pics of the place!

my new sofa couch! Thanks Ikea.

Check out the bathroom. What more do you need?

This is my house. I live behind the big window on the first floor. My car's parked in the back.

This is wilton street looking toward the Hollywood Hills. The Hollywood sign is just to the left.

My bed is behind the divider. There's the big window you can see from the front of the house. Notice the other windows behind my computer - it's a curved wall (like a turret).

This is my tiny kitchen. There's no counter space! Notice the doors on top where I store my stuff.

My fridge is very centrally located.

This is one of the beaches in Santa Monica at night.

I'm not updating much, but I figured I at least owed you some pics of my place. It's a small place, and it really does cost a fortune for what it is - but that's California for you. I really like the studio setup, and it's less than a mile away from work, so I walk there most days. It's probably too small for two people since there's no bedrooms, but perfect for just me. Plus it's all yellow and the utilities are included! I'll try to put some pics of my work too. Thanks for checking in.

It's been a while...

Wow, it's been a while and so much has happened. Unforuntately I dont have internet access yet so I'm doing this on company time (oops) and I can't write much right now. Here's a few highlights:

-Played some Guitar Hero

-Graduated with my MFA in Savannah!

-Travelled across the country - Georgia to California!

-Tire flew off my car in Louisiana

-Saw Mark in Texas!

-Working at Extra Large Technology (XLT) - it's great!

-Saw Bryan at Jim Henson - and got the tour

-Found a place to live in Hollywood CA

-Ate some good Sushi

Here's a few pictures until I can write some more:

It's that time again...

I think I'm going to have to rename this blog. Now that school's over, there's not a whole lot to write about. For now, I'm back home again in Indiana so I can attend my old roommate's wedding on the 19th. I left my car and stuff in Atlanta because I got plane tickets for $39 each way - it was such a deal because I can't even drive home for that little. At the end of the month I'll return to Savannah to turn everything in and get my signatures. However many people have asked me what I'm going to do next...

The big news is that I have secured my first official job! About two weeks ago, one of my professors told me about an opportunity at XLT (extra large technology). Apparently, they tried to hire her first, but when she decided to stick around SCAD, she pointed them in my direction. One of her former students (David Bokser - creator of "The Old Man and the Fish") has been there for a number of years and offered me a position as a Character TD and Animator. XLT is a small company that is most notable for its direct to DVD animated films, but what really sold me is that it seems to be a really good fit for what I do. I wasn't getting any love from the bigger studios (Pixar finally got back to me with the bad news - surprise, surprise) and I hadnt heard anything from the promising companies we met with at the job fair (LucasFilms, Framestore, Charlex, etc.) so I started looking at video games. I have nothing against video game work, but my best skills and interests are in animated film, so I wasnt all that excited about doing global tool development or pipeline work for interactive stuff. The cool thing about XLT is that they still make films, and since they're small I can wear a lot of hats and do the things I like to do. I'm not so worried that I'll show up at their door and not have a clue either, which is a really good feeling.

The catch is that this job is contract work, so I'm only hired until January - and I'm paid by the week instead of a salary with benefits. Don't get me wrong, the pay is very good for a first job, even in California where everything is more expensive (9.3% in state income taxes!? are they insane?). That's right, I'm moving to Hollywood. The day after Graduation I'm driving my little Volkswagen convertible across the entire United States (Savannah and Hollywood are two extremes). It'll be quite the adventure. I still dont have a place to live, but I'll cross that bridge when I come to it. I start work on June 8th and if I make it past January, they're likely to hire me on for longer. However, I'd also have the chance to go somewhere else, since there's so much work out in LA. I just hope it doesnt fall into the ocean when I'm there.

So that's the news. I'm working for my dad while I'm home and finishing up writing my thesis paper. I'll see some of you back in Savannah for Graduation on the 2nd!

I've also been prepping a new Andy release:

Scrap Metal and Such

Now that the wedding is over, it's possible that you've been wondering what I've been up to. Well, Sean and I have gone into the scrap metal business. We're pulling old cars out of the woods and selling them to the local recycling center. How redneck is that? The upshot is that we get $0.07 a pound for scrap and we've made two runs at around 5000 pounds a piece. The first trip we made $333 and the second trip we made $369. It's fun work and a good way to pass the time between writing my paper and playing guitar hero. Yes, we spent the first $280 on a PS2, Guitar Hero II (with guitar) and a second wireless guitar. The rest of my cut will go toward the clutch in my car.


I also spent some time writing a speech in preparation for an interview to decide who would be awarded excelsus laureate at graduation in June. I made it past the first round interview, but it seems I lost in the second round. The good news is that now I dont have to speak in front of the entire school and since I had to go to SCAD Atlanta for the interview, I got a chance to see that campus. It's a really nice place, and I really liked it there. It even has lockers and windows (take that Montgomery Hall!). If you're reading this and you had any involvement with getting me nominated for this award, I want to thank you for the honor, I'm very grateful.

I'm working on another update to the Andy rig. This one will add some nice texture enhancements. I just added a nice skin shader, and now Andy renders out really purdy. Maybe I'll even have time for a new hair style.

Stay tuned.

Now that school's over...

Well, school ended without much fuss and I've now made my way to Atlanta. I'm spending my time helping my cousins prepare for the wedding (Whitney is getting married), trying to write my thesis paper and desperately trying to find a way to afford Guitar Hero II. The current scheme is to trade the engagement ring Sean bought a few years ago (the engagement didnt work out) for an Xbox 360, for which Guitar Hero was just released. I'm not sure how that one will work out. When the wedding is over I hope to be able to drive my paper back to Savannah for the required signatures - but before then I have to replace the clutch in my car (think big $$ that I dont have). There's no news on the job front, though I did get to meet some great people at the job fair last week. I sure hope I can find something soon because I havent had an income in over a year and you can only live on credit cards and student loans for so long. :-)

Some small insight

Just a little insight from good ol' Hammish McKenzie regarding scripting:

"...of course, more often than not, advanced tools generally enable people to work faster and find other problems based on the new tools. which of course means my work is never done. and thank goodness, or I’d be out of a job…"

As with the real world, If you're careful to always keep learning, automation won't put you out of a job. Instead, it will let you move on to bigger and better problems, which is very good because I hate doing the same thing all the time. "Forever a student," as they say.

Some great news...

First of all...the andy rig is posted (check my website)! There's bound to be some bugs in this release, but I won't know unless you download it and try it out for me! I think I managed to accomplish everything that I wanted to put into version 1.0. Sometime I'd like to put in the palm lifter (thank you Jason Schliefer) but I dont want to add anything that you can't get out of the JTDriggingTools, since the andy rig is supposed to be a demonstration of what's possible using that tool. However, when I figure out how to integrate it with everything that's there already, Andy will be updated accordingly. Also, I want to encourage everyone to modify the textures, create new hairstyles or even add some blendshapes. If you want them to be included in the next release (and I like them, of course) I'd be more than happy to give you the credit.

Also, I have a phone interview with Pixar on Monday! This is a huge deal for me, so I hope that I dont screw it up. I know that the reason for the interview is to see if I would be a good fit for them and if they would be a good fit for me, so I'll try not to get my hopes up just yet. It's for a chance at the Technical Director Internship in the Fall, which would be perfect timing as well.

That just goes to show you that especially in the hard times, you never know where encouragement will come from.

Currently listening to: Modest Mouse - We Were Dead Before the Ship Even Sank, The Arcade Fire - Neon Bible, The Submarines - Decare a New State

it is finished!

That's right, you heard it here first, Inside The Box is finished - and just in time for the siggraph deadline. It took some serious work, but it all paid off. Great work to all those involved, it's been a privilege to work together. Here's hoping the festivals like it as much as I do!

Generic Character rig and ITB screenshot

I know that I've been talking about this mystery rig that I'm building, but I decided to finally post a picture. Everything is still in flux, and probably will be for a while but I like where it's headed. Also, here's the latest composite for the opening shot of Inside The Box. It's beautiful!

almost a month has gone by...

I know, I know, it's been a while - almost a month, in fact. Needless to say, I'm pretty exhausted and the ole' blog isn't a very high priority. School and the job hunt has been keeping me busy - I'm just real tired. The good news is that Inside The Box is almost finished! We're compositing now, and it's looking sweet! I'm very proud of the four of us who have remained faithful to this project. We hope to finish it in time for the SIGGRAPH deadline.

In other news, the generic character (now called: Andy) is modeled and rigged and in the texturing phase. The very talented Ying-Chi (Rae) Chen has agreed to help texture it, so I'm very excited about that. She's the best we have here at SCAD, so her help all but guarantees that this project will be a success.

I've also just finished my finger rig module! I'm happy with how it turned out. Look for that to be added to the rig section of my website after a bit more testing.

To make amends for the lack of posting, here's a WIP documentary on my short film: "Inside The Box." All the credit goes to my right hand man, Nitesh Patel. I'm the worst part about this video, so if you can ignore me, this is a lot of fun to watch. Now it's your chance to meet the many talented people who slaved away on the project:

http://studentpages.scad.edu/~jdoubl20/files/ITB_Docdocumentary(compressed)_512k.wmv
(download is aprox. 50MB)

Just an update

I know it has been a while, but that's how it goes during my last quarter. If I dont manage to post here, be sure to check out my Visual Effects web page over at http://www.sfdm.scad.edu/faculty/mkesson/vsfx705/wip/winter07/john_doublestein/john_doublestein.html
it'll be updated with my work for that class.

I havent been doing too much outside of school (what else is new?) but I'm pretty spead out on a lot of things. In addition to my course work, I'm trying to write my Thesis paper and perfect my rigging scripts. I've been working with many different students to test out my stuff and help them with their characters. Also, I've been learning more about MotionBuilder and setting up a pipeline to go from maya to MB and back to maya. The good news is that since my rig simply attaches itself to a normal hierarchy, it's easy to detach it and send the joints out to MB (sans the rig). I've also managed to strip the rig out of the maya file except for the fingers so that it's easy to merge the MB animation onto the skeleton back in maya and then animate the fingers with familiar controls. Animating in motionBuilder is quite nice, but it doesnt really have great finger support and you'd still want to do facial animtion in maya.

We're also finally in the compositing stage with Inside the Box. Yesterday I helped discover what has been wrong with our shadow passes, I'm really quite surprised that we didnt catch it sooner. Basically Maya only puts cast shadows into the shadow pass. That means that the surface shadows are only in the beauty pass. Unfortunately, we never rendered a beauty pass (only a diffuse pass) because we wanted control over the shadows, so we really only ended up with cast shadows coming through to the final render. The solution is to apply a white shader to the entire scene and turn off shadow casting in the lights. This gives us a frame that only has surface shadows that we can multiply over the diffuse pass (just like you would with an ambient occlusion shader) and combine with the shadow pass we already have. Now we have a complete shadow pass, and since we dont need to re-render the cast shadows we can turn off ray tracing and render it out through maya software. Instead of 12 minute render times for an entire shadow pass, it now takes less than a minute to repair what we already have!

On the job front, I think I've finally decided on some places to apply. I'll follow up on the PIXAR thing and see if that can happen this time, but if it doesnt, it seems that Blue Sky has a posting for my dream job on their website. I would be a happy man if I could work on the animated adaptation of Dr. Suess's Horton Hears a Who. I'll keep you posted.

Oh, and I got a new hermit crab to keep the other one company.

Hermit crabs etc...

Hey all, many of you know that I have two new pets. Unfortunately I lost one of them. I'm sad for my little hermit crab, he wasnt with me long. The other one seems okay though, here's a picture of us at the beach!


In other news, I'm working on a generic character rig. The school's been using other rigs off the internet, but it's high time we had our own customized for our purposes. Also, since there's plenty of cartoony rigs out there, we wanted something a little more normal. That means that it's not all that interesting, but it'll work for all kinds of situations (and genders), especially when a guy with a huge jaw or wearing tighty-whitey's is not all that appropriate to the scene. Here's the concept - thanks to Craig Scheuermann.

A quick render

We're busy rendering away, here's a quick composite that I put together. Chris Henderson will be making up the final shake template and we'll mess with Depth of Field later, but I just had to see what things were looking like all put together. Enjoy the HD720 render. Pretty Sweet!

The end is near

Hey all, my last quarter has begun and it looks to be as busy as ever. I'm taking two electives and Thesis, in addition to trying to finish Inside the Box, and find a job. So far I'm very excited about my intro to programming for visual effects class. I know nothing about Renderman or TCL, so hopefully I'll pick up enough to be a good foundation if I ever want to learn more in the future. However, I've heard that Pixar is going to be replacing Renderman and TCL soon, so I may be a bit late to the party. I'm way ahead on the MEL portion of that class, but my Professor is helping me find new ways to be challenged. My naturalistic 3D character animation class should be alright as well. We're doing some motion capture, so I hope to get a handle on our Vicon system and the IQ software. I also hope to pick up the ole' animation skills and dust them off a bit. Thesis is ongoing, but I've made some significant progress in the past day or two. With any luck, I'll have an updated website soon that'll have JTDriggingTools available for download.

In other news, I have some new pets! Ashley gave me two hermit crabs for Christmas! They live in a little habitat next to my computer. I also have a Chia Garfield to take care of, so I have my hands full. Until next time...

Merry Christmas!

http://blogs.indystar.com/varvelblog/archives/2006/12/so_this_is_chri.html
I wanted to post the cartoon here, but I dont have premission, so be sure to check it out yourself.

Bummer

Well it fell through. I was trying not to get my hopes up when I got an email from the PIXAR recruiter I had met at SCAD saying that there might be an opportunity for me to intern there in January. Unfortunately, despite my best efforts I still got my hopes up. I didnt even have a chance to send them my updated portfolio when I found out today that they went with someone else. Oh well, at least I wont have to drop out of school now. I'll pick myself up and try again in March.

Adv Figure Drawing FINAL

Well school's been over for a while now, so I thought it's about time I wrapped things up. It all ended very fast. Thanks to Frappachino and Milky Way bars, I stayed up for over 48 hours to get things done, and then drove back to Indy with only two hours sleep. Fortunately, I travelled with someone who had a bit more rest, so I could doze here and there. Since I'm at home on break without internet attached to my computer, it's been harder to post. Here are a few pics from the work I turned in:







Fortunately, I landed an A in this class. I'm very proud of my grade, as it was a lot of work. Forgive me for this moment of pride, but the other work in the class wasnt even close - almost painful at times. I was the only grad student though, so maybe that's why.

In other news, I'm having to scramble a bit to update my flatbook, demo reel and website. PIXAR emailed me yesterday with some very interesting news...I'll let you know if there's anything else to report.

Anyone in Indy have a computer with maya 7.0 that I can use for a few days?

Adv Figure Drawing #7

I dont have much time to write, since there's less than a week left of school, but perhaps you'd enjoy seeing some progress on the sculpture. The plastic skeleton has to be done for tomorrow, then we tear off all the clay and return it, so that's my priority for today. On the final ecroche I've finished the neck, back, chest, arms and lower legs. That leaves the upper legs, butt and all the muscle striations. I lugged it into class on Tuesday (it's probably over 50 pounds) and got some great feedback from my professor. It really does blow everyone else's away, but I knew he liked it when he asked if I was also going to turn in a CD with photos of it in progress. See, he will often patronize students by complementing their work, even though it's often pretty bad (especially compared to his work) so it's hard to know if he really likes what you've done. However, he didnt ask anyone else for photos, so I knew he was impressed. I'll let you know how the final critique goes on Tuesday. I still have all the drawings to do :-(

ITB render

Here's a new render I just got back. It should be obvious that Chris did an amazing job on the lighting, as this is with just the color and occlusion, no shadow, spec or reflection pass added in yet. Good job Chris! I can't wait!

ITB reality check

Well ITB isn't going to get done this quarter :-( We just didnt have enough people committed to the revision. Hopefully next quarter will be different, but I suspect It'll be a worse struggle with everyone trying to finish their thesis work. The good news is that we have started rendering, and let me tell you, ITB in HD looks amazing. The HD resolution increased our render time, but since we rebuilt and optimized a lot of things at the beginning of the quarter, it's about the same render time as what we had for standard def in the original renders. Also with Bryan Bently's help we've got the motion blur problem solved.

My original solution was to render the motion vectors out with a mental ray shader and use a retail plugin that could read the motion vector images and do motion blur in Adobe After Effects or Shake. We even got the shader installed on the render farm. However, the plugin costs $200, so all we could do was work with the demo version.

The neat thing that Bryan showed me is that maya has a hidden built in motion blur post-processor, that can read IFF motion vectors and motion blur our final composites. From what I can tell from my tests, the results looks just as good as what we could have gotten with the expensive plug-in.

What you do is render a low quality (but at the same resolution) maya software pass with default textures, no lighting, no raytracing, and no anit-aliasing into an IFF file. This should render very very quickly. If the motion blur was turned on and the option to save motion vectors was checked, then the motion vectors are stored in the IFF file. Then you take your high quality images that have been rendered in mental ray and fully composited (without motion blur) , and run blur2d from the command prompt using the low quality IFF images with saved motion vectors as a guide. It will read the low quality IFFs and motion blur the high quality images! The advantage is that you can get a very fast motion blur on images rendered with Mental Ray, because as we all know, Mental Ray motion blur, while very accurate, slows down our render time so much that the farm gives up. So there we have it, now we just have to get everything rendered with that extra pass. Good times.