Thoughts from Iceland Kickstarter

I had the pleasure of animating the video for a kickstarter that just went live for the omnibus printing of Lonnie Mann's travelogue comic Thoughts From Iceland.

It's an endearingly honest account of Lonnie's trip and an expertly made journal comic based on the “Thoughts from Places” -style videos that the vlogbrothers make. I read it in the original printing, but I'm excited to see all of the new content that will be in the new collection being kickstarted. Heck, Brian K Vaughan and Lucy Knisley both liked it, so do yourself a favor and check it out!

New Business Card Design 2015

Normal Map Palette

This is the palette I use when I'm fixing or painting normal maps, I find it easier to pick from a segmented sphere rather than a smooth sphere -- just for the sake of consistency. If you want a smooth sphere or cone to sample from, Wikimedia's got you covered here:

Happy painting!

Shader / Material Reference

I've decided I should make this a permanent and publicly searchable page on my blog (I keep losing links), so here's a place where I'll compile shader and material reference (code, scans, samples, best practice documents, reference images, etc) for myself and for other people working on such things. This will likely be primarily focussed on physically based rendering topics, but there may be other stuff here as well.

Basic Biped Controls for Maya / Mecanim Character

I was so tired of not having at least basic controls for a mecanim compatible rig that I finally broke down and made a really basic set of controls for one of the Mecanim default characters.

He's nothing that special: FK arms + IK legs, no special face/hand controls or fiddly bits. You'll still have to directly animate on the bones for hand and face animations, but at least doing basic blocking and pose-matching won't take so long now :D

One of the benefits of this being really simple is that I think the fbx should work a lot of places (please let me know if I'm wrong), so I have an MB and and FBX file you can download and use.

Other than that, he's really just the default mecanim body -- skinning and all. You shouldn't have any trouble bringing him in engine as long as you remember to turn on animation export (and baking) in the fbx export dialog.

MB file for Maya
FBX file for Maya and Everything Else

Small Reel Update

This most recent update to my reel includes my shader work. Other than that, it's pretty much the same as my other recent reel update.

Anyway, thought I'd crosspost it here :)

VFX Reel 12-11-2014

Since I'm applying to some new jobs recently, I decided to collect and demo some of my recent VFX work. It's mostly particle work, but there's a bit in there about the new ribbon component I'm working on which is meant as an upgrade to the existing Trail Renderer in Unity and a quick mention of my new particle shaders, scene color control script, and the shockwave script I wrote to make my explosion effects more dynamic.

The particle shaders I wrote have their own dedicated video:

And my other recent shader project, the Simple Physical Shader set, is detailed in another: