Lighting Show Reel 2018

Here is some of my updated work that I have so far for my demo reel. The shots were made in Katana, Renderman, Maya, Zbrush, Mental Ray, Substance Painter, and Photoshop.

I unfortunately can't show any of my current work at MPC from Justice League, Alpha, The Dark Tower, and Wrinkle in Time since it is not out in public yet.

Below is just a video of the Piano room model.

Look Development

First pass

This is the final render from maya matching the ref. Worked on UV's, texturing, and Lookdev. Once I was done UV'ing I moved into texturing in photoshop. I mainly enjoyed making the layered textures for the wall's and the bottle.

Last part to the project was to bring the final render into nuke and adjust it using different layers that we rendered out separately like the lights, IBL,  the occlusion and the matte ID's. I did a relight using the light ID's to give it a more interesting story different to the ref. Added defocus.

Previews Work

Piano Room

Chocolate table with AO pass to show of modeling

Lighting and Texturing Research I did in gray scale in 2 days. Modeling by Juan Iglesias.

This was the art test that I had to complete in order to specialize in look development it took a total of 3 weeks. I only lit and textured the scene. Model was provided to me by the class.

A nursery scene that I modeled in 1 week using mostly maya and a little bit of Zbrush.

These assets where made in one week. It was one of the first projects I have worked on.

This cafe scene was made in one week.

My second project in Zbrush later retopoed in Maya in 1 week.

  

This is my first full model based on a the 2D Color image that I made in Zbrush. Took a week and 3 days.

This next three projects where tests using Nuke and SynthEyes(assets provided by Fullsail). In this composition I had to get rid of a helicopter, a fence, sky and signs.

This project tracked in SynthEyes in 4 days..

This project tracked in SynthEyes in 4 days

houdini

For this month, we had a lot of research to do for what kind of effects we wanted to create. We got a chance to use both Maya and Houdini. After this this whole month, i realized that Houdini is the place to go for effects. They just provide a lot more freedom on how you want to control you fluid unlike maya.

Our first project was creating fire with Maya Fluids. For this project I used an object emitter on various of my objects. I wanted to create the effect of a bonfire, that was neither to big nor to small.

 
 For our second project we were also supposed to create fire only this time using Houdini Pyro. This project, to me at least, the fire looks a bit more realistic then the maya one. My time was mostly spent in the pyrosolver where i adjusted the size, shape, and speed. The most complicated part for me was the volumetric Pyro Shaders. It took me a very long time to get it to look like the fire reference. To me it was mainly just messing with everything and see how each one worked and how I could manipulated to get it to look like my reference. 

The third project was about using Houdini's FLIP fluid effects. This project I liked the most because i felt like I had more control then the previews ones. The best part was messing with the curl noise to achieve what your reference showed you. The only Downside was the sim time. It took way too long to see how things were going to turn out. But as soon as you get what you want, catching it was a very useful tool when you wanted to continue to the shading part. The shading part was also amazing to mess with, you can turn it into which ever liquid you want in a matter of seconds. Houdini's water simulations were so also great because we could have objects affecting it. 
The final project, 

In the final project, we were supposed to create viscous liquid using flip. This project was almost the same process as the first one but this time, we were supposed to make thick liquids. I decided to go for honey, but I had a ton of errors. The main one is that it kept duplicating the effected geometry in a different place and it showed up in the render. It had to to with something in the autodop but I was able to figure it out. 

This class had a lot of topics to learn from, the most complicated one was Houdini. But as long as you explore into it, you will eventually find were things are, how to cache them, and how to render them. Even though maya is a faster at getting to these things, the numerous amounts of options you get for houdini is incredible.

Visual Effects old

Character Animation

This month we worked on a Pantomine of our choice. I chose the one where the character is distracted by something and then knocks a priceless object down. Once I chose my action, I started to write my characters history. After that I recorded how I think my character would react to this action based on his history. When I got that down, I did some pre-pro to get more extreme poses from my acting. Then I went about blocking in my key poses,  after that I finished the walk. After I had blocked out all the main poses I started to do breakdowns and anticipations for everything. I think my biggest mistake was to wait till the 4th pass to parent the paper and pencil to my character. But I think I did a decent job in this project.