Skills
Creative Technologies, Prototyping, Translating Academic Texts
Tools
Max/MSP, Java
Year
2020
In collaboration with John True, a local musician who was soon to release a new album of solo piano works. I developed an algorithm from the ground up based on the concept of a particle system mimicking the blurring effects of camera depth of field. Programmed in Cycling74’s Max utilizing the built-in Jitter matrix package, and custom externals written in Java.
A Fun Quirky Low-Poly 3D World For an Intro Video
Skills
Branding, Design, Animation
Programs
Adobe Illustrator, Adobe After Effects, Newton Physics Engine
Year
2018
I was working with a group of close friends to develop a comedy YouTube channel, based around video gaming and popular culture. So we needed to find a quirky name and brand that fits our weird and dry senses of humor.
Hanging out as a group, we had a game; stupid band names. Hunting down the best band names in our normal speech (or, abnormal speech). Such as in the middle of a game of Dungeons and Dragons, when a character made an alcoholic concoction of fermented fish, we joked that that would be a perfect folk band name: “Dr. Bartholomew’s Experimental Fish Whisky.”
While searching for a brand name for this odd new endeavor, we remembered some of our old band names, and Fish Whisky was born.
I then went to work on creating a logo. I wanted to play with that mix of dry and silly, so I went with a classic badge-style logo, but with an illustrated Cthulhu-esque monster climbing out of a de-facto whisky barrel.
Then, it was time to animate it. Using After Effects I took all the 2D elements from Adobe Illustrator and projected some of them onto a 3D plane, and piece by piece animated them all.
Most of it is standard After Effects keyframe animation, but some of the elements needed a little something extra. I utilized the Newton physics engine to give some of the elements the feeling of weight and realism. I also add rigged the tentacle using bones and Inverse Kinematic bones.
Finally I downloaded a series of sound effects from Splice, and laid them out and mixed them to create a track that would fit along with the animation, fleshing it out and creating both a sense of realism, and an extra comedic addition.
What I ended up with was a quirky, silly, fun, but dry intro for an equally silly YouTube channel.
Check out the video here!
Short Cube Animation Study Done in Realtime in Max/MSP/Jitter
Logo made with Adobe Illustrator, 3D Animation made with Blender
An artist, famous for adding a technological element, was interested in ways to utilize technology to give his art another dimension.
I worked with him to select a few pieces of his art, to come to life in a couple of ways.
Create 3D animations to explode out of his paintings.
Allow him to create 2D animated videos, that tell the story intended in his paintings.
I knew I want to create an augmented reality app, but how to accomplish that was yet a mystery. I did some research and settled on using Qualcomm’s Vuforia library, and the Unity game engine which I already had experience with.
From there, it was a fairly simple process, use a tool from Vuforia to convert pictures of the paintings into trackers. Import that to Unity. And then attach a video player object to each painting, and then trigger the video to play when the painting enters the camera viewport. Vuforia made the process very easy, all it took was some custom programming, and a lot of fine tuning to build the basic app.
Creating the 3D angel is what ended up being the most difficult. I took the picture of the painting, and removed the angel and used Adobe Photoshop’s clone stamp and Healing Brush to cover over the hole the angel used to be in. Then I took the angel and flipped its wings outwards as it would be fully outstretched, and then exported the angel and background as individual pieces. I took and used Adobe Illustrator to create a black on white outline of the angel, and exported it as an SVG object.
I then imported the SVG object into blender. Used the “Mesh > Faces > Beautiful Fill” option to convert it to a mesh. Then spent some time cleaning up the mesh by hand. The next step was applying the Angel we cut out earlier as a material (which proved to be a finicky process to map properly.)
By this point I had an angel with outstretched wings, and its background as two elements. Now it was time to animate it. I had created rigs before thanks to the Double Jump Intro, so that turned out to be an easy process.
From there, I watched a lot of videos of birds flying in slow motion, and did the animation in two parts, animate the flapping of the wings itself, which was just a simple up and down motion, with a little rotation. Then it was about animating the up and down motion of the angel itself. I noticed that as birds fly, they dip a little after each flap. This helped to give it a really natural feel.
I then took an additional digital painting given to me by the artist, and faded that in at end. Giving all the little specs and words depth as to help enhance the 3D effect.
And just like that I had an Augmented Reality app, and I had taken a 2D artwork and created a beautiful 3D flying angel. This wowed a lot of future clientele, and helped him to sell prints of his art as “AR Ready.” Increasing his revenues and reach.
Ral-ly was a Sports drink start up company that wanted a website that could make them stand out from other competitors. They wanted to leave an imprint on their audience and that the best way to do that was to have something that was unlike anything on the web.
To accomplish this, we contracted with a 3D modeler to model their sports drink bottle in three flavors. We then animated the bottle to act as a quirky and fun transition while you navigate through their website.