bells and whistles

It's started. We have the date set, venue booked and photographer set to go. We needed to submit a photo of ourselves for the venue so Mary and I had a little photo shoot last night in the Apartment model. It was trial and error since I was using my remote for exposures. I think we are gonna have to get our engagement photos set up here soon as well. Pretty exciting.

HollyFarm

DemoReel WIP

Work in progress DemoReel

James Eggleston Demo Reel 2010 from James Eggleston on Vimeo.

I am weak.

I wasn't gonna be a slave to technology, I wasn't gonna contribute to the hype. Not because I didn't feel like it, it was mostly cause I don't have disposable income. Anyway, where there is a will, there is a way. I was able to sell my 3gs for pretty much exactly what I would pay for a new phone. In fact I only spent something like 17 cents out of pocket.

Anyway, so I get the thing the other morning. It really is pretty sweet; even with all the purported problems. Mine seems to be void of all those issues in all honesty. The screen is SUPER sharp. They weren't really exaggerating when compared to the previous generation phone. 1 ghz chip is way faster, it runs 512 mb of ram. That is as much ram that was in my last imac when I bought it.

The camera is lightyears ahead of the previous version. It is 5 mp and the sensor is much more sensitive to photons. This enables much quicker exposures in normal light and pretty awesome low light results. I have attached a few examples taken today on the patio. It takes sharp photos. The flash is okay, nice to have I suppose in certain circumstances. Not expecting it be a savior by any means. The video is also pretty sweet. It uses h.264 compression which has been shown to be a very formidable codec. The additional compression that flickr used on my upload was intolerable so I will post a video sample at a later time. There are some other features that are available now in the ios4 which can be mentioned, such as multitasking with apps like pandora. You could do some of this stuff already with a jailbreak, I'll also be jailbreaking this badboy once it is feasible. Can't for someone else to get their hands on one so I can test out the facetalk feature which looks pretty cool as well.

afternoon walk..

Here are a few photos from either today, or another day...

Early worksite regimen.

Here is a small vid from the previous project. This was the first concept I came up with. I am overly dependent on caffeine..

Untitled from James Eggleston on Vimeo.

Hummingbird tracking in Boujou

Here is a video of the latest project. I am open to anyone with suggestions. Tracking footage is pretty cool, a lot of troubleshooting but very awesome. Next class is advanced modeling (more zbrush) I am psyched to learn some more subsurface scattering and shader networks. Class is so much more enjoyable now that I have a computer up to the task. Much more to come.

Untitled from James Eggleston on Vimeo.

Edit: this video was slightly altered this morning. I updated some object shadow masks and retooled the audio. I noticed the text was slightly unreadable when compressed in vimeo so I made some more adjustments there.

MotionBuilder v.6

Class is finished,
Tomorrow we start our lighting and rendering class. I will post updates with that. For now, here is my latest project.

Untitled from James Eggleston on Vimeo.

Mobu v.5

I finished my project Monday. I had left my render at school over the weekend. I was messing around in After Effects on sunday and layed out my background image and edited my intro text etc. so that all I needed to do Monday was switch out the new render and output my video in AE. Once I was finished and turned my project into the TS, Otto noticed that my raycasted shadows on one of my lights was pretty distracting. I do agree that it did take away from the animation overall. I went ahead and left it to re render this afternoon. I should be able to quickly swap out the frames in AE and output once more. I finally figured out why my videos were rendering so desaturated in AE. I had to switch the compression to something like jpeg 2000 instead of normal h.264. I don't know if it's practical since the files are pretty big but the quality is far better as far as color richness. I will post my final animation tomorrow once we finish our critique.

Mobu v.4

Before the end of last week, I was finishing up my animation in motion builder. I was having some issues with additive character tracks. I had finished my initial poses and wanted to add in secondary movements. This left much to be desired since the story tab really isn't intended for editing key frames. I managed to get some movements in here and there but the end result is still a bit fast or rigid in motion in certain places. Overall, I am good with the poses and feel that they demonstrate the emotions that my chosen sync exudes. Once I felt happy with everything in MOBU, I imported back into Maya, then applied my color and normal map. I was intending to use displacement but I didn't have time to learn the new workflow in zbrush 3.5 r3. I will start getting that done tomorrow.

MOBU v.3

Last week, I finished up my color map, output a normal map and rendered a few frames in maya to make sure they looked half way decent. Lighting was setup, though, not finalized. I worked at home mostly the entire Thursday finishing the map. I am getting more efficient with layout of maps. Still need to improve technique though. My normal was output of Zbrush 3.1 at school. I was going to use displacement but the workflow changed the very next day since the classrooms installed 3.5 r3 and I believe the process has changed. I will need to get on that soon.

Motion Builder 02

I've got my project going for class. I decided to sync a quote that I extracted from an episode of It's always sunny in Philadelphia.
My character is reciting lines by Charlie Kelly. It is really just something I whipped up rather quickly in zbrush from a generic base mesh from Maya. It had been a minute since I had used zbrush so I spend a day or so troubleshooting problems between file exports. I came to the conclusion that my versions I was saving out at home were scaled to some insane degree and I had to sculpt everything over with zbrush 3.0 in class. Not that big of a deal. Anyway, so at this point in the game, I have my final mesh and blend shapes back into maya. I am currently working on my color map for my character. I hope to have that finished by this weekend but there are a few other things going on. This coming week, I plan to get started with the lip sync and onto the full animation thereafter. I have a bunch assets already made from previous projects so I shouldn't need to be modeling too much, maybe a few tweaks but we'll see.

balcony

I love the views from our balcony, it seems that there are new colors at sunset every night. Here are a few recents. The first, a photo of pretty big hail that fell about a week ago.

MotionBuilder

I am now in term 6 of my classes, which means I am that much closer to graduation. That in itself is a bit scary. Loan repayment is fast approaching. I am currently in Motion Builder class, which consists of animation, both motion capture and manually keyed. It is always a balancing act trying to stay creatively motivated when learning new programs. Luckily the ins and outs of Motion Builder are relatively similar to Maya since it is developed by autodesk (bought out).

The first two weeks of class have consisted of learning the technical aspect of the program. I am happy with the teaching method, it had a practical approach which is hands on. Three more weeks, then on to rendering and lighting which should be very cool as well. I will talk more about my plans for our final project in the next installment.