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Tuesday, January 31, 2006

New Demo Reel/Resume

I have a new demo reel online with a slightly updated resume. Please check them out, especially if you are someone who should be hiring me, you know who you are.

I also had a interview today with High Moon Studios. They are a gaming studio just outside San Diego California. Their first title came out last fall for PS2/xBox called "Dark Watch" (it is a first person shooter involving vampires, cowboys, and zombies). I think overall it went well, although aparently I don't know what five words best describe me. Feel free to help me out on that one. I should know in the next week or so if it yields any fruit. The interview itself was about an hour long, and I may or may not write another entry about it in the next few days.

Also I have a lighting/texturing test for the cootie I did last weekend. This is more or less what the final look of the film will be. You can check it out here. The turn-around is rather quick, I made it to be scrubbed frame by frame.

Sunday, January 22, 2006

More MEL script Joys!

Hey everyone, I've been rigging all day on the cootie, fixing eye controls and corrective blend shapes that I have been meaning to do for a long time. As a result I got two more plugs to make for people that make me happy by making uber awesome mel scripts. For all you new animators/riggers, these links I have been listing are gold, gold I say!

First winner today is Ian Jones, and his ijUlt script. Its a collection of several rigging tasks, but the one that made my day was Mirror blendshape. With this baby when creating blend shapes, especially for facial, all you need to do is create the left or right side, and simply run the script and it create a new mesh, only flipped and ready to be applied as a blend shape. Saving you potentially dozens of hours of work.

Second winner today is Jason Osipa and his jsFacialWin script. This one creates several different facial control sliders, and even links up the set driven keys to the blend shape in a matter of clicks. What else could anyone ask for?

Check back in a few days for some pics of the cootie rendered and textured, UVs have been laid out and I almost have the color map and shaders done. I'm so excited I can hardly contain myself.

Wednesday, January 18, 2006

Comet Cartoon Scripts ROCK

I would like to take a second to plug the fine folks over at Comet Cartoons. They have made several maya mel scripts and plugins that make my life worth living again. The one I just discovered today is a incredible life saver.

CometSaveWeight: I had to delete my history on my Cootie today in order to unwrap the UVs, which causes the skin to be unbound. I have used a few other scripts in the past to save weights, but those are very slow and sometimes have bugs. Comet's weight save is very fast and reliable, and best of all it saves the weight data in one simple text file that even gives you a list of the joints that are in the bind. Saved me so much time today.

resetSkinJoint: This is a plugin I have been using for some time, and is another massive rigging time saver. Ever wish you could just nudge a joint over after you skin and weight the mesh? With this little baby you can, simply move the joint, run the plugin, and it resets the mesh back to where it was before, and all your deformations are pretty.

They have some more plugins that I plan to use, especially the auto-tangent. If you are doing any rigging they are a must have.

Monday, January 16, 2006

This American Obsession

For those of you that have been paying attention since my new site debuted, and especially my blog, you may have noticed a curious little link off to the right hand side, or rather a small conclave of websites entitled: "Links that make me happy". Of all the millions of beneficial and not so useful websites, by far for the past year my all time favorite is NPR and more specifically "This American Life". My love for this radio show has almost become an obsession, and the lucky students who have worked with me at Monty Hall can attest to my random and often loud outbursts of laughter or other vocal exclamation that come out from me while I listen. Even worst when I make them hear a sound bite that I think is positively remarkable only to receive a stare that declares, "What the hell are you making me listen to Matt?"

So what is This American Life? (which I shall refer to as TAL from hence forth) It is a radio program produced by Public Radio International, and played on NPR stations through out the country, and their entire archive can be listened to for free at www.ThisAmericanLife.com. Now I know what you are thinking, "don't only former tree hugging hippies with a lava lamp and black light listen to that NPR stuff?". Actually as far as I am concerned NPR is the last bastioned of intelligence, sanity, and enlightenment left in the media, and one of the best sources to improve ones worldview. TAL is a weekly hour-long show hosted by Ira Glass in which each week they pick a theme and have several stories on that theme. Topics range from the lighthearted to the deadly serious and are written and narrated by a group of regular writers as well as guests. One of these writers is a sub-obsession of mine, Sarah Vowell.

You probably know her as the voice of Violet from the Incredibles, but more importantly is an amazing writer with a sharp sarcastic wit and an infatuation like me for American History. She has written several books, last I read was "Assassination Vacation" about her tour of the U.S. visiting all the Presidential assassination landmarks, great book, but I digress. If you go the TAL website run a search on her name and any one of her episodes is going to be a great one, although they are all great, hers are just super great! Oh Sarah... if only I were ten years older... and you dug animators. Too creepy? I'll move on, I can always talk more about Sarah in a later blog.

This is how geeky I have become. My idea of a really great evening is a glass of Spatlesse wine, animating in Maya, my cat, and a new episode of TAL. It doesn't matter how poor my mood is, or how pessimistic I am feeling that this country has completely and utterly lost its mind, This American life always makes me feel warm and fuzzy, and most of the time damn proud to live in this marvelous if not often nutty country of ours. So the entire impetus for writing this diatribe was to tell you about an especially terrific episode I just listened to:

"Not What I Meant" aired earlier this year. I originally heard it actually on the radio, although I do most of my listening of the show via the Internet. This episode is about people saying or doing one thing, and it getting completely misunderstood, sometimes with things going horribly wrong. Act One is my favorite, and is about a man completely at the wrong place, at the wrong time, with the wrong items, and saying the absolute wrong things. He ends up getting the FBI and Donald Rumsfeld after him and eventually they figure out he is in fact as dumb as he looks and not an international terrorist. Of course hilarity ensures throughout. This story would be funny enough on its own, but as luck would have it a similar event happened to me when I worked at a summer camp. I had the Secret Service department of Anti Internet Terrorism looking for me. Long story short is I learned two things: First there are exactly seven Matthew Ornstein's in the entire U.S.A., and one of them had been running muck on the web. Second that I rather nicely fit the profile of a internet liberal terrorist, but I promises you I am not. The details I will save for another time, its a amusing tale, one worthy of story and song. In the mean time go forth and listen to the episode, I know for a fact you will enjoy it. Expect to see more links to TAL on the blog, and if you become addicted as well let me know, maybe we can start a 12-step therapy group. "Hello my name is Matt Ornstein, and I haven't listened to a This American Life episode in two weeks, and I fear I may fall off the wagon".

Thursday, January 12, 2006

Cootie Show and Tell

So I heard back from Scott about the Z Brush demo he gave at PIXAR using my Cootie model, and it seemed to go over well. According to him they "chuckled" when the cootie came on the screen. So maybe one day some PIXAR artist will be looking at my reel and see the Cootie... "Wait a minute, I've seen this cootie before! Give this man a job!" Then again maybe not, but still cool none the less.

I also got two WIP (work in progress for all you non animators) shots to show. First is a shot already on my reel that I finally put some tweaks on and got the antenna moving. I even managed to throw a minor temper tantrum over the the antenna because I initially couldn't get the rig to make "S" curves, and we all know how sexy "S" curves are. However nothing that walking away and a little McDonalds couldn't fix, and I am pretty happy with the end result. I might slap a few more tweaks on it but without further delay, shot01_05v14.avi.

Second clip is a very small cut-away shot I churned out rather quick, so it doesn't work that well out of context. However I think it's cute none the less. shot07_04v06punch3.avi

Friday, January 06, 2006

Free Maya rigs for download

I finally added content to the downloads section. You can now download two free Maya animation rigs. The first of these rigs is Lieutenant Dan, a ball with legs rig which has full squash and stretch in the ball as well as the legs. It also has an fk tail that can be turned on and off. I also rigged up a squash and stretch ball rig. If it looks familiar its because I used the tutorial at http://lichiman.aniguild.com/ and modified it a bit to fit my needs. Both rigs are compatible with Maya 6.0 and above. I hope you all will find them useful and any comments and feedback are always welcome.

Wednesday, January 04, 2006

Cootie at Pixar

Hey, I just got some cool news today. A friend of mine Scott Spencer has been giving zBrush lectures at PIXAR recently. He has another one on the 10th and he needs a cartoony model to demonstrate with, and since he specializes in monsters and evil clowns, he asked me if he could use the Cootie model and rig. So on the 10th a room full of PIXAR artists is going see my Cootie, in all his cute glory. Hope they don't catch him.

Also today was the first day of classes this quarter. I just had "portfolio" today which is being taught by a new professor here, and she has a ton of real world industry experience concerning getting hired, which is going to be really handy considering I need to be hired in ten weeks.

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