Blog

Founder/Director, Gnomon

Lustmord

Over the past couple months I've had the opportunity to create a bunch of visuals for Lustmord and Karin Park who will be performing live together later this year. It was honestly a huge honor as I've been listening to Lustmord for years. Their album, Alter, is hauntingly beautiful and I expect the show will be too. I produced about 45 minutes of animation across 28 shots. Unreal Engine 5, Quixel Mixer, ZBrush, WorldMachine, Gaea, Maya, etc. While UE5 was still in beta and rather quirky, it really represents a huge leap forward.

FurnaceHead

Started this guy in ZBrush on Gnomon’s Artjam stream last week. Had fun trying out Quixel Mixer to texture something other than terrains and rocks. I also got to try out the new build of Embergen which just came out. A lot of cool changes, although FBX scaling issues are still a thing. Ho hum, still cool. :)

Tartarus

At the outset of the Unreal Fellowship we were given a prompt, ‘conflict’, and given a week to come up with an idea, storyboards and then an animatic for a one to three minute short film… which we would make over the course of a month using software we’d never used before. 100 artists, 100 stories, 100 shorts. This was a little stressful but also pretty exciting! Ultimately, I came up with something more ambitious than time would allow and what I completed does not yet reveal the story but… there is one. Heh. Anyhow. Five weeks ago I had never used Unreal. I now know a tiny bit of Unreal. :)

Unreal Engine

On June 25th I turned in my final project and was officially graduated from the Epic Games Unreal Fellowship. Five weeks of intense Unreal immersion with 100 industry professionals from literally all over the world. It was an experience that I will remember vividly for a long time and, while intense, it was awesome. After 20+ years of using Maya, it was amazing to finally be in a real-time environment. Not that it replaces Maya, since you still need to do so many things outside of Unreal but… it is really liberating to not have to wait for renders. You sacrifice a few things but… it is so worth it.

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Vicar VI: Vitrificar Inveteratus

As we breath our last breath, it is exhaled by the Vicar.

Sculpted this guy in ZBrush on a stream last week, then finished up the lighting/rendering in Maya with Redshift. I played a bit with the render passes in Photoshop, used Embergen for the fire, then tweaked color in After Effects.

 
 

The Last Thing I Remember

28 second loop with sound. I started this on a Gnomon livestream last week, and then just kept playing with it over the weekend. I tried out Adobe Audition for the first time to do the sound/ambience which was really fun and intuitive. It has a bit of an 80s vibe, but that’s really due to the synth I used: OB-6 from DSI. The melody sounds unique yet familiar… not sure if I made it up or if I’ve heard it somewhere before. Hmm.

Embergen

Recently stumbled upon a new tool that is in beta called Embergen. It’s really fun and extremely intuitive with amazing performance for creating smoke, fire, etc. While a few important features are missing, such as the ability to work on imported animated meshes, I can’t wait to see what the final 1.0 release will be like! Anyhow…. about a month ago I started streaming with Josh Herman on Gnomon’s weekly ArtJam, and this is the first image I’ve completed mostly live, including layout, zbrush, rigging and fire/smoke. I did a few things on my own time, just cuz it was hard to wait an entire week between working on it. So Embergen... pretty cool.

Inktober, 2020

31 ink/marker drawings on 8x10 paper and that... was intense, at times stressful, but also fun and super rewarding... especially in hindsight. There is a tangible sense of accomplishment when it is over that makes the journey very much worth the effort. And... after a weird fn year, twas a needed dive into my own little bubble of art, music and podcasts. :) I decided to use my own word prompts this time (that suit me better), and I'm glad that I did. I do think the drawings show an overall improvement over last year's effort. I also discovered a lot of music but... Atrium Carceri, the soundtrack to this video, is pretty cool. That is, of course, if you’re into dark ambient soundscapes.

All of the 31 drawings are in their own gallery section under Drawings/Inktober2020. If you’re here and reading this… thanks for visiting. :)