Hi everyone. Sorry I haven't posted recently, I've just been busy with school and life, and everything in general. Actually, I didn't get to go to school last semester because of financial problems, but everything worked out in the end because I was able to find some pretty nice jobs thanks to all of my teachers and friends who helped me out in my time of need. I'm really grateful for having such inspiring teachers and supportive friends, thank you all so much for all that you've done. I am sitting here in Puerto Rico right now, spending a considerable amount of time in self reflection and figuring out my goals and dreams in life. After spending a large amount time in production I have been able to assess my greatest skills and weaknesses and have decided to pursue the career path of a CG Supervisor. I feel as if even though my artistic skills are being challenged as a compositor, lighter, and motion graphics artist, I feel more joy in helping others achieve their goals with my technical expertise and artistic insight. I feel that I've gained enough knowledge as a generalist that I can solve a wide variety of problems or if I can't, I know who to ask. Right now I'm fighting with every ounce of strength to come back to the Academy, and when I do I want to see if I can talk to my teachers to pursue the right path to become a successful supervisor. I really love the whole entire creative problem solving process and get a kick out of working hours on end to solve a problem and have it absolutely rock.
Today, July 23,2009, I have lost a dear old family friend, Gilma O'Rourke. Gilma was an amazing person, I'm lucky to have had her in my life. She was inspirational, hopeful, and wise. She has helped my family and I during hard and dark times, and was always a beacon of hope when the going got tough. She was a very dear close friend to my grandmother before her passing, and she has helped my family numerous times, too many to count. One of personal note, as a cosigner for my student loans.
It's hard in this world of cynics and negative people to find someone as positive and loving as Gilma, and I'm truly astonished to this day how much she believed I will make it in my industry. She is the only reason that I had the luxury to go to the Academy of Art University, and I will never forget that. I have grown as a person, son, neighbor, friend, lover, and artist in ways that I never thought possible. I owe it all to her, this wonderful opportunity to contiue my education and carve the path to my future.
There are only a handful of people that I can say have drastically changed my life, and Gilma the only one who has done so repeatedly and without falter. She was such a loving, caring human being and I will never forget her and her unwavering generousity.
All the flowers in this picture were from her beautiful garden in Houston. It was always such a wonderful relaxing place to be in, as you felt all of life's stresses melt away. She moved from Houston to Medellin, Colombia earlier this year, to spend the rest of her days closer to home.
She fell ill to cancer in early March 2009. She had had cancer twice before, but kept a tight lid on it because she didn't want anyone to feel sorry for her. The doctors recently said there was nothing else they could do for her and it was terminal. She has been in bed at home, with nurses taking care of her on 12 hour shifts. She passed away early this morning at 4AM.
I love you Gilma, and will never forget you. Thank you for everything.
Thought I'd post an update since it's been a while since my last blog post. Wow, this semester at school was incredibly intense, the most work I've done all year long. Over a dozen of sleepless nights on supertight deadlines including Without delivery, mid-terms, Game Developer's Convention, the AAU Spring Show, and finals. I really poured my heart, sweat, blood, and tears into every single project this semester, and I have an under-appreciated lonely girlfriend to prove it. Now that I've had a bit of time to relax, and recuperate from such a strenuous semester, I'm enjoying my time off by watching season 1 of Star Trek: Voyager. Maybe I'll make it to the end of season 7, but I do plan to be a bit busy this summer, especially with my previously mentioned under-appreciated girlfriend.
Right now I'm in the process of fighting with financial aid to get enough to go to summer school and live out here in San Francisco for a couple more months. Hopefully I can also figure out my situation for next Fall and Spring as well.
Also working on giving my website a totally new facelift, integrating it more with the style of this blog, as I've really fallen in love with it. It just feels very simple, clean, and web2.0-ish. Wish it could just be a simple copy and paste and bam my site is done, but I'm having to go in deep and meticulously write some seriously complex code. Definitely glad I chose VFX as my career path and not web development. I can deal with web development for now, but there's no way I could do this 24/7. CSS was a bit frustrating to get a hang of at first, but now I'm loving it. It sped up my workflow considerably, and now I have more control over every single element in my layout.
I'm planning to have my website coincide with the launch of The Avenger, and I'll have many various streaming and downloading options available. I'll talk with the other ninja team after everything is finished and see if they would like me to put their video up. Both videos excel in different ways and both are a blast to watch. It would be awesome if I could, so people can see two totally different approaches to the same assignment.
Well, back to coding....
Update: 4-23-09 View Comments
11:02 AM by , under after effects, Cobra Creative, Colin Sebestyen, MoveCraft, nailspot, Spring Show, The Avenger
I just recently finished working on The Nailspot website during my free time. The Nailspot is a premier nail salon and spa located near the greater Houston metropolitan area in Kingwood, TX, next to Kingwood High School. It's a great, newly-opened, nail salon with luxorius Luxan tubs and Lonestar Spa Chairs and a great ambiance. Definitely an experience you don't want to miss.
On a side note, the Ninja project is coming along smoothly. Now titled, "The Avenger", my team managed to pull something together for the Spring Show. The other team, who interestingly enough called their piece "Ninja Avenger", managed to get together a nice good solid piece for the show. Our team still has a ways to go, and we have 3-4 weeks left to get it together for the final. Colin Sebestyen from MoveCraft and Cobra Creative, was there with us till the last minute of the deadline, midnight on Sunday. He definitely helped bring my piece together, and with his help I feel we got a decent amount of work done for the Spring Show. Thanks Colin for taking the time to help us out into the wee hours of the morning Saturday and Sunday night, definitely appreciate it.
With the consent of my team, I will try to post up the final version of The Avenger in 3-4 weeks when completed. I'll also talk to the other team, and see if I can get their work up here too, with credit where credit is due of course.
Working with RED footage View Comments
2:56 PM by , under after effects, afterfx, motion graphics, Paralux Productions, RED, Spring Show, The Avenger, vfx
The week right before Spring Break, Catherine came into our motion graphics class and informed us of a new category being put into the Spring Show, VFX Motion Graphics. Sweet, seeing as how our motion graphics class is the first and only class in the VFX department, whatever we turn in will more than likely be in the show. We have no competition. Problem is, we were only given two more weeks to work on something amazing to knock the socks off of people, with the impending deadline of April 19th. So eight of us got together and formed Team CRYPTALBAYSPLOSIONOMICRON (later split into two teams for different concepts). One of our team members, the talented Roger Apolinar, is currently VFX Supervisor at Paralux Productions. He was able to get a hold of the RED cam for a night and managed to recruit some martial arts talent to shoot in the greenscreen studio. With martial artists Isiah Flores and Michael Gonzales showing off some sick moves in the studio, we managed to get some amazing, beautiful RED footage.
Speaking of which, if there are any of you using Windows right now, REDCINE seems to be the best option to handle any R3D files you can throw at it. Actually, I'm not sure but I think it's the only option right now, at least it was the only one that I could get to work. There was a solution to open it up in AE CS4 but I couldn't get the RED settings to pop-up. If you need some place to get started, I recommend watching the tuts from Final Cut User here. They'll give you a basic overlook on the app, and give you a better insight on just how awesome RED is.
I'm currently working on doing the roto and keying right now, so nothing new for my mograph buddies, but I thought I'd post up some my prev work in progress. This first pic is to be the intro of our project, a 2.5D matte painting depicting an ancient Asian landscape.
I made it in Photoshop, and then rendered out layers to switch to After Effects and displaced along the Z axis.
A styleframe/storyboard in which our hero character hides behind a wall. 3dsmax.
More to come soon, I promise, but there's still lots and lots of work to do!
Nuke - Managing Your Files On Multiple Computers View Comments
7:34 PM by , under files, fxphd, master class, nuke, script, the foundry
Often times I find myself moving Nuke scripts back and forth between my computer at home and the labs in school. If you work on multiple computers with your Nuke scripts, you've more than likely experienced broken Read Nodes.
But fear not young padawan! There are ways to avoid spending 15 minutes redirecting Nuke to all your files. I've come across a couple of scripts to fix your Read Nodes, but by far the most jaw-droppingly easy one comes from The Foundry itself. If you haven't checked it out yet, the Nuke Master Class last January was extremely beneficial and I highly recommend everyone to check out their videos and source files.
In their Python videos, they quickly demonstrate fixPaths.py, which attempts to automatically fix the paths of all the missing files in your Nuke script. Here's a little excerpt from the second Python video showing the FixPaths script in action:
Again, please please please, I urge you to go visit the Nuke Master Class and view the entire video in higher res. It will be worth your while, I promise.
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This second method I learned from a good friend of mine, Devank, who put together a PDF based on another tutorial from The Foundry. You can download his original PDF here.
The rundown of his interpretation goes a little bit like this:
- Create a NoOp node and set its name to Path.
- Right-click on the NoOp node in the Properties panel and select Manage User Knobs. Add a Filename knob and rename it to Project_Path.
- Enter or browse to the path of your project directory.
- Now all you have to do is copy and paste this little code into all your Read nodes before the filename to insure it links to the Project directory.
[value Path.Project_Path]
- Now whenever you switch computers, all you need to do is change the Project path in the NoOp node and your Read nodes should fix themselves.
