bradavery_news

More Progress with Vue

2007-12-07T10:40:00.000-08:00

I am currently completing a freelance project making use of Vue XStream and Maya. After some trail and error, I arrived at a pretty good workflow for making the two pieces of software work together well, and for rendering all the buffers I need to get the composites working. the way that I want. Below is a frame from the project showing the difference a little compositing makes. More on this project later.

Groovebox

2007-12-06T16:59:00.001-08:00

Hurrah! I finally textured my MC-505 Groovebox. This is a very accurate model of a Roland MC-505 - all done in MAYA.

Love those IGs

2007-12-06T15:23:00.000-08:00

Recently I began to pull some models that I have made out of the archives and touch them up a bit. Here's an Italian Greyhound that I modeled in Maya and Zbrush - now with a collar, eyes, teeth, and a tongue.

301 Mission / Millennium Tower

2007-11-16T15:50:00.000-08:00

Hello All - long time no post... A project that I have been managing for a year now through my work at Screampoint has recently gone online. My part was to manage the creation of the 3d architectural visualizations of the building, the interiors, and the surrounding city model.
The actual building is currently under construction and when completed will be one of the tallest structures in San Francisco.

Have a look at some other renderings at the final site -www.millenniumtowersf.com

Landscape

2007-03-05T19:55:00.000-08:00

It's been a while, so I sat down the other day for some fake landscape fun - the next landscape will be totally different, I promise....

Ellie

2007-02-02T15:10:00.000-08:00

Michelle and I have added yet another pet to the family. Meet Ellie the Italian Greyhound.

For the curious, pictures of all the pets are available here.

Look Out Blogosphere

2007-02-02T14:19:00.000-08:00

It's official - after a long time of being teased by a "coming soon" banner page, you can now delight in all the goodness of Michelleboenig.com. Take a moment to check the site out, and be sure to check out her blog while you there are she has been very diligent about keeping hers current (unlike me).

Hiatus

2007-02-02T14:03:00.000-08:00

Good citizens of the internet, right around the time of my last blog post (March of '06), I started working for Screampoint, llc. While at Screampoint I have been working on projects involving architectural rendering, city modeling, workflow creation / documentation, and custom technology development. Fun stuff. The job has even taken me to China a few times. One of my first projects involved managing the creation of a 3d model of approximately 2 square kilometers of San Francisco. (rendering pictured below)

In all of this time, I have woefully neglected my site and this blog. Hopefully I will be able to resume the pace and make this something worth visiting again...

Mac Break

2006-03-20T22:56:00.000-08:00

Last week, my adventures with the Pixel Corps continued with the shooting of several episodes of Mac Break. It looks like this week I'll be helping out with the keying of all the footage using my new favorite piece of software Shake - fun stuff.

Underwater Test

2006-03-20T22:45:00.000-08:00

Last week I sat down to continue my experiments in Vue 5 Infinite. My goal was to achieve a convincing (I think it still needs some bubbles added in the composite) underwater look in a short amount of time. For this image I focused on achieving an appropriate atmosphere as opposed to spending a lot of time modeling - to that end I utilized stock models for the fish and the shark. The image was rendered out as layers and ultimately composited in photoshop with no digital painting.

Panorama

2006-03-20T22:24:00.000-08:00

Being an independent contractor sometimes takes me to interesting places. On the 14th of this month I shot and stitched this spherical pano (the real image is huge - over 8000 x 4000 pixels) for a client specializing in architectural visualization. The platform that I shot from was a couple of wooden planks on top of a 30 foot scaffolding in the middle of a construction site. The width of the platform was exactly that of my open tripod legs - it was quite a dance to maneuver around my camera rig without disturbing my tripod (it's very important when shooting a spherical panorama not to move the nodal point of the camera). I'll admit that it was a bit scary, but the results came out great.

Big River

2006-03-07T21:42:00.000-08:00

I was fipping through an outdoors magazine the other day and got inspired to attempt a realistic outdoor 3d rendering. Last night I drew out some rough sketches of what I wanted to achieve, and today I built, textured, rendered, and composited the whole scene. I think the result (pictured below) came out quite nicely for a first go at it. To achieve the look, I modeled and textured the scene in Vue 5 Infinite, then did the render as a series of passes each possessing one characteristic of the scene (ie reflectivity, shadows, etc.) The final image was composited in Shake which is fastly becoming one of my favorite pieces of software.

Fish Eye

2006-03-02T21:10:00.000-08:00

Recently a friend lended me his Sigma 8mm fish eye lens. Shooting with a fish eye is a big change and I'm not sure that I'm used to it yet. One odd thing is that since I'm shooting with a DSLR that has a conversion factor of 1.6, the fish eye is cropped. Below is one of the first images that I shot with the lens on a recent trip into San Francisco. My wife Michelle (pictured) and I stumbled into a crazy store near Union Square, and I snapped this as we were walking down the stairs.

Sculpture

2006-03-02T20:48:00.000-08:00

Every once in a while I get an image in my head and try to make it in 3d within a short period of time. The inspiration for this image came from a picture that I saw in a recent sculpture magazine. The only light sources used are the white cylinders insdie of the glass and metal cases. The image was rendered in passes using the Mental Ray renderer and assembled in Shake.

TWIT

2006-02-21T20:06:00.000-08:00

On Friday the 17th, along with the rest of the Scene Capture team from the Pixel Corps, I took part in shooting the weekly podcast "This Week In Tech", a.k.a. TWIT. It was a lot of fun to dust off some of the old production skills and help with the setup and lighting. If anyone out there is curious, the podcast (episode 42: Dvorak's Lost It) is available for free via the TWIT website, and the iTunes music store as well. At present the version available is the audio-only version, but very soon, the video version will be posted.

Vegas

2006-02-21T19:22:00.000-08:00

Last week I went on a short business trip to Vegas. I haven't been to Vegas in about seven years, and I had almost forgotten what a bizarre slice of reality it is. My trip was all business, with the exception of the "play" below - a partial panorama from the roof of the Hard Rock Hotel's parking garage (thumbnail of full pano above, detail below). The funny thing is that the job I was on involved taking pictures all day and a good number of night hours for two days - you would think that I might do something else for fun. Ok, ok, I did spend $1.75 on the slots.

Architectural Revival

2006-02-10T10:22:00.000-08:00

As an experiment, I decided to revive some old work that I did in Lightwave (circa 1999) and rebuild / relight it in Maya. The added twist was that I was going to render it in passes and composite it in Shake. The lighting is accomplished via a a single HDR image that I generated, paired with a directional light to boost the sun portion of the HDR. Missing from this image are all of the pictures that I had hanging on the walls in the original model - possibly I will add them back in, along with another light source and a character to bring more interest to the image.

Groovebox

2006-01-23T12:05:00.000-08:00

Work is continuing on my modeling reel. For some reason I felt like I needed a product on my reel, so I chose my trusty Roland MC 505 as a subject. All the geometry is done and very precise (I measured everything with digital calipers). Pictured below is a rear view of the geometry with some procedural textures on it. The actual product has a lot of painted-on decals, so some texture painting will be in order to finish the model.

Pixel Corps at the Apple Store

2006-01-12T15:49:00.000-08:00

Yesterday, I headed into San Francisco for Macworld 2006. New Apple hardware aside, the show was not as exciting as others I remember attending in the past. The show could have just as easily been called ipod expo '06 as it seemed that a large portion of the booths were pushing ipod related accessories. I didn't have high expectations going in as most of the exciting stuff is now announced at Siggraph and NAB, but I still felt the show fell short.

The great thing that I did manage to see yesterday, however, was the Pixel Corps presentation at the SF Apple store (a few blocks away from the Macworld convention). Alex Lindsey of the Pixel Corps gave a very detailed presentation on shooting and compositing a subject against a green screen using a Sony CineAlta camera. I was simultaneously surprised and very appreciative of the depth that he went into. The image below shows me (I volunteered to be the subject) on the big screen at the store just before Alex demonstrated a quick test key in Apple's "Motion" software. He later went on to assemble a final key using Apple's "Shake" software.

High Dynamic Range

2006-01-05T21:46:00.000-08:00

Today I shot a High Dynamic Range lightprobe on my back porch using my trusty EOS 20D and a 2" chrome ball-bearing on a lightstand. I also shot video of a pedestal sitting on the porch where the chrome ball was mounted. Below is a 3d model of my head illuminated by the lightprobe that I captured. Tonight I hope to motion track the footage that I shot, and integrate my model seamlessly into the video environment. So much fun...Have I earned my nerd card yet?

More Work In Progress

2005-12-29T12:09:00.000-08:00

Today I'm back to pulling old models up and refining them for my modeling reel. Here's a model in progress of a wolf spider that I created for a short.

Flux

2005-12-14T13:01:00.000-08:00

For the duration of today, this page will be changing form as I'm trying to squash some css layout bugs on different platforms.
Fun Fun Fun till daddy takes the mouse away.

So Close

2005-12-14T00:11:00.000-08:00

After about five hours of work I'm very close to having the teplate fixed for this blog. CSS is not my expertise, but I have learned a lot this afternoon. The template was working perfectly when I tested it through blogger about five minutes ago, but appears slightly broken when I view the live site. Hopefully I will be able to nail the remaining bugs tomorrow.

Busted Code

2005-12-13T10:50:00.000-08:00

It looks like adding images to my blog is causing my tables to bust. Time to hit the books and learn more about going fully CSS and ditching tables. Anyone know of any good books on the subject?

Work in progress

2005-12-13T10:00:00.000-08:00

My friend Eric Keller continues to inspire me with the way he keeps his blog up to date with work that he's doing. Going with that inspiration, here are some geometry-
only renders from some of the models that I'm working on for my modeling reel.