Hollywood Forever Cemetery Panorama

I've been taking Lighting & Rendering 1 at Gnomon this summer and the assignment this week was to take a panorama.

After figuring out how to use a Kaiden head tripod, I went with two other classmates to Hollywood Forever Cemetery and spent forever trying to get the photography accomplished due to security...Permits, permits, permits, permission, permission, permission! It's for school!! hahaha

At first we were stopped and told photography wasn't allowed (oh people take photographs all the time, but we were sore thumbs because we had a tripod and were sticking to the same area in order to get the full panorama). So after being told such, we went to the Cemetery Office to ask for permission, which we were easily given on a post-it note. Then we continued back to our spot in order to start again. Being that there were three of us, we chose three different locations to do panoramas and throughout our remaining time there, we were approached by security about 5 or 6 more times, twice by the same guy! We showed the permission post-it note we were given and all was okay...I understand they were doing there job, but the same guy twice? "I'm sorry, I just wanted to look at your note again and verify." hahaha

We did have to clear out of the cemetery around 6pm because they had to prep for the movie screening they have on Saturday nights during the summer. It was an interesting day, I am sunburned and drained, but I got the photos, stitched them together and got a descent panorama.

Aquafresh - Work Project

May 2009
I modeled, textured, and animated everything in about a half day to a day.

Structural Graphics - Work Project

March 2009
To match the logo, I modeled and animated a paper airplane with little dots trailing after it.

Reebok - Work Project

February 2009
I animated this 3D Reebok shoe "pumping up" / inflating.

Squeaked

This is an unfinished film I created during the second year of my MFA at USC (2006-2007). The story is about a chewtoy that loses its squeak. There's a T-Bone, Hamburger, and Hotdog chewtoy that gang up on the poor Ball chewtoy because of his malfunction.

I only completed a little over 1 minute of the film, but the continuation of the story introduces a dog. While the food-related chewtoys are ganging up on the Ball, they are causing all sorts of ruckus, which catches the attention of a nearby bulldog. The dog sees these rather large chewtoys and realizes this is an opportunity he cannot pass up, so he charges after them. Initially he goes for the Ball because it is on the ground and couldn't get away. The dog pounces on the Ball, but it doesn't make a sound. The dog promptly loses interest and pursues the remaining chewtoys. So in the end, it is the abnormality that saves the Ball from the jaws of the bulldog.

This was a solo project; I created the story, modeled, textured, rigged, and animated the scenes in maya. The textures aren't finalized and the sounds are only temporary (and some aren't synched properly...definitely rough!!) in order to give the general idea.

Augmented Reality at ComicCon 2009

Now this has been a part of my life since about the moment I started working at Total Immersion. Along with one other 3D artist, I did some modeling and texturing, but mainly rigged and animated many many characters.

Augmented Toys

Related Article

A little background info on the company

Augmented Fantasmic Summer Nightastic

A truly quick project I worked on was an advertisement for the 2009 launch of Disneyland's Summer Nightastic. With only a few short days, I helped model, texture, rig, and animate the dragon...then I cleaned up Tinkerbell's animation and added a few extra sequences (an animation cycle of her flying, and a sequence where she flies up to the front of the screen/camera and flirts a bit).

Fantasmic! 3D
Related Blog

First Job Out of School - Total Immersion

Since the end of January 2009, I've been working as a 3D artist at an Augmented Reality company called Total Immersion. Topps 3D Live is one of the projects they were finishing up when I started. I helped with minor texturing tasks, exports, creating buttons, text....just various odds and ends. It was a huge step for the company and brought a lot of media attention...NYTimes did an article and we were also interviewed for a telecast of the Canadian division of the Discovery Channel.

NYTimes Article About the Topp's AR Project
I created the image in the article captioned "A fanciful depiction of a 3-D image of Ryan Howard of the Phillies from a Topps 3D Live card."

Total Immersion's AR Youtube Channel

Some More of Total Immersion's Work on Youtube

Total Immersion Main Website