Oh hey look, another Houdini newb

This is how I feel trying to learn Houdini. It took far longer than it should have to render this. Hey, at least NOW I know where the shadow sample settngs are! :-/

The character is a prebuilt rig and this was rendered using one area light, and one environment light / IBL with Houdini 10 Apprentice.

Fruit Plate

I'm not dead. I am just rendering fruit.

This is an example of one of Jeremy Birn's challenges. Jeremy was one of my old teachers at AAU.
Here is the site where one can download and participate in these challenges.

Today, Westwood had a game art competition between the two campuses where I teach. It was invigorating to see students under the wire produce work against their peers. I would love to have more campus competitions like this one, but talk about an exhausting event to get through!! The coordinators of the event seemed just as drained as the students afterwards.

Also wanted to plug a sketch-blog that some old friends of mine started. It is a great way to force myself to paint more and stay in contact with old friends.

3d progress on Android Masquerade

These were created in Maya and these latest renders were examples of "in-line compositing" . . . meaning I rendered and composited the images within Maya's renderlayers options. The metal pic is me playing around with the chrome spec material over-ride. The glowing eyes were me playing around with having an additional render layer which was screened on top of the already multiplied occlusion. These took between 2-3 minutes to render on my Dual P4 Xeon.