Technical Art Director
A few former coworkers of mine worked together to put together this little animation using a couple of rigs I made. Check it out: Animation - George Aleco-Sima LookDev/Rendering - Brad Falk Textures - Terry Molatore Rigs and Creature Model - Chad Vernon Matte Paint - Alfonso Villar Sound Effects - Kyle Gray Technical Wizard - Geordie Martinez ...
I’m happy to announce that last month, I accepted an offer to work at Digital Domain’s new San Francisco office as a Rigging Pipeline TD. This was my first week of work and it looks like it is going to be an amazing opportunity. The small talented team is lead by Academy Award winning VFX Supe, Stephen Rosenbaum. With solid leadership and a talented team, we should be churning out some great work in the future. Stay tuned! ...
This is an update of my sticky lips deformer. In an attempt to make the deformer more automated, I’ve implemented a mode where the vertices stick on contact and then fade off with time. The original mode is based solely on distance and so would stick together even if the mouth was on its way to being closed. The frame stuttering is from the Camtasia settings. The deformer runs in real-time. ...
A deformer that blends one mesh to another based off of UVs. Mesh topology can differ and you can optionally maintain the initial offset between the two meshes. Uses include transferring existing work onto another mesh. The demo shows transferring shape work from one face to another. The faces have different vertex counts and topologies but share the same UV layout. ...
A deformer that can drive subsets of a mesh with other meshes. Uses include driving a body with a blendshaped head or driving larger meshes with a heavily rigged subset of the mesh. This can increase performance as the heavy rigging isn’t affecting the larger mesh. ...
A deformer that simulates motion blur geometrically. The amount and falloff of the “blur” can be adjusted with keyable attributes. ...
This shows a deformer that attracts vertices to a nurbs curve using a distance-based falloff. It can be used to create sticking effects like sticky lips. Various attributes can be adjusted and animated such as falloff, distance threshold, magnitude, etc. ...
This shows an implementation of a Spherical Radial Basis Function node. SRBF is commonly used in lighting calculations like this http://www.cse.cuhk.edu.hk/~ttwong/papers/srbf/srbf.html. I am using SRBF here to track joint position and orientation. This gives me a weight value per target that I can then use to drive corrective shapes. Each target point has its own falloff and twist attributes to adjust the triggering sensitivity. The rig is my free quadruped rig, Nico, which you can download here:https://www.creativecrash.com/maya/downloads/character-rigs/c/nico. The download does not include the SRBF node since it requires a plug-in. ...
More technology demos! First is a dynamic transform node. The node is applied to various joints and IK handles. The node can also drive arbitrary attributes so they behave dynamically as well. Next is a custom jiggle deformer. The reasons why I created my own jiggle deformer as opposed to using Maya’s jiggle deformer is because of speed and ease of use. Mine runs a lot faster and is easier to use. ...
This is a performance comparison between Maya’s blendshape deformer and my GPU-based blendshape deformer with 1000 targets on a 30,000 vertex mesh. The test is using an Nvidia Geforce 230M video card. ...