would saturate colors, clean up the dirt/debris (but not completely), and present a clean and vibrant image with patterns and colors boarding on the edge of abstract. I cleaned up the majority of my City shots where I removed distracting dirt/debris, while enhancing colors. For Eastman's Vanishing America images, he would often darken and enhance the sky, desaturating it while increasing the contrast and details. Other than working with the sky, I would apply a slight desaturation (using an adjusted "Black and White" adjustment layer at low opacity) and bringing details back into the highlights of the image. There is a huge advantage to working in 16bit with camera raw, which allows for HDR images and really pulling in the details lost in shadows and highlights. While none of these are actually HDR in my final, I did bracket my images which will allow me to get HDR out of them, and I did work with HDR on a few that didn't get into the final. I will be presenting more of these later.
Enjoy!
Monday, May 13, 2013
Photo Preview
Today I have for you a preview of my final project in my photography class.
The final project in this class is to take a photographer (or other artist), and either try to mimic their style and work, or improve on it. Since I would rather learn from others, and not show them up, I chose to mimic a photographer. After much searching, my wife and I found Michael Eastman. Michael Eastman began taking pictures in 1972, and his work is really impressive! He has done a series of different subjects, from Americana to horses to abstract to Cuba. His images have a certain aesthetic appeal I really like, and I find that his study of reflective, refractive, transmitting of light in a city at night is intriguing, bordering on abstract, but with a certain sense of place. You look at things you see everyday in a new way, or at things people never notice at all that's right in front of them.
Usually his images are of textures and play of light. I have to wonder how he gets into all these places, but I really enjoy his work. I spent the better part of a weekend (with some planning beforehand) taking pictures around Atlanta. Here is a preview of some of these images.
I will also be using a similar aesthetic to follow is Vanishing America series, contrasting the big city with rural country.
In the end, I have to pick a grand total of 10, so that's around 5 for each study. But what I really care about in this is keeping consistant with te aesthetic and building some good photography samples for my demo reel.
Enjoy!
The final project in this class is to take a photographer (or other artist), and either try to mimic their style and work, or improve on it. Since I would rather learn from others, and not show them up, I chose to mimic a photographer. After much searching, my wife and I found Michael Eastman. Michael Eastman began taking pictures in 1972, and his work is really impressive! He has done a series of different subjects, from Americana to horses to abstract to Cuba. His images have a certain aesthetic appeal I really like, and I find that his study of reflective, refractive, transmitting of light in a city at night is intriguing, bordering on abstract, but with a certain sense of place. You look at things you see everyday in a new way, or at things people never notice at all that's right in front of them.
Usually his images are of textures and play of light. I have to wonder how he gets into all these places, but I really enjoy his work. I spent the better part of a weekend (with some planning beforehand) taking pictures around Atlanta. Here is a preview of some of these images.
I will also be using a similar aesthetic to follow is Vanishing America series, contrasting the big city with rural country.
In the end, I have to pick a grand total of 10, so that's around 5 for each study. But what I really care about in this is keeping consistant with te aesthetic and building some good photography samples for my demo reel.
Enjoy!
Saturday, May 11, 2013
New images soon
Just spent a day working on mudbox, compositing files together, and taking pictures around the city at night. I'll have lots to show soon but for now, I'm beat!
Stay tuned for all of this plus a book review and more reviews of movies!
Thursday, May 2, 2013
A sneak peak...
Hi again everyone!
Time for another daily pixel fix. This time I am working on a very complex materials and shading scene, and I'm not really ready yet to show it, since I have little time left to work on it. So instead, I will show you something I am using as reference, just a quick snapshot I took. What you will see will not, I repeat NOT, look anything like the final project which you should see tomorrow or so. However, it will be using the same theme.
I find that visiting a location and taking a few pictures, even mediocre pictures, is a big help in getting ideas for a scene. But it is better to take nice pictures, which I just didn't have the time for.
So back to work I go...
Time for another daily pixel fix. This time I am working on a very complex materials and shading scene, and I'm not really ready yet to show it, since I have little time left to work on it. So instead, I will show you something I am using as reference, just a quick snapshot I took. What you will see will not, I repeat NOT, look anything like the final project which you should see tomorrow or so. However, it will be using the same theme.
I find that visiting a location and taking a few pictures, even mediocre pictures, is a big help in getting ideas for a scene. But it is better to take nice pictures, which I just didn't have the time for.
So back to work I go...
Sunday, April 28, 2013
Rainy Days?
I know, it isn't exactly the first of spring or anything, and in all honesty what I'm going to post today was taken a week ago, but I felt that to contrast today's dreary cloudy weather, I should post some bright and happy ones.
So these are pictures taken either last weekend at the Dogwood festival in Atlanta, or the weekend before in the garden at my apartment complex. There were LOTS more pictures that I took, but I figured I'd just post a handful. Got to save something for those rainy days... the other rainy days.
Saturday, April 27, 2013
Car Show
Hi again everyone!
Today, more photographs! Something I have been doing lately with my wife, which I think I may try to do more of int he future, is try to find local events or places of interest and go for a few hours on the weekend. Usually, I've been doing this for my photography class, but it can also be fun, and doesn't have to cost much, if anything. Last week I went to the Dogwood Festival in Atlanta, and a smaller art show called Artsapalooza. We also explored Stone Mountain a little, and a few other places. Today, we went to the Taste of East Point Art, Food, and Car Show. So I got to meet some cool and interesting people, and take lots of pictures of cool and interesting cars.
Here are some of the highlights, which showcase the style I like to go with, close-up and personal.
Enjoy!
Today, more photographs! Something I have been doing lately with my wife, which I think I may try to do more of int he future, is try to find local events or places of interest and go for a few hours on the weekend. Usually, I've been doing this for my photography class, but it can also be fun, and doesn't have to cost much, if anything. Last week I went to the Dogwood Festival in Atlanta, and a smaller art show called Artsapalooza. We also explored Stone Mountain a little, and a few other places. Today, we went to the Taste of East Point Art, Food, and Car Show. So I got to meet some cool and interesting people, and take lots of pictures of cool and interesting cars.
Here are some of the highlights, which showcase the style I like to go with, close-up and personal.
Enjoy!
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