JHH VFX - 2020

The Last Defender began as my final submission for Chris Barischoff's Lighting 1 class at Gnomon. It was my first portfolio piece that involved rendering effects and animation. I learned a lot while working on this project,  such as some tricks to rigging my own characters by constraining  custom geometry to existing rigs. 

Dragon and human rig provided by CG Truong (https://gumroad.com/truongcgartist). 

Responsible for all other aspects. 

The environment assets for this project were recycled from a previous Gnomon assignment. The prompt was to model, texture, and render an architectural interior, matching the perspective of a photographic reference. I chose to recreate the cloister of the Catedral de Segovia in Spain. 

Guardian was the final project for my HD Matchmoving class at Gnomon, taught by Stephen McClure. This was a really fun one to work on. The prompt was to integrate digital assets into three digital-film sequences. I was very lucky to get permission to use drone footage for my project. Big thanks to Alan Feng, WeWannaGoTV, and DroneIt for sharing their breathtaking shots. 

Dragon rig provided by CG Truong.

Original video content:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vu4WK-FMyIg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eTHZt2x9HXY

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jFdudM4FMQ4

Responsible for animation, rendering, matte painting, and integration. 

Shockwave was my final project for Gnomon's Maya Fracture class with Jose Berkstein. While the main effect was done in Maya, the smoke, secondary debris, and procedural modeling of the facade were done in Houdini. The prompt for the assignment was to recreate a destruction scene from a film. I ended up choosing a shot from my favorite Superman movie, Man of Steel (2013). The rest of the environment was largely kitbashed using free assets from Turbosquid. However, because most of them didn't come with textures (or UV's for that matter), I ended up using camera-projection in Nuke to apply texture detail to them. This allowed me all the flexibility of matte painting while also maintaining the benefits of 3d, such as render passes and parallax.

Rigs provided by CG Truong and Prashant Padekar.

Car and building models from TurboSquid.

Crowd Animation by Mixamo.

SFX by Sergio David.

Responsible for all other aspects.

Recovery was my final for Gnomon's Digital Matte Painting class, taught by Marcos Shih. It was an experiment in tracking a plate onto live-action footage. The mech was initially a TurboSquid model by Dmitriev Vasily that was rendered in Maya and then integrated into the plate in Photoshop. Using the same technique as my Shockwave project (above), textures and additional elements were painted and then projected onto a flat plane in Nuke. This process allowed me to iterate quickly, playing with different compositions and asset placements in order to make sure forms and silhouettes were easily read. The soldiers were custom characters that were rigged using Mixamo's online auto-rigging service. 

Character animation by Mixamo.

Drone footage provided by DroneOneMedia: 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zWg-bMjF2oc

Responsible for all other aspects. 

Vanguard was a Frankenstein project on multiple levels. Initially, it was a combination of my final projects for Gnomon's Dynamics 3 course, taught by David Stripinis, and Houdini 3 course, taught by Peter Claes. David focused primarily on fluid dynamics while Peter taught us different methods of creating custom destruction and explosion set ups. Inspiration for the shot derived largely from two precedents, a Star Wars The Old Republic cinematic trailer and a chase sequence from the movie Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows. It was a challenging but rewarding process to hybridize these two scenes (as well as two class projects). The integration of time-warping also added a level of complexity that needed special attention. A more in depth explanation of my process can be found here: https://80.lv/articles/006sdf-003qxl-vanguard-slow-motion-compositing

Animation from Mixamo.

Environment assets from Megascans.

Tank model/texture provided by Jak Pagan.

SFX by Sergio David.

Responsible for all other aspects.