Finished Master Course Bournemouth

Just finished my Master Course in Bournemouth which wrapped up the end of August. It was a highly intense but super interesting year where I got to know some talented cg folks which I won’t forget quickly. Time for a quick trip home and a short break after which a new episode will start working at Framestore london.

Reel summarizing some of my work done in the year:

I’ve also been slightly involved in some other projects as for example Kevin Meade’s amazing ‘A Little Wicked’ animation short which I did some minor smoke effects for:

And Lars Van Der Bijl’s demolition of The Tower Of Pisa project on which I helped out with the crowd sim and assisted on set.

Some other remarkable projects from some of my classmates:
Dapeng Liu – Modeling Reel:
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=Si0gF8K17LE
Lee Baskerville – Modeling Reel:
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=fiVlwaGO5aA&feature=related
Alkis Karaolis – Modeling Reel:
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=-K7ax6fEXn4
Nic Groot Bluemink – Environmental Modeling:
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=BeURMI6Gmlc&NR=1
Pedram Christopher – Animation:
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=nyYaKpjGyt4
And many more:
http://uk.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=291138D85F1C166C

Jo

XSI wing feather tool

New version:
https://joplaete.wordpress.com/2008/08/08/wing-feather-tool-version-ii/

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Lately I was looking at rigging feathers on a wing in XSI and I decided to develop a small prototype tool for dealing with this.

Basically it started out as a procedural feather system which enables you to draw out a curve and attach it to your bone system (or extract from a mesh) and generate a desired amount of feathers onto that curve. For the generation you can provide your own feather you model up. On generation you can adjust a set of parameters the script will take into account as for example add in some randomness in scale variation or some offsets. After generation you have a set of custom controls to adjust your feathers as well as a flash interface that pops up to manage your feather distribution and individual placement. The idea is that you animate your bone chain and afterwards you can go in and adjust the exact feather placement and bake that in as animation too. This gives you a lot of control in tweaking your feathers.

The system is still a prototype having some pros and cons and probably still some bugs in there but it definitely was a very good exercise in scripting for rigging and putting the flash-xsi bridge I developed (more info soon) to a more advanced use. I will keep developing this as I think it might be useful for people who quickly want a wing feather setup for their character.

To see it in action you can take a look at this screencap where I briefly go over it:
http://www.edjstudios.be/rigging/j_feather_tool/j_feather_tool_v1.html

Feel free to leave any comments or ideas or drop me a line if you fancy to give it a try. I will upload the tool at a later stage.

Jo