Wallester T. Dog

Wally deciding what piece of great literature to tackle next: the abridged Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, or perhaps The Winter of Our Discontent.

Study in Black and White, Somewhere in Idaho

A well photographed building in northeast Idaho. At one time probably a school house, now just a temptation for folks intent on disregarding the posted No Trespassing sign. Also, it is probably haunted.

Audi R8 Commercial

Below is the completed spec commercial for the Audi R8, more an opportunity to practice animation and rendering in Maya than anything else. The car is modeled in Maya 2008, using primarily NURBS surfaces, with the occasional polygon thrown in for good measure. Most of the textures are procedural textures that do not require a detailed texture map. The car itself was typically rendered in three passes in Maya:

1. Color / Beauty pass - mental ray with Final Gathering, etc. turned on.
2. Occlusion pass - mental ray default rendering layer.
3. Depth pass - different techniques depending on the shot.

Further animation was done in the Maya software renderer. All elements were then imported into After Effects, where some fine tuning took place, lens flares, etc. Final layback and export with audio was via Final Cut Pro.

Below is the 'HD' embedding, and below that, the normal embedding for slower connections.

Deviating From The Script

It was a silent night, at least initially - calm - but bright.  Much brighter, in fact, than the average night.  The local radio had mentioned that the full moon would appear larger and brighter - something about the rotation of the earth.  The radio also mentioned the influx of visitors from afar, drawn by the glowing sky, however the radio failed to mention the exact rhyme and reason for at least one of the visitors.  Peace, or conquest, it motives were up in the air, crackling with static electricity.

Little Girl With Bunny

From a collection of old photographs in and around the Teton Valley in Idaho, taken sometime in the early 20th century, probably between 1905-1915. This photo in particular is a portrait of a little girl in a pioneer dress, holding a bunny.  The chair looks a little more modern than the above time bracket, but not by much. 

Fractured Head

One from the archives. To see more photos from Florence, Italy, visit this photo gallery.

Explorers on Horses near Geyser

Three men and their horses, checking out a geyser in Yellowstone, circa 1915.  No idea which geyser it is.

More Tilt-Shift Photography

Here are some more tilt-shift style photos. It is interesting to play around with this technique, as I am currently developing a working method of introducing depth of field into the Audi R8 render, which uses the same post-processing tools.

The University of Utah, looking at the Psychology building and towards the football stadium.

Suburban Salt Lake City. How more ticky tacky / cookie cutter / etc. can you get?

On the left, a more-recently abandoned mine in Utah, in the mountains above Park City. On the right, below, a farmhouse near Park City, Utah.


Detail of the farmhouse.

Walking in the fall.

Below, a small herd of cows gathered at a watering hole.

A suspension bridge near Lava Hot Springs, over the Pourtneuf River, as a trail sails by.

Tilt-Shift Park City Downtown Panorama

A detail from a massive tilt-shift panorama of downtown Park City. The photo was taken in 2007 as part of a collection of aerial photography over Salt Lake City, the Wasatch mountains, and Park City. It works well for tilt-shift photography (created in Photoshop, as I have no tilt-shift lens). In tilt-shift photography, depth of field is kept in a very shallow slice through the scene. Additionally, the lens (and plane of focus) can be tilted away from parallel with the film plane. This effectively creates the illusion of miniature photography, as your brain has no real-life correlation with such distortion of depth of field over a large expanse (such as a city) but accepts it fully at the smaller scale. Real (non-photoshop) tilt-shift images also have additional shifts in perspective from tilting the lens away from the film plane, and is often used to shoot tall parallel things, like buildings, from the ground and still maintain the sense of the parallel. Below is the full image, zoom in and explore. Or download the image as jpeg here (2.85 MB).

Audi R8 Test Animation

More to come.  For now, the Audi R8 model is rigged and ready for animation.  Here is a test render with some simple animation.  The headlights still need some work for this particular shot.

Oyster Mushrooms on Tree

A beautiful set of oyster mushrooms growing out of an old stump, somewhere in a forgotten section of Salt Lake City.  Oyster mushrooms are edible, and considered tasty, although I will not personally be eating these.  I liked these images quite well; below I have included a slideshow of more photos of the oyster mushrooms.  Also, there are some slime-capped brown mushrooms that were sharing the space, although I have not identified them yet.  Any help would be appreciated.

Audi R8 Exterior Render

A final render comp of the Audi R8, modeled and textured in Maya using primarily NURBS for the model, and mostly procedural textures.  The exterior of the car is modeled to the detail necessary for a thirty second spec ad I am working on.  The above image gives a sense of the style.  Still to come:  rigging and car lights, and maybe a simple interior if necessary.

Below are two straightforward images of the front and rear of the R8.

And one more of the Audi R8 model, rendered in Maya using Mental Ray.

Day of the Dead Altar and Montage

University Guesthouse website (WIP)

Recently completed, the new website for the University Guesthouse and Conference Center at the University of Utah. As with most these sites, I was responsible for all design and layout, media manipulation as necessary, and some of the underlying code (ColdFusion, javascript, etc.)

Liberty Park, the last day of fall colors

The pond at Liberty Park, looking northeast.  The last day of pure fall colors, after which trees started to loose their saturation.  As a bonus images:

Halloween 2008

It's pumpkin time! My pumpkin does not wear a mask, although he should. Not that he is terribly disfigured, or burned by acid or something like that. It's just they're terribly comfortable. My pumpkin thinks everyone will be wearing them in the future.

Audi R8 Front View Render

The 2007 Audi R8, a work in progress presented as a NURBS model in Maya.  The main body is modeled and textured.  Still to come:  side view mirrors, wheels and tires, real spoiler, non-functional interior.  I intend to rig the car for animation and create a :30 second spot highlighting the car.  Details to come.

Soda Springs, Idaho

Soda Springs, Idaho has made a name for itself by turning a small natural hot spring in the area into a full fledged, albeit man made, geyser. Some inspired entrepreneurs tried to market soda water (under the brand name Idan-ha) by drilling for carbon dioxide from a spring near town, kegging the gas, and carbonating local water in the bottle. This turned out to be a bad idea, as the gas was impregnated with a sulfur smell, which made any water all but unbearable.

Said entrepreneurs then decided to make the best of a bad situation, and to turn their fledgling seltzer company into a hot springs bath house. Expanding their drill hole, they hit hot water which shot out of the bore a la There Will Be Blood. Once they contained their gusher, the town now had a fully functional geyser that they could throw on at the turn of a valve. The joke in Yellowstone is that tourists ask where the pump house is for Old Faithful. Here, it is located several feet from the pipe that emits the geyser water every hour, on the hour.

High Fashion

Fall Panorama Roundup

Fall is panorama time - ok, well, everyday is panorama day - so here are a couple recent big images. The top two are from a recent venture into the McCain/Palin stronghold of southeastern Idaho (on the opening day of deer hunting season, no less). Pictured is Bear Lake, complete with its abnormally blue-green waters, and a (190 megapixel) early morning outside the forest service cabin in Idaho where we stayed.




And just for old time sakes, a panorama at sunset overlooking Flaming Gorge in Utah, taken almost exactly one year ago at th

Heber Valley Website (WIP)

Here is a screenshot from the near completed website for Heber Valley, Utah. I handled the design elements, all the html / css work, and some of the underlying ColdFusion code. The full site, for what's it worth, can be seen at www.gohebervalley.com.

Moon and Other Spheres

Something like a Christo installation.

First Day Of Snow

To celebrate the first snow in town (Salt Lake City, 2008) here is an old photo from the Teton Valley area depicting two men in a horse drawn sleigh.  The sleigh is a low slung type typically used for hauling freight or timber, as opposed to a passenger sleigh for jaunting across the Russian countryside.

Ann in the Kitchen (Early Morning)

The Night The Plants Attacked!

So I was just minding my own business, and the papas grass in the front yard attacked me. Luckily, it turns out not to be a green hand grenade, but this katydid. In many ways-even considering my sedentary lifestyle-the katydid does a better job of imitating a plant than I could.

Cowboys on the Plains

A dozen cowboys out on the plains. See below for a detail.

The State of Utah Wine Affairs Bureau, 2008

We are happy to present the state of the Lamberti Bocca Noir grape harvest for the 2008 growing season. One of the most successful harvests in recent times, we pulled in a hair under 150 pounds of grapes, de-stemmed and crushed for 16.6 gallons of must for the initial fermentations.

This is up from 70 pounds in 2006 (a late season hail storm damaged about a quarter of that crop) and 48 pounds in 2007 (birds, heat, and ???). This year the protective nets got on early, and the vines were well maintained. For the record, Growing Degree Days (10 C base, March 1) was 3165 at time of harvest (Sept 28, 2008). Heating Degree Days (SLC station since July 1) cumulative was 27 at time of harvest compared with 7 last year. For what it's worth. More stats to come.

Likewise, a good turnout of wine grape pickers, destemmers, and stompers. More photos of the 2008 Wine Stomp can be seen below:

The Passion of the McCain

To celebrate my short film "The Passion of the McCain" breaking 60,000 combined views across YouTube and Machinima.com, this post will mirror some of the design decisions and content for the film. The recent increase in views is largely due to the inclusion of the film in the 2008 Cambridge Film Festival, where "Passion" was invited to be screened as part of a special program on machinima styles and techniques. Reviews so far have been mostly positive.

It is interesting to read the comments on YouTube, et al where available. Those who approach the film from a typical machinima's viewer's perspective (i.e. a typical gamer) tend to not like it, because it hides the underlying video game characters and style. they tend to prefer films made wholly within a particular game's reality, which is nonsense, as most games tend to have a fairly boring and conformist world-view. Shoot this, dodge that, escape[ist] here. I, on the other hand, believe that because it hides the underlying game, it is inherently better than stock characters in stock situations. Halo's Master Chief doesn't event have a visible face, so how can he act?

Regardless, the film was fun to put together. Take a look for yourself here, here, here, or below:

Men Sawing Lumber

Abstract Photo #5

One in a series that I put together a long time ago, when I did more film and darklab work.  Anymore, such an image would be produced entirely in Photoshop.  Even design work that ought be created at least from "real" elements are more quickly and efficiently made from scratch.  Is this a good thing?  Probably.  I'm no purist.  Here the trick is figuring out how I accomplished the image entirely analogue.     

Late Summer Dragonfly

The Odonata order comprises dragonflies and damselflies.  Dragonflies are well-regarded in Japanese culture - on par with Japan's and other cultures attitude towards butterflies.  In western cultures and in early United States, the dragonfly was understood to either sew your eyelids shut during sleep, or simply pluck your eyes out entirely.  There are no documented reports of anyone ever waking up to his or her eyelids sewn shut, but one must be ever vigilant.  These creatures of the "night" are only waiting for their chance, and then it's off with our eyeballs. 

Full Harvest Moon

Also called the Wine Moon, the Harvest Moon heralds the coming harvest and the autumnal equinox in one weeks time.  The hops are growing heavy, the grapes will be crushed in two weeks, and grappa and apples in the time afterwards.

Comb Ridge Panorama - Southern Utah

From National Geographic: 

Geologically speaking, the Comb is a monocline—a single fold in the Earth's crust created by a cataclysmic slippage of deeply buried tectonic plates some 65 million years ago. That upheaval has left a scar slashing across the desert landscape of the Southwest: a sharp ridge of sandstone that stretches almost 120 miles (193 kilometers) unbroken from just east of Kayenta, Arizona, to some ten miles (sixteen kilometers) west of Blanding, Utah.

The scale of the Comb is not colossal: Its ridgeline looms only from 300 to 900 feet (91 to 274 meters) above the plains, and shallow washes surround it on either side. But what the crest lacks in height, it makes up in ruggedness. No smooth arête, the ridge swoops to sharp summits and dips to V-notch cols with relentless regularity. To hike the Comb is to run a gauntlet of up-and-down severities, always at an ankle-wrenching, sideways pitch. There is not a single mile of established trail in the Comb's reach, which is one reason why no humans, to our knowledge, have ever traversed its length. We thought we should be the first.

Read more about Comb Ridge, or see a photo gallery of the surround southern utah area, including Arch Canyon, Mule Canyon, and Valley of the Gods.