Gnomon: The Making of Guardians of the Galaxy

This past Thursday I had a chance to trek up to Hollywood and visit Gnomon for their “The Making of Guardians of the Galaxy” presentation. Some really awesome artists were on hand to talk about their work and process. I was fortunate to get a great seat and really take in all of the information that Josh Herman, Andy Park, Jackson Sze, Anthony Francisco, Rodney Fuentebella and Charlie Wen shared with the group. Wish I could have taken some pictures. There’s a great recap with some pictures on Gnomon’s site.

After getting home I added a drawing of Groot to my “One Sketch a Day” sketchbook.

I am Groot!

I am Groot!

Happy New Year! (2015)

Ok yea, so it’s almost February… I know I’m a little late with this post. Either way I wanted to get at least one post in for the month of January.

At the beginning of last year I wanted to get back into doing more personal art work, be more active on social media and get more visitors/views on this website. For the most part I was successful on all of those goals.

I didn’t get to do as much networking in person this past year. Being busy at work prevented that. Spent most of my year working on a really awesome project, that is continuing into this year. Wish I could share some of the that work… maybe someday.

One major milestone that I hit this past year back in January was hitting the 10 year mark at Boeing.It has been a pretty amazing ride thus far. I’ve held a few different positions. All of which have allowed me to be involved in 3d visualization. When I first graduated college I thought I would work in film, TV, commercials, video games maybe even architectural visualization. The aerospace industry wasn’t even on my radar. But when you are right out of college and a major company says they’d like to hire you to do 3d modeling, animation, graphics and video editing, you don’t say no. I never would have thought, that 10 years down the road I would still be doing visualization for Boeing.

I have learned more about engineering and manufacturing over the last 10 years, than I ever thought I would as an animation major at LMU. What is really neat to think about is, that all of the cool sci-fi stuff that people dream about being a part of in the entertainment industry, I get to be a part of the real deal. When I see other artist looking at reference for their project ideas, a lot of it is based upon current aerospace technology.

So here is another year ahead of me with many opportunities to learn and grow. This year I would like to continue work on more personal projects, learn ZBrush and bring more people to this site. Excluding this past month, one of my goals is to post here once a week. I was given a “One Sketch a Day” sketchbook as a gift, so I’ll be working on that too. Looking forward to what this next year has in store.

So I’ll wrap up with a quick sculpt that I did on my iPad using Autodesk 123D Scupt+
Fun program, easy to use and a lot of cool features for a mobile sculpting app.
Enjoy!!!

123DSculpt_AlienHead

MB Workshop LA2013 – Recap

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This gallery contains 34 photos.

So the other weekend I had the chance to go to the Massive Black Workshop held at Manhattan Beach Studios. It has taken me over a week to decompress and I’m sure that I will continue to pull knowledge and … Continue reading

Space Monkey Model

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This gallery contains 4 photos.

I worked on this space monkey model a few months back going through a Digital Tutors tutorial. I don’t get to do much organic modeling, let alone characters at my day job, so it was a nice change of pace. … Continue reading

MB Workshop LA

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Just signed up to go to the MB Workshop coming up, December 5-8. Looking forward to multiple days of awesome demonstrations, mind exploding inspiration and more learning and skill development in a couple of days than I might get in a year. I’ve wanted to go to one of these workshops for the last few years, but they have never been close enough to home to allow me to go.

If you have the time to go, you should do it. If you’re already going or plan to go, let me know so we can meet up.
http://massiveblack.com/workshop/

SIGGRAPH – Day 4

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Yesterday was day 4 and it started off with a great behind the scenes talk covering shots from Iron Man 3. So much absolutely incredible work done by the folks who made that movie. Like a lot if the talks, no recording of the session was allowed. However, they did have 4 awesome maquette models of the suits up at the front which we were allowed to get pictures of.
Afterwards, on my way to the exhibit hall I ran into a good friend of mine, Chris DeSt Jeor. Who, I found out was presenting at the “Dailies” for some of his work on the Croods. Spent the afternoon checking out the exhibit hall and catching up, until it was time for his presentation. The dailies was a really fun session. A bunch of people went up and gave a 2 minute pitch about some of the work they did, the problems they encountered and how they solved them.
Day 5 is today… And unfortunately I won’t be attending the last day. However the past 4 days have been awesome. I have learned a lot, realized how much more I need to learn and have been inspired to continue to learn and develop my skills as a creative professional. Looking forward to see how my experience influences my work as I process and decompress everything that I have absorbed over the past few days. To those of you that I have met over the past few days, thank you, it was a pleasure getting to know you and I hope to see you around.

SIGGRAPH – Day 3

Another great day. So much to see, so much to do. Started my day with a zBrush workshop. Awesome program, that I need to learn. Saw a few cool things at the exhibit hall, but barely scratched the surface of the products being showcased there. Went to a Birds of a Feather talk on managing creative projects. Interesting stuff, but skipped out early to go watch some behind the scenes work on the last Star Trek. Awesome!!! Ended the day at Autodesk’s User Group Meeting. Once again… Awesome!!! Here is to continuing to develop my creative skill set.

SIGGRAPH – Day 2

What a great day. Further reinforcement of the need for me to develop more skills within the mobile development arena. Met some great people at a birds of a feather event. Saw some awesome work at the computer animation festival. Enjoyed some networking at the after hours social event.
Looking forward to another day of inspiration and learning.

SIGGRAPH 2013

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I have the pleasure of attending SIGGRAPH with a full conference pass this year, thanks to a colleague of mine at work. We’ll see how many days I actually get to go based upon workload at work. But I’m not going to think about that right now… Looking forward to a lot of learning and checking out what people all over the world have been doing within the field of computer graphics, visual effects and interactive content.

Day 1 will be spent taking a Unity class. I’ve been learning Unity on my own for a little while now. Between online tutorials and trial and error, I’d say I’ve figured out a lot on my own. Having an instructor lead class will hopefully bring a lot of that knowledge together.

More updates to come…