Characters, Characters, Characters

Over the past 13 months at Reelfx, my rigging team and I have rigged over 110 commercial and film quality characters. This includes:

- at least 10 characters for the Kung Fu Panda commercials
- 3 characters for the vfx work on Snow 2 (an ABC movie, aired in April)
- at least 60 characters for Open Season 2 (for Sony, DVD comes out in Jan in the US)
- at least 9 characters for Madagascar 2 commercials
- at least 30 characters for Escape From Planet Earth

- and even more on current and other smaller projects inbetween.

It's been a crazy year, that's for sure!

Siggraph 08!

Off to siggraph tomorrow, hope to see some old friends and meet lots of
new ones! I'll be checking both work and vfxcreator emails, so gimme a
shout if you want to meet up. We're on the lookout for some rigging/td
people...

Also be sure to stop by the reelfx moho (motorhome) which will be in the
parking lot across from the front entrance of the convention center.
we'll be doing interviews, chilling, hanging out and drinking, etc from
tues to thurs. tues 4:30-7 will be our 'happy hour', but definitely
come by at any time to check us out.

See you in LA!

Stan Winston

Thanks Stan, for being one of the top inspirations for getting me into this industry.  To me, it was Jurassic Park that really made the push for me to get into this biz in the first place.  Who knew that being a ‘creature creator’ was a real job?  Well, we will miss you Stan. 

 

Here are some links…

 

NY Times

Images

Thanks for the monsters

Ain’t it cool news

The Winston Effect (book)

Quickie update

Wow, its been too long… again.  A major update needs to happen soon, but for now just a quick one will have to do –

 

-OS2 is almost wrapped up, animation should be finishing up over the next week or so, and then we’ll have about 2 months left for lighting/fx

-KFP commercials are wrapped up, and now we’re doing some DVD stuff.  I can’t wait to see this flick btw, it’s looking awesome!

-a new, and very large, project fell on my lap recently… more news on that later this year. 

-I’ve been meaning to do a big script dump to highend for some things I’ve had, but it’s a bit low on the priority list

-I might be switching servers/hosts soon, but ideally that will happen seamlessly if/when it does

-stay tuned for some new rigging tutorials coming in the future :)

-speaking of rigging tutorials – have questions or would like to see some specific how-to’s answered?  Shoot your suggestions this way..

 

Oh, and don’t forget to get your siggraph tickets!!  It’s approaching rapidly…

 

 

Happy New Year!

Just a quick Happy New Year to everyone! Thanks to all who are helping
out with contract stuff on OS2. I'm happy to say that we've plowed
through about 30 rigs in 3 months, which is just an insane
accomplishment for the level that we're reaching.

Thanks!

jc_SketchPose!

alright, i've finally(!!) added sketchpose to the highend3d maya scripts. for those looking for more info on it, scroll down a bit to see my previous posts with video links. i will be diving back into the code to get the rotations sorted soon, as we'll probably be using this at work on a project in the near future.

--edit--
I really should give a big thanks to Mark Swain, the original creator of the disney sketchPose tool. thats where the inspiration for this tool came from... just so you know!

Bye bye piggy

For those that don't know, my old company that i was at from startup to... nearly over the hurdle of a startup (~3rs).. The Animation Farm - closed its doors last month. Definitely sad to see it go - we put a ton of hard work into that place, and it was surely a blast. Everyone there seems to have scattered around town, and i wish them all the best of luck. Hopefully we'll get to work together again in the future!