Point Reyes – Lighthouse

Monday, November 30th, 2009 No Comments »

Finally had a chance to visit Point Reyes National Seashore this past weekend after a very long time. It’s about 1.5 – 2 hours north of San Francisco. These pictures are of the lighthouse and surroundings.

 
 

AAU Spring Show 2009

Saturday, May 30th, 2009 No Comments »

At the end of each spring semester, the Academy of Art has their annual spring show which showcases the best student work. We produced some really great Visual Effects and Animation work this year. If anyone lives in San Francisco, definitely check it out. It’s open house for all, but hurry since the show closes on June 11th, 2009.

 
 

VFX Cine – RED One shoot – Marina

Sunday, March 29th, 2009 No Comments »

For our second field trip, the school rented a RED One Camera and we shot a few plates in the Marina district of San Franscisco. There has been a lot of hype about the RED so it was really nice to be able to mess around with it. I have to say, it can be quite intimidating at first with all the options that are available on it. The great thing about the red is that you completely bypass any film processing as the files are stored digitally onto either a harddrive or memory card. We shot a few items at high frame rate at 160fps.

 
 

VFX Cine – 35mm shoot – Treasure Island

Saturday, February 28th, 2009 No Comments »

This was the first field trip in my VFX Cinematography class. The location is Treasure Island in between San Francisco and the East Bay. We used a 35mm Film Camera and we also had a Panasonic HPX 500 digital camera. This was the first time most of us ever used a 35mm camera so this was quite a treat.

 
 

The Orphanage is shutting down

Thursday, February 5th, 2009 No Comments »

I just learned today that the VFX house, The Orphanage, in San Francisco is officially closing its doors. It was a real surprise considering the amazing work they’ve done, like in Iron Man. Seems the economic downturn is hitting everyone hard this year. There are  several instructors at our school who work at the Orphanage, so it is really sad news.

Read more about it here at co-founder Stu Maschwitz’s blog.

 
 

Spring 2009 Semester

Monday, January 26th, 2009 No Comments »

My classes began today. After some last minute changes, here is my schedule for this semester:

  1. Particle Effects 1
    This will be taught in Autodesk Maya. Hopefully we’ll get into nParticles which is a new particle system in Maya 2009. We have a new instructor for the class: Markus Burki, currently a visual effects animator. The last movie he worked on was “Monster vs. Aliens“.
  2. VFX Cinematography
    Taught by Kenneth Ferro (who is amazing btw), this class will teach lighting and cinematography with respect to VFX. It’s great for those pursuing a track as a VFX supervisor. We’ll be using a few high-end cameras like the RED One 4K camera. We’ll be shooting some stock footage for the school as well as work on some class projects. I’m looking forward to this.
  3. Nuke 2: Advanced Compositing
    We have a great instructor for this class – Kyle McKulloch who currently works at the Orphanage in SF. A few of the movies that he worked include Iron Man, Live Free or Die Hard, and The Last Mimzy. The class will touch on of all the advanced features in the Nuke compositing package. Ultimately, I will be working on some of my thesis shots.
 
 

Houdini to Maya (BGEO import/export)

Saturday, January 24th, 2009 No Comments »

I found this maya plugin that seems to work reasonably well for importing a BGEO sequence from Sidefx Houdini into Autodesk Maya.

You can download the plugin from here: http://www.houdinistuff.com/

The instructions provided in the readme file can be a bit confusing.  Here are the steps I used to successfully load a Bgeo sequence from houdini:

  1. Save the bgeo.mll file into your plugins folder and load it in maya.
    mbeo_maya_plugin
  2. Open the command line editor and run: mBgeoReader
    mbgeo_maya_script_editor
  3. This will create a new poly object called mBgeoReader. Check in the outliner window.
    mbgeo_maya_outliner
  4. Select the object and go to the attribute editor.
    mbeo_maya_attribute_editor
  5. Enter the Path to the bgeo files.
    mbeo_maya_bgeo_path
  6. Done. You can pan through the timeline to see the animation sequence.

I haven’t yet tried exporting a Bgeo sequence from Maya, but the import worked successfully. Some problems that you may run into are attributes like velocity that aren’t  transferred into the Maya scene. At least I haven’t been able to during my test run. If there is a way, let me know. Without the velocity attribute, I wasn’t able to produce an accurate motion blur in Maya.

It may be a good idea to turn off any attributes in Houdini before using the ROP output note to create the bgeo sequence. This should increase performance in Maya. Lastly, use the geometry cacheing in Maya to speed things up if needed.

 
 

Final Projects

Thursday, December 11th, 2008 No Comments »

It’s been another busy semester as usual. I’ve worked on a few projects this semester which I will be posting to the portfolio section soon. In my Visual Effects class, we worked on a greenscreen character replacement, matchlighting, HP commercial, and a UFO project. Here are some screenshots:

 
 

Oakland Hills Panorama

Sunday, November 9th, 2008 No Comments »

I found a potential location for the intro of my final MFA thesis project. These panorama photos were taken from the Oakland Hills (Claremont ave @ Grizzly Peak Blvd). In the distance is the city of San Francisco along with the Oakland and Golden Gate bridges. It’s quite a nice view from up here.

350d_stitch_001

s500_stitch_002

s500_stitch_003

s500_stitch_001

 
 

Red Bull Soap Box Race

Saturday, October 18th, 2008 No Comments »

There was event today in the mission district of San Francisco – The Red Bull soap box race. I imagined it was going to be a small event, but it actually turned to be huge – estimated about 75,000 people.