Steam Train in 3D, composite

A steam train engine, modeled and rendered in Maya. Original render composited in Photoshop.

Compare this image to the real thing from the Teton Valley, in Idaho.

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.

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 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.

Modeling and Texturing Pixar's Wall-E in Maya

A freelance animation project I am working on calls for a cameo from Pixar's Wall-E robot from the 2008 Pixar film. Here is the basic model, textured and rendered. Please read more about this project, including modeling, texturing, and rendering Wall-E in Maya.