Nonsensical Blurb

22nd birthday

2010-08-29T20:20:00.000-07:00

Um, so I was poking around my old artwork, trying to get some inspiration for the next sculpt I'm doing for Jerome Ranft's class and I found this from when I just turned 22. I barely remember drawing this, but I do remember being extremely sick and miserable. I'm fortunate to have awesome friends though. They drove me to Baltimore to check out the fishes.

Shoreline Dr.

2010-07-05T20:29:00.000-07:00

The Ghost of You Lingers

2010-04-14T23:40:00.000-07:00

Pottery[1]

2010-03-22T22:31:00.001-07:00

It's a pair!

Pottery[0]

2010-03-06T00:30:00.001-08:00

Here are some pieces from a pottery class I'm taking/just finished taking. I've still got a few more things to glaze and fire. Here are the results from the first couple of weeks of class which happened to be almost two months ago:

Misfit cups:

Functional bowl and plate:

Starting a new sketchbook...

2010-02-28T01:13:00.000-08:00

Some oldies....

Breakfast at Pixar

Rhino and poop

Unsuspecting mother

Newbies inspired by SF Sketch Crawl. I didn't actually move around with the group, but I bought new markers and sketched for the first time in ages!

Happy dogs at Ocean Beach

Chinese New Year parade

Ice Rink Boys

2010-02-17T21:32:00.000-08:00

Fake Mosaic

2010-01-10T22:09:00.001-08:00

I really like the look of mosaic art so I tried to replicate it in an inexpensive way. These are 6"x6" acrylic on masonite.

Rock Cloud

2009-12-03T19:37:00.001-08:00

The result of 12 weeks of laborious hammering, scratching, and alabaster dust inhalation...

I bought a hamster and his name is Chewbacca

2009-10-20T01:05:00.000-07:00

Musings

2009-10-05T23:40:00.000-07:00

Teen Joker

Zombie Snape

Zombie Dumbledore

SF Asian Girls

2009-09-07T22:25:00.000-07:00

Fong Sandwich, a tribute

2009-07-22T00:00:00.001-07:00

Euro-sketches

2009-07-06T11:07:00.001-07:00

Just got back from my trip to Europe! I visted Barcelona, Rome, Cinque Terre, and Amsterdam for two weeks. Most of these sketches are from my 5 hour train ride from Cinque Terre to Rome.

We were cleaning out the Family Wagon...

2009-05-26T13:30:00.000-07:00

...and I found this old notebook of mine. From it I've gathered that I was a weird, angsty nine year old who liked drawing animals with similar features. Click the title too see some pages from it!

More ink stuff

2009-04-28T19:45:00.001-07:00

Click to see some higher res videos.

These images were generated with a maya plug-in tool called TrInk that I created with my partner, Aline Normoyle. It autogenerates branching plant shapes given some input images and optionally renders them out in an eastern ink painting style.

Trees rendered with my ink simulation

2009-04-23T12:44:00.000-07:00

More smoke!

2009-04-09T12:46:00.000-07:00

This is my smoke sim sped it up with After Effects. The grid size is 40x20x3.

Boo

2009-04-08T13:30:00.000-07:00

I just added some debug features to my smoke sim. This is my velocity field...turns out my vorticity or pressure still has issues :(

Sorry, it's kind of hard to see.

C++ Projects..yes!

2009-04-07T20:58:00.000-07:00

Besides the occasional sketch while waiting for things to happen, I haven't been making very much art. This is due to me having several programming projects and presentations all due (curiously) around the same time and then more projects getting assigned right after. You know how it is.

Well, here are some of the results of me staying in during the weekends..

This is was my first project from my Physics Based Animation class. It's a cloth sim using a mass spring system. It involved starter code and me implementing different springs, collision detection, and penalty/velocity forces to resolve collsions. As you can see it's not very good, so you should move on to the next video.

This is my smoke simulator. I wrote all the code from scratch. I'd like to eventually render out a really high resolution sim, but for now I just have this screen capture. This is of course based on the Navier Stokes equations, and I added vorticity confinement, but I'm not sure if that's working properly because of the low resolution. The red smoke indicates that it's hotter and blue is colder smoke. Notice how (besides the emitter) the hot smoke hangs out at the top of the box! Awesome!

This is from my rigid body simulation project. We were given starter code and I implemented Box-Ground, Box-Sphere, Sphere-Sphere, and Sphere-Ground intersections, collision resolving, gravity, and the Sweep and Prune algorithm to speed up broadphase collision detection. Yay for destroying things as a homework assignment!

These are some ink stroke textures generated from my ink stroke simulation which is based on a 2005 Siggraph paper - MoXi Real-Time Ink Dispersion in Absorbent Paper. It's still a work in progress. I've teamed up with Aline Normoyle, who's writing a tool to create 3D tree models from images. So she provides tree shapes and I provide the non photorealistic rendering!

Cooking class

2008-11-14T23:23:00.000-08:00

I've been taking an intro to cooking class at the Restaurant School. It's only 6 classes and I'm halfway through already. It's been enjoyable and yummy. Here are some drawings inspired by people from class.

I also had this idea of doing an abstract mosaic painting of the craziness in the kitchen. Maybe I'll follow up on that. We're rolling our own dough next week yay!

Don't be a creep!

2008-10-15T12:38:00.000-07:00

Here are some drawings of one of my crazy professors and the things he likes to say. Imagine him with a thick Dracula accent.

"Holla at your boy"

2008-08-06T22:35:00.001-07:00

Dog

2008-07-06T20:59:00.001-07:00

It must suck to be an ant.

Hobo-chic

2008-06-15T13:53:00.000-07:00

I miss Oregon sometimes

2008-06-08T23:19:00.000-07:00

I've been thinking about whales.

2008-06-07T00:00:00.001-07:00

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory...

2008-05-25T11:50:00.000-07:00

...was on TV yeseterday (both versions). The original is just weird and the oompa loompas scare me to death, but I love Tim Burton's version. You could tell the concept artists who worked on that movie had an amazing time. I drew some caricatures...not that the characters really needed any more caricaturing.

Animations from my Mixed Media Animation class

2008-05-17T15:15:00.000-07:00

I really enjoy stop motion animation, the process, the look...the whole magic and spontaneity of it. In this course, we did hand drawn, sand, stop motion using a multi plane device, and a stop motion using a set and props as a group project (and my final project). The sand was my least favorite to do, but the end result can be really fantastic.

Final project - I just couldn't get rid of this image of a little girl with a yellow umbrella and rain gear with a minstrel/jester man so I came up with a story around the two characters (with lots of help from friends). I think I enjoyed making the costumes the most.

Multi plane - Got this idea while walking around an art store. There were so many random props I just couldn't resist.

Hand drawn - This was our first project. I had been watching a lot of Planet Earth. I love birds though, they're so silly.

I rescued Tarzan from my computer

2008-04-04T11:53:00.000-07:00

Here he is, printed out from my school's newly acquired 3D printer. He's slightly under 3 inches tall from toe to fist and is one of the funniest things I've ever seen. I might print a bigger version later. Enjoy!

I'm going to Pixar!!!

2008-03-06T12:32:00.001-08:00

I'll be working as a Technical Director, which means I get to work on an actual production for 12 weeks! I'll be finding out what I'm working on and what I'll be doing after the first week. I am so unbelievably excited and I hope to see some of you Disney folks there as well!

Sea Monster...Attack!

2008-02-22T18:22:00.000-08:00

For my Mixed Media Animation class, we're working on group projects. One of the ideas laid out was a Jonah and the Whale story and something like this image and the whale in Pinocchio hung out inside my head. My group isn't actually doing this story, but I wanted to get the idea out anyway. I also decided I'd make the monster more shark-like since I like to imagine whales as being the wise, peaceful creatures of the sea.

Business Goat Maquette

2008-02-20T16:47:00.000-08:00

...Currently without his suitcase. I'll glue it on eventually. He's 10 inches high, and I used about two and a half boxes of SuperSculpey. I have no idea where it all went.

For my next sculpture....MAD SCIENTIST

Some sketches I've failed to post for a while.

2008-02-16T22:44:00.000-08:00

[Update]

I forgot that I had wanted to do a whole "Concert" series of sketches. I went to quite a few last semester and brought my sketchbook along. Aside from the poor lighting, concerts are a pretty awesome place to sketch.

2008-01-06T18:39:00.000-08:00

"Business Goat"

An idea for one of (hopefully) several maquette's I'd like to make this semester.

"Hic"

Painted in a random doodle.

Oh my goodness, how did I not look this up before??

2007-12-05T17:06:00.001-08:00

http://media.universalorlando.com/harrypotter/

Check out the "Downloads"

I <3 sunsets.

2007-11-24T13:15:00.001-08:00

Hope your Thanksgivings were delicious. I need to go see Enchanted...

Raycaster!

2007-11-16T23:05:00.001-08:00

It might not look like much, but these, my friends, are images rendered out of a program that I've been working on for the past two weeks in my computer graphics class...a raycaster...kind of like a raytracer except the rays only reflect off of the surface once. Right now my program only raycasts spheres, but soon it will render out chairs! and desks! and lamps! and OBJs! (sort of). I'm eventually going to have to make a raytracer too. Man, I don't want to think about how long that will take to render out one image. The ones below are 50X50 and they took about 15-30 seconds each. It feels like forever.

Diffuse shading

Environment mapping..The white stitches shouldn't be there but oh well.

Rabbtiz

2007-10-21T19:55:00.000-07:00

My roommate and I got the cutest little bunny about a week ago. It's name is Coconut. We're not really sure of the gender but we like to pretend it's a girl. So, in honor of her...

Head study

2007-10-13T23:03:00.000-07:00

Just playing around with Painter and various brushes. It's of no one in particular.

An alternative to coffee...

2007-10-11T10:29:00.000-07:00

I spent the better part of one of my classes yesterday drawing turtles.

Stormin' Norman Badler

2007-09-19T13:51:00.001-07:00

Director of Digital Media Design and powerpoint extraordinaire.

3:10 to Yuma

2007-09-09T21:59:00.001-07:00

..was an awesome movie so I had to draw a cowboy, what can I say. Oh Charlie Prince, what an interesting character.

The Ballad of Sinister

2007-09-03T17:37:00.001-07:00

Here's the father model for The Ballad of Sinister (a short from Disney's shorts club) that I sort of started during the internship. I had been working on and off on it last month and finally finished it. I would have liked to pose him, but I think I want to start on something new. One of the visdev pieces by Erik Vanhorn is at the bottom.

In other news, I had a bowl of cereal for dinner and I'm about to embark on an Office marathon.

The mall

2007-08-28T19:52:00.000-07:00

I figured it was about time to post something. Maybe it was just the mall I went to, but almost everyone I saw wore a squinty face that made them look disgusted and angry.

San Diego

2007-08-11T14:09:00.000-07:00

I attended my first SIGGRAPH conference this year. It was unnerving coming from a completely artistic, Andreas Deja-animation history worship point of view of making films to completely technical, code/script/simulation/hardware point of view. I felt somewhat thrust back into a world which I hoped I didn't belong to anymore. I went to Penn's alumni get together and met a tech guy from Rhythm & Hues. I was introduced as being the DMDer who had a REAL art internship and he spoke to me in a way that sounded like he was reprimanding me for straying away from reason and practicality. I placated him by saying that I saw the importance in getting a solid education in computer graphics and that I wasn't planning on dumping my computer science courses completely thank you very much. He suggested that I stick to technology, that art could be picked up later. There's some truth to that I guess, but every time I hear that I think about the people who end up going straight into artistic positions and I wonder why I can't be one of those people. I keep hearing Dan Platt harking"We're artists first, geeks second!" I still wonder if it's possible to be arists and geeks first. It's been an awfully difficult thing to do.

A few sketches from San Diego..

..at the Marriott,

..of the guard in front of the Exhibition Hall,

..of the characters at Sony Imageworks,

..and of Harry Potter.

Tarzan

2007-08-03T23:28:00.001-07:00

Dumbo

2007-08-03T23:16:00.000-07:00

First real maquette yay!

Hello

2007-07-18T00:48:00.000-07:00

I guess I should start this thing properly. I've been interning at Disney since June. Apparently Disney thinks I am a modeler so I have been doing thus night and day. This internship has also rejuvenated my desire to draw anything and everything. I'm totally carrying around a sketchbook with me wherever I go for the rest of my life.

My first modeling project was to take a 2D image of a set from any Disney movie, model it, then add more crap to it. Some stills...

The image was from Lady and the Tramp

Yay.