Seadragon / Photosynth
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/129
No words to describe this brilliant new technology. Has to be seen to be believed. Running on a laptop no less.
June 07, 2007
May 07, 2006
Andrew Stanton Interview
http://www.timshim.com/downloads/AndrewStanton_Interview.mp3
A great interview by Spline Doctor with Pixar Writer/Director Andrew Stanton. Andrew wrote and directed 'Finding Nemo' and in this interview, he talks about how he got into animation, story development, and gives many insights into working at Pixar.
Again, kudos to Spline Doctor for this great interview. I've re-edited this 3 part interview into one lower bitrate mono mp3 file for a smaller filesize for your listening convenience.
There's also a new interview with Ralph Eggleston who was Art Director for 'The Incredibles' on Spline Doctor's blog. You can also subscribe to his podcast in iTunes. Search for 'SplineCast' in the podcast section.
April 25, 2006
Animated Textures With RenderMan
This RenderMan related tutorial shows mainly how to animate RenderMan shaders in Maya. To illustrate this tutorial, I decided to create an Ocean shader animated purely through the use of procedural textures with RenderMan.
This tutorial isn't a guide on how to create a photorealistic ocean shader in any way. No real world ocean effects like frothing and waves collision - none of that. That would be a whole new tutorial on its own.
For some purposes though, this simple effect may be good enough for production. Here's the final clip: http://www.timshim.com/downloads/ocean_demo.mov. The compositing work was quick and dirty - I added in a still image of a sky picture and animated it to match the ocean somewhat. Not very good but better than leaving a black hole for a sky.
So here we go ...
April 13, 2006
Dahfa CNY 15-Sec Spot
This short 15 second commercial was a project I completed earlier this year for a local food manufacturing company. It's a full animation piece, the highlight being my 3D animated character(s). This spot was aired on national television as well as on Asia's cable network, Astro, over the Chinese New Year period.
I wouldn't really call it a concept, but the main goal of this short ad was to make it appealing to children, hence the liberal use of bright, saturated colors - namely red and yellow. And of course, the introduction of the animated lion (not real lion, lion dance kind of lion), which was animated more like a puppy dog to make it look more friendly and dare I say it, cute. Ah, well, the people you have to please in this line of work.
Modeled, Textured and Animated in Alias Maya with fur created using Joe Alter's Shave & A Haircut.
Save the QuickTime movie here: http://www.timshim.com/downloads/DahfaCNY_Spot.mov
March 11, 2006
Finger Painting FX
This shot for STM (www.singletrackmind.tv) is for an AIDS PSA so it's sorta kinda suppose to be a representation of the AIDS Awareness symbol.
This entry is a short tutorial on how this shot was done. For those who are (really) interested and/or geeky, click to read on.