New location

Crystal Dynamics has merged with Eidos in a new location in Redwood City. We are on the same campus as PDI now which is sort of cool. So the move to the new building was pretty smooth. No huge problems. I.T. did a great job getting everything set up. The place is really nice. I miss Menlo Park though. The new place is way to neat and perfect. Its neatness sort of gives me the urge t0 mess things up. Ya know...ruffle up some grass here and there.The nice courtyards outside of our building. Cute little fountains and perfectly trimmed grass. They certainly discourage loungers who might ruin the art of their architecture by not putting benches anywhere and planting razor sharp grass so you won't want to sit on it.

Our new building.

All cubed out.

Part of my new cube. I need some more books to fill up my shelf.

Another angle. I was going for a blurry sort of look with this picture.

The full view of the cube.

Illustration Friday: I Spy...

.....with my little eye: Something yellow and Australian.

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Ususpecting B.A.R.T. Passenger

Unsuspecting Pedestrian

Saw this guy walkig through Berkeley while attending my first sketch-crawl. I'm not very good at painting. The pencil has always been my thing. But I want very much to get good with color. I only recently discovered the ability to use textured brushes in Photoshop ( I know, I'm behind the times ). Hope you enjoy.

An Old Sketch

Did this one a while ago. Forgot to blog it.

Wired

I was late getting it done so I missed out on posting this on Illustration Friday.

It's official!

I'm a Californian!!

Comando Monsters

Some more experiments of characters. The design is being pulled from the muppets as well as my good friends. Some are derived from their looks others are derived from their personalities and others are derived from that persons own drawing style.

Rat

Sort of a strange thing for me to draw.

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Creatures

Some designs I would like to someday turn into animations. Going for muppet style. I'm interested in what makes muppets so alive with such limited movement.

The Apartment

So this is the livingroom. Most of the stuff in here was bought very cheap off of craigslist.org. What wasn't bought there was probably purchased at the IKEA down the street.

The other angle of the room.

The office area. Complete with Brittney's gianormous desk, custom built light table (courtesy of my brother Matt).

Homemade painting by established artist Brittney Lee.

Not sure why these pictures turned up sideways. This is the bathroom attatched to the livingroom. Very surfer themed. I'm going to take a short drive south to warmer waters to learn.

I did that painting on the shelf in highschool. Its not for sale.

My favorite room....the kitchen. I painted that sign on the wall. It's a saying my manager at
Eat n Park used to tell me all time...."Never trust a skinny cook".

A different look at the kitchen. The one plant we got that we haven't killed. Oh look! Brittney is making a cameo!

Crystal D

So here's a mini tour of work. I'm going into my 3rd month at Crystal Dynamics as a Technical Artist. It's going great. I do a bit of coding and a little bit of art. I am working on the next Tomb Raider game -- scheduled to be released in 2008. We just finished up a Demo for the "suits". We start production in a couple weeks. From what we've done this game is going to be pretty awesome. It's amazing what next gen. games are capable of.Here's the front door. Pretty awesome isn't it?

This is Gex. He's a character in one of their claim to fame games.

This is the front lobby decked out with Lara Croft. Crystal Dynamics took over this franchise a few years ago. Their first Tomb Raider game was number seven: Legend. They are about to release an anniversary addition, which is a better looking version of the original game.

This is my new office. I was next door with the animators but I am so awesome they kicked out the boss and put me in his office......or maybe its because they needed my old spot for a new animator.

Here's the next corner. I get a big white board to scribble down ideas on. As you can see I'm not doing a very good job at filling up the bookshelf.

They sure did hook me up. Two 19" monitors and a big ol' widescreen TV monitor (that's for testing out the game on the xbox 360).

Steven v.1.0

This is my new StevenRig, a multi rig I've been working on. Thanks Joe for the pose. Its taking a bit of time to set up since I don't have much free time after work. Oh I forgot to mention. I have a job. I am working at Crystal Dynamics in Menlo Park, Ca as a technical artist for their next game.

Anyways, I'm trying to get it to an acceptable stage by the new year so I can start to do some Character Animation. This rig will be set up with multiple heads/hair/acessories/body types so that you can mix and match and even creat new assets.

Test Face

I've been working on a new type of rig for a face that is faster to set up and gives more control. This is a test lipsync

PLAY IT

Also as added fun and to demonstrate what is driving this face I made two videos the FIRST is the controlers of the face which drive free floating clusters which in turn drive the curves of the face you see there. The SECOND is just of the free floating clusters.

Taking on the United States

It's been a while since my last post but as you can see I've been very busy. At the end of Sept. Brittney and I started our journey across the United States to start the next chapter of our life in SanFrancisco, CA!! Here is a the story (pictures included) of our trip.

COLUMBUS, OH

On our way!!! We stopped briefly in Columbus, OH for some ice cream that we couldn't finish - but what a delicious start to a trip.

NINEVAH, IN

Our first overnight stop was to see friends of Brittney and her family in Ninevah, IN. It was a very beautiful lakeside cottage although the cot I slept on was a little small.

ST. LOUIS, MO

Isn't that a beautiful arch??

MOUNT VERNON, MO

Unfortunately our second night, Brittney decided to get really sick. It was a sleepless night for both of us due to coughing, barking dogs, and uncomfortable crappy motel beds.


We then went on to travel through Oklahoma - perhaps the most boring state in the world. Nothing to report there.

???, TX

I nearly ran out gas in Texas. We were in the middle of nowhere without a gas station to be found. We finally just went down a long, endless dirt road until we found a little gas station with one of those pumps that you pull down the lever to reset the dials. It was great. I wish I had a picture.

RED ROCK, NM

Stopping for a bite to eat at the Red Rock museum.

Proof that she DOES eat!!
Then we went up to the Four Corner Monument - the only place in the US where 4 states share a border. It was out in the middle of the desert where no radio stations picked up on my dial.



Brittney look! I'm in four states at the same time!!!

"Ouch"

FLAGSTAFF, AZ

We stayed the night at Brittney's cousin's 2nd house for the night and then were on the road again.

PHOENIX, AZ

We made it to Brittney's cousin's primary house. Jan and Chuck put us up for the night. Two very wonderful and kind people. I was glad we got to see familiar faces along the way.

We decided it would be a good idea to try to hike a mountain that day.....in 106*F weather.

Feeling rather bored of the hike we decided to make it extreme and turn it into rock climing without harnests. Look how high up we are. "How ya doin' over there Brittney??"

Amazing! Holding on with only one hand!

SAN DIEGO, CA

We swung over to San Diego to get an idea of what Souther Cali was like. That night we would going over to Brittney's other cousin's house. Brandon and Janine. Brandon is Chuck's son.

We had some time to check out the beach.

SANTA BARBARA, CA

What a great little surfing town. Beautiful. We traveled a bit more north and stopped early for the night.

EMERYVILLE, CA

Now entering EMERYVILLE!!!!!

WE MADE IT!!! OUR NEW HOME!!!! Got there and unpacked and are still unpacking slowly. But when its all cleaned up we will be taking pictures and blogging them. We'll also be ready to house friends who are stopping by.

Thesis is Finished

Chloe Gets a Pet on Vimeo

May I present to you my thesis film: Chloe Gets a Pet. This film took me 30 weeks to create from concept to render. Josh Piejko was a big help. He modeled the characters and props, Brittney Lee designed the characters. I learned a lot about rigging and lighting on this film. I used a broken rig technique in the bird to get it to stretch and squash when needed. Let me tell you that certainly helps a lot in 3d. It doesn't limit you like a normal rig does. If I need the bird to reach across the table and grab something, I can do that without having to worry about it not going the distance. Thanks to Greg Smith for teaching me about utility nodes.

Broad and Subtle or How I Learned to Stop Being Stubborn and Listen to Audience Response

I have been taking a class for the past 5 weeks called "Acting for Animators". It is quite a useul addition to the R.I.T. animation curriculum. Today we reviewed an assignment. We were all supposed to take 24 pictures of ourselves performing different emotions. Twelve of those were to be close ups on the face and the rest were to be full body poses. Most of my classmates (self included) have grown up in an age of animations where it is more impressive to be able to pull off subtle acting in a character. Therefore most of our own emotions were an attempt at subtle. Many faces were very readable: happy, sad, angry, surprised. But there were a few emotions that repeatedly got muddled up together: disgust, jealousy, confusion. One picture got all of these responses from the rest of the class.
It is my belief that my responsibility as an animator is to be clear with my acting so that every emotion reads to the audience. If some people in the audience are reading "confused" and others are reading "disgusted" and I was intending embarrassment, then I fail. I unfortunately don't have the right to say "well im sorry you didn't get it but the character was embarrassed". That is not an option. The audience has to understand what the character is feeling if they are going to care for he/she, and so therefore sometimes sacrificing subtle to add a broad stereotypical action ain't such a bad thing now is it? I was surprised after much reflection on how some of my favorite animated films do great subtle work when appropriate, but then give you some over the top emotions to really drive it home. Now I will keep that in mind the next time I get a critique that says "This isn't working for me"

With the joint help of Josh Piejko and Joe Daniels (because I have no idea what im doing with lighting or texturing) Chloe has been made ready for render. Josh is hard at work with other characters and props from my film and I will be attempting to take a more active role with lighting, all the while continuing to polish animation. How exciting.

Illustration Friday - Tatoo

Yay, another one. My attempt at drawing something badass.