So… after interviewing with Paul Kanyuk from Pixar, I’ve decided to update my reel a bit…

Breakdown is here (PDF).

So why the updated reel? Interviewing with Paul and chatting with the other two people from Pixar that visited Penn was a really interesting. Paul had a lot of suggestions for my work during our interview, so I’ve decided to go ahead and incorporate a lot of the changes that Paul suggested.

So changelog time!

Overall Changes:

• New song! The new song is an instrumental version of Baby Universe from the We Love Katamari OST. As usual, the version of the reel I’m actually sending out to studios for internships has not music, though.
• I’ve replaced “Postcards from Prague” with a new project, “Chairs”
• Shuffled around the order of some pieces.

Apples:

• Recomposited with slightly better z-depth using a new depth of field plugin for After Effects I found called Frischluft Lenscare. Apparently Alex Roman uses it, and if Alex Roman uses it, then gosh golly I’d better give it a try. Hahaha.
• Slightly tweaked color grading
• There’s a little more footage of the second shot of the apples bouncing than there was in the previous reel

Hermit Crab:

• Recomposited with tweaked ambient occlusion in the turntable. Paul pointed out that there were some odd light leaking issues on the underside of the shell’s opening, so I’ve increased the intensity of the AO there to try to make it a bit darker.
• Fixed a small problem with the transition between the Untextured Lambert and the Fully Textured parts of the turntable

White Room:

• Every shot’s depth of field has been redone using Frischluft Lenscare
• The first shot of the underside of the stairs was lengthened, rerendered, recomposited, and re color graded.
• The second shot has new color grading and altered AO.
• The third shot was rerendered with new contrast settings and re color gaded.

Clock:

• Paul pointed out that a major flaw with the clock was that the highlight on the glass washed out everything under the glass, so I fixed that by changing the reflective properties of the glass slightly and giving the glass more of a curve to break up the highlight
• Turntables were sped up to help the reel’s overall pacing
• Textures on the clock face are sharper than before

Raincoat Girls:

• Turntable was rerendered to get rid of the light blue band that appeared partway through the turntables in the previous reel
• Environment shots were re color graded

Look! I finally cut together a demoreel!

I’m getting interviewed by PIXAR! Actually, Pixar gets a slightly different version of my reel. The Pixar version simply has no music… they’re not very big fans of music in demoreels, apparently.

Which is why I got off of my lazy bum and finally cut a reel together.

Oh, I have a reel breakdown too! Check it out here (PDF).

The song in my reel is “I Like Van Halen Because My Sister Says They Are Cool” by El Ten Eleven. I’ve recut it slightly to fit the length of the reel.

I also finally put together a personal site thing at www.yiningkarlli.com.

Speaking of new sites… I should probably get around to redesigning Omjii.com soon. Hm.

Earlier this week my mom gave my roommates and me a ginormous sack of apples, so I’ve been eating apples all week. Which is good, because I love apples.

So I had an apple sitting on my desk, and I had Maya open, and I was a little bit bored, so… I made some apples in Maya!

Over the past few months I’ve developed a bit of an… odd… workflow for texturing/shading irregularly shaped objects (apples… muddy boots… hermit crabs…). I start with modeling and whatnot in Maya, as usual:

Then I go into Photoshop and use various reference (images found online, photos taken with my Nikon D60, etc) to paint a tile of the texture I want. For example, for the apples I took some photos of the apples and then extracted textures from the photos to create this texture tile:

Next, I bring the object mesh and the texture tile into Mudbox and use Mudbox’s projection stencil tool to paint the mesh using the texture tile as the stencil. The nice thing about bringing things into Mudbox for texturing is that I don’t really have to worry too much about UV mapping. Mudbox will automagically take care of all of the UV stuff as long as the imported mesh doesn’t have any overlapping UV coordinates. So instead of messing with the UV editor in Maya before texturing, I can just use Maya’s Automatic UV mapping tool to make sure that no UVs overlap and bring that into Mudbox. After painting in Mudbox, I got a texture image like this:

After texture painting in Mudbox, deriving spec and bump maps in Photoshop is a relatively straightforward affair. Once texturing and shading is done, I render out the beauty pass and z-depth pass and other passes…

…and bring all those passes into After Effects for compositing and color grading, and I’m done!

For animation class, we were given an assignment where we each had to pick a random mixed drink name and use that name as the basis of a 10 second animation in After Effects. I picked something called a Watermelon Smash (it contains…. watermelon cubes… and I don’t remember what else). So… here’s a watermelon smashing something!

We were actually allowed to use anything we wanted for the actual animation, the only rule was that we had to composite the final result together in After Effects. I wound up doing the ocean, splashes, and sparks in Flash (with tons of help from Joseph Gilland’s book Elemental Magic) and painting the boat and the watermelon in Photoshop. The watermelon itself is animated entirely using the puppet warp tool in After Effects.

I’m not terribly happy with the sound. That needs some reworking probably…

Here’s a few stills breaking down how the entire thing was composited:

…and here’s some random stills:

This is just a quick dump of recent things I’ve been working on, detailed posts to come later.

I’m done with my character model! Until I can think of a better name, I’m just calling her “Raincoat Girl”.

Here’s a still:

Getting the hair and cloth sims to work right took aaaggggeeesssss. Thank goodness Marissa Krupen knows so much and helped me out a lot.

I wound up cheating on the subsurface scatter for the skin. I couldn’t get it to look right on its own, so I wound up using a layered shader with the subsurface on one layer and a normal texture map on the other layer. I think the end result looks okay.

Turntable!

I’ll post more stills later, but now I really need to study for that Finance final that I’ve been avoiding… I also have to make an environment for my character to go in to, and I still have that final project for 3D modeling to finish (I haven’t even started…).