Well its been an interesting few months. I finished my Master of Science postgraduate degree in Computer Animation at Bournemouth University with a distinction. I moved to London and I have a job at Framestore CFC as an Assistant Technical Director (I better not say the show but its big!). I just want to say thanks to all the staff at the NCCA and a bigger thanks to all the other MSc. students who really made the course worth doing.

Finally good luck to all the graduates from Bournemouth, it was a really good year.

Evening guys, just thought I’d pass on tonight’s render. The spec is a bit too high(its a very clean rat) but just showing it off. I think I just saw aliasing(dear god no) but I hope my eyes are just too tired. It uses the Kajiya-Kay model at the moment but I will eventually use more advanced models. Next need to do shadows. Ambient occlusion for the skin (mostly for the ground feet contact) is pretty much done just have to apply the brickmaps and figure out the how to comp it in. The shadows are up after that so stay tuned.

The file is here. Any problems viewing it then give me a shout.

Its weird, just when you think you have yourself figured and things are getting a bit boring, you find yourself doing something you didn’t think you could and you just have re-assess everything. For the better in this case……..

Anyway enough obscure emo crap on to to some proper techies things. So its as official as it’ll ever be, for my masters project (same as a masters thesis) I’ll be looking into lighting computer generated hair using Renderman (probably PRMan, Pixie and 3Delight aren’t working too well with Houdini). Last term I did some fur modelling and fur interpolation at render-time kinda stuff. Below you can see a colour pass of the fur I did last term. The guard hairs are bit long especially under the body because I was showing them off and I used the same length map as I did for the rest of the fur. Youtube embed:

and the mov file is here. So that was created using Houdini, Renderman (PRMan) and a bespoke C++ program called by Renderman using riprocedural that actually creates the fur at rendertime. I cached the geometry for the turntable making a it lot quicker but even without that whole thing didn’t take too long. So that’s the starting point I have to get the rest of the passes done now. Gonna start looking into changing normals for the curves that make them easy to light next.

So I’ve been surfing the internet for many years and even though this is my first proper web page that I actually paid for, I am on quite a few other sites.
Of course there’s my old blog at livejournal which will be replaced by this one. I used to have a blogspot blog but I preferred the livejournal one for reasons I can’t remember.
I use del.icio.us to save a lot of random links and I use bloglines every day to read RSS feeds along with iGoogle.
I’m on far too many social networks for a healthy person. Of course there’s the ubiquitous myspace page. There’s Bebo which seems to be popular in Ireland and the best of the lot is facebook which I actually use as a social network. I am on some other social networks but I couldn’t be bothered looking for the links.
There’s also

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