Stills

1994 - 2002

This section features some of my old computer graphics work, circa 1994 through 1999.  This is work done between high school and my early professional career in my spare time.  Much of the work was done on an Amiga 2000 equipped with a Video Toaster in Lightwave 3D, and later using the same software in a DEC Alpha workstation.

Videos

These videos represent both my early work in the 1990s and some of my work while at Netter Digital on the TV shows Voltron:  The Third Dimension and Dan Dare: Pilot of the Future, as well as the feature film Bats.  My personal work was done with Lightwave 3D on an Amiga and, later, a DEC Alpha running Windows, while the Netter Digital work was done with Lightwave 3D on DEC Alpha and Pentium class workstations running Windows, with some After Effects thrown in for a few shots.

All of these clips are quite short, between 2 and 10 seconds long, as they were all shots meant to be tied into longer sequences.  These date back to the days before HD; everything was rendered for NTSC (480i in modern slang).  A hard drive head crash caused me to lose much of this content, including the models and scenes, while file format issues prevented me from converting rendered clips to modern formats.  As such many of these are pulled from SVHS tape and are kind of blurry, while others have bad frames or drop-outs. 

Demo Reel 1998

Personal projects, really.  I did all modeling, animation and lighting, save for some of the Asheron's Call one, which was an in-house project at Turbine Games.

The mech in the first two clips is a design a made for a school project, with the short animation Pest Control becoming a runner-up for a Lightwave Pro magazine award at the time.  The blue crawler droid is a personal project to play with inverse kinematics and refraction.  The train is an experiment with grass (before grass tools where available) and modeling a train engine and cars.  The gears were just an experiment with volumetrics.  The cell-shaded mechs, a Quedluun Rau from Robotech/Macross, was an experiment with making water, missile trains and cartoon shading, and was modeled based on a plastic model kit and show reference.  The lighting gloves and flying taxi were done for a friend's student project at RISD, while the inchworm and flying Saturn were for my own school projects.

Max Steel (1999 - 2000)

I was an animator on Max Steel at Netter Digital.  I wound up modeling parts of the city, writing a level-of-detail plug-in to replace objects based on distance to camera to keep render times down as the cars raced through the streets, and hand animated all of the vehicles and lit the scene.  I worked on a number of shots including mocap character shots, but these are the ones I like the most.

Dan Dare: Pilot of the Future (1999 - 2000)

At this time I was doing IT work at Netter Digital, and during my down time I helped with animating a few shots on Dan Dare.  I had more time than most, so I was able to use After Effects to add some dust hits and some extra detail to my shots, as well as hand-animating the foreground character and bits of the background aliens in the first shot. I later did work on another episode of Dan Dare at Foundation Imaging, but I don't have copies of that work.

Babylon 5: Crusade (1999)

I was at Netter Digital for the end of Babylon 5: Crusade, and did some animation and lighting for various shots.  I got lucky enough to have one shot with a Star Fury, too.

Voltron: The Third Dimension (1999)

I arrived at Netter at the end of Voltron: The Third Dimension, and got a few shots to work on.  These were two of the more interesting ones, where the glow effect was created by running a noise through a second version of the model with the polygons flipped and scaled up slightly.

Bats (1999 - 2000)

I did animation and lighting at Netter Digital for the feature film Bats.  For the scene where the bats fly off of the ceiling of the cavern, I wrote a tool that parsed Particle Storm data to offset Lightwave 3D animations so that the bats would start flying at different times, and had to render it in three sections to get all the bats into the shot.  For the second scene, I animated and lit the swarm of bats covering the scientist, matching the lighting flashing and tracking the camera by hand.   The third shot is simpler, showing a few bats flying around and one slipping into a window; in retrospect, slower, heavier wing beats might have been more interesting than the fast flaps I went with.