Show reel 2017

For Avatar I worked on several variant grooms for Jake Sully's avatar. I also worked on the grooms for Grace and Norm.

I designed a new grooming system for Maya, the interactive Grooming System, released in Maya 2017 and further developed for 2018. I lead a team of developers, QA and documentation that worked for over two years to create a fully interactive and intuitive grooming system.
These are two examples of grooms I created to demonstrate the system to customers.
I modeled the characters, sculpted them in Mudbox to create displacement maps and I also painted the texture maps to use in the Arnold shaders for the skin and fur.

As a character effects artist at Sony Imageworks, you'd be assigned shots and you would be responsible for all the CFX work for every character in the shot that needed attention. This would include simulation for Hair, Fur and clothing, Anim Cleanup (fixing interpretations) shot sculpting and interactions with props.
The director had very precise requirements for the shapes of the cloth for Drac's Cape for example and this required very precise modeling often on a frame by frame basis to make sure the shapes were hit at the desired frames, on top of the simulation result.

The most complex of the models I built for Avatar was the C-21 Dragon Assault Ship. The model was going to be used as set extension for the full scale forward section (the main engine vents forward) that was built on stage at Stone Street Studios. A lidar Scan was used as reference to ensure that the model was an exact match for the set. After the model was finalled I also had to create the UV layout for each of the thousands of components, most of which had to be done in Maya, but some UV mapping was done using Headus UV Layout.

I also made models for clothing of some of the digi doubles as well as various set pieces (the schoolhouse seen int he extended cut) Naavi weapons and Jungle plants and Trees.

At Weta Digital, you'd often be working on multiple projects simultaneously. At the same time I was working on Avatar, I was also working on Prince Caspian where I created the grooms for two of the CG creatures, the Bear at the river and the Werewolf seen at the resurrection ceremony for the White Witch

The werewolf was shot on stage using an Actor (shane Rangi) in a costume, but he was replaced in all but a couple of shots with the digital version and it wasn't necessary to match the costume exactly.

The Bear was based on reference of a Black Bear, but no bear was used on set, just a guy in a blue leotard

At PDI/Dreamworks CFX artists were responsible for making sim meshes for the clothes (as the fianl render meshes would fall apart) and this involved a lot of modeling. To create the correct sim response for seams, pockets and shoulder padding, the sim meshes would have sections built in suach as way as to create stiffness and resistance to folding.
For many of the shots I worked on, I would be responsible for all of the characters featured, such as the animal control officers, Alex the lion, Marty the Zebra, Melman, the Giraffe and the King of Versailles.

In several shots, I also ran the sim and did shot sculpting on the cloth wings for the Monkey Plane. The wings would be simmed but often had to be sculpted as well to hit the desired shapes.

One of the more difficult of the CFX challenges was actually Alex's Mane. The animation often had self or external interpenetration of the mane and this required a lot of frame by frame modeling to correct these, often on top of adding wind driven motion to the hairs, all whilst having to keep the distinctive shape.

As a Character TD on Wall-e, I was given the task of building several of the 'Bots' seen on the ship, Axiom in the latter half of the movie. These included Mo, the cleaner bit, PR-T, the beautician bot and the Massage bot, as well as several others.

I worked with the character designer to help realize the designs and for Mo, I also helped design the neck and shoulder mechanisms. Refining the design as we went, from his initial sketches to the approved final model took five weeks, which was said to be a record for a Pixar Character at the time.

I built the abandoned vehicles on the freeway, many of the items in Wall-e's junk collection and the Trash Towers seen scattered through the City. I also built and rigged the boot that Wall-e puts the plant in. I also built the plant.

For Ratatouille I created the grooms for all the human characters. Linguini's was particularly challenging as if had to double as Remy's control system for Linguini.

As all the human models shared the same topology, variants for background characters would also feature the grooms created for the hero characters. I also painted the color maps for several of the grooms, such as Colette's, Gusteau's and Ego's, amongst others.

At this point, UV mapping had not been used on a Pixar Character before as the Texture painters at the time preferred to use camera projected mapping. I pushed for the use of UV's on the rats as there were to be so many of them that having to repaint all of the textures for each and every rat would have been punishing work for the groomers. I created the initial default groom for the rats that would then be used as a jumping off point for the many many rats featured. I also worked on the groom for Emile, Remy's brother. as well as several other rats that unfortunately did not survive the transition from Jan Pinkava's version to Brad Birds'