stone fragment test

just an experiment with some particles with pflow in 3ds max. my pc is slogging through baking out the 2000+ particles so that I import them into maya. slow going.

rigging...

... is evil. necessary, but evil.

just another character update

spent a lot of time refining textures today. now the kid looks less caucasian.

character design & animation

well, i know it has been a while since i posted anything new, but for the past few quarters i have been taking evening classes in 3d character design and animation using maya. that makes two new topics for me, coming from a 3d motion graphics background and having used 3ds max almost exclusively for over 6 years. anywho...  here are some quick screen grabs (+ minor compositing) of my 3 characters i have made for this final quarter, which i will be using in our main project... due in 5 weeks. this is going to be a long weekend of rigging.

pacific martial arts - pt. 2

Here are a couple more elements for the new Pacific Martial Arts of Lynnwood website redesign.

pacific martial arts of lynnwood - web design

Lately I have been working on designing a new website for a Taekwondo school in Lynnwood, WA. Here is a dump of some elements and rough splash page layouts. Ideally, the viewer would be able to select which "belt theme" they want displayed, thereby changing the background of the site to match their preference.

interim portfolio

The other day it came to my attention that my host server for my website, www.ericlawshe.com, could no longer be found. To make matters worse, I seem to be unable to track down the administrator of said server, so I am not sure if it will ever come back online. So... for the time being, I have made a few adjustments to my blog so that it can act as an interim portfolio until I can get a better server for www.ericlawshe.com. I will add a couple more pages to the blog shortly so I can have a more complete portfolio gallery. Thanks for the patience.

monday mug shot 04

Here is the mug shot for 6/20/11. Modeling time came in at around 5.5 hrs which is a little quicker than the last one. I had some difficulty with geometry flow around the mouth that slowed me down. Also I had meant to add hair to this one. As you can see it didn't happen today. Maybe I can add it later in the week. Also I will be gone on vacation for the next 2 weeks so there won't be any updates. I will still try and keep up with questions and comments though.

monday mug shot 03

I'm pretty happy with how this one turned out. I'm getting faster so yay for progress. Mug shot 1 took about 2.5 days, #2 took around 1.5 days, and this one I did in just under a day (1 day = 8 work hrs). I also feel that the quality is improving. My hope is to start doing weekly full body models in the near future as well... but we shall see.

greyscalegorilla - the creative gap

I watched most of this presentation by Nick Campbell the other day and found myself going back and jotting down some notes. I consider this a must-see for any designer. For the full post head on over to greyscalegorilla. I especially took note of "make something cool every day."

Nick Campbell - The Creative Gap: Becoming Better Than Most from Nick Campbell on Vimeo.

moleskine murals - lightborne creatives pt. 3

Here is part 3 of the Lightborne Creatives moleskine mural. The artist is Neil Smith, a Senior Designer at Lightborne. Below that is the comp of rounds 1-3 together. I forgot to mention to Neil to keep the left and right edges clean so of course he went above and beyond and filled the entire 2-page spread. I'm not complaining though. Props to Neil.

monday mug shot 02

This time I'm actually posting the Monday Mug Shot on Monday. Imagine that! Still no working wacom though so no sculpting work on it. Someday I'll have a tablet again.

moleskine murals - lightborne creatives pt. 2

Here is round 2 of the Lightborne Creatives moleskine mural. The artist is Chris Gliebe, one of the creative directors. Below is the comp of parts 1 & 2 together.

monday mug shot 01

I recently found a collection of front & side mug shots tucked away on my hard drive and thought I'd try and do a model every week. This took me about 1 day. Yes, I realize it's not Monday yet. I meant to post this last Monday but it was a holiday and then things just got crazy at work. Oh and my tablet isn't working so I couldn't take it into Mudbox for sculpting... so it is symmetrical for now.

moleskine murals - lightborne creatives pt. 1

For some time now I've wanted to do a Moleskine mural collaboration with various artists. So here is my 2 page spread. I've started passing the book around my work. I'm excited to see where this goes. For my pages I used good ol' pen & ink.

ae - crumble

This is a result of following this tutorial on videocopilot.net. I'm a fan. This was all done procedurally in AE. There were no 3d elements brought in from 3ds Max.

3d - sketch dump 06

The explosion and the fireball were both made using the FumeFX plugin for 3ds Max.
The oil fire was a very high-poly mesh who's displacement and shading was driven by a series of animated procedural textures. Not very practical, but an interesting experiment, nonetheless.

3d - sketch dump 05

A w.i.p. turntable of my pirate, Franklin Tug Bowline, a falling rock, and a cave-bike... w.i.p.

3d - sketch dump 04

Just messing around. Transforming phone, camera mapped chipmunk, some cloth, and a two-way-mirror-spinning-LED-hockey-puck. Why not?

3d - sketch dump 03

For the first two I was messing around with Max's rigid body dynamics and a fracture script. I manually adjusted the baked animation to give it the "bullet time" effect.
The last one uses the same fracture script with a pflow birth script operator. That way I was able to implement more control of the behavior of the debris.