Shadows of Mordor

Another piece we have done @ DD,  this one was lots of fun, lots of characters and
character FX, cloth, hair etc... I was responsible for rigging along with A.Diamond and
I was lead for the cloth. I like the way the project turned out. There was lot's work
to be done on this. MORE TO COME ....

Reel 2018

Reel 2014 - collection some of the projects I have been lucky to be part of. Much
appreciate the opportunity on each and every one of them. I have learned a ton
and hope to continue learning and producing better and better work . MORE TO COME .....

NBA2k14

Another cool little project we have done at DD, pretty small team on this one
I was responsible for developing cloth simulation rigs and some shot work.
MORE TO COME ....

Ryce

Ryce - an awesome cinematic done at DD, this is just a piece of it.
I was responsible for the cloth setup and simulations. Building rigs,
challenge here was the layer clothing, very tricky with collisions and IP's.
Overall a great project, as always lots of fun with guys at DD. :)
MORE TO COME.....

Murdered

Another piece done by DD, I was lucky enough to work with Adrian on this one as well.
Working on mocap setups, rigging secondary props and accessories, I was mainly
responsible for the hoody guy.  Good times ! Thanks DD.
MORE TO COME .....

Destiny

Destiny - The law of the jungle trailer - really awesome project to work on, I was responsible for rigging and all cloth simulations for the entire project. DD's awesome pipeline and key people like A. Diamond helped with some more technical challenges. Great story, I think the game is going to be visually awesome. MORE TO COME .....

Deadspace 3

Another cool project I was lucky to be part of. DeadSpace 3 cinematic done @ DD. I was responsible for rigging of the guy and animating some of the shots. The helmet transformation.
I also rigged up the props, from rigging point of view, nothing hard. Some of the parts of the
suit couldn't be just simply skinned because of the nature of the meshes. They had to ride on
top of the surface instead. The helmet animation was pre-animated and then published so animators were able to load the animation on the base rig level to start with. Offset animation
controllers were provided to animate on top of it. We have a sick vRay pipeline @ DD so everything is rendered in vRay. Also, huge "bravo" to vfx guys , Eric and Carl.
MORE TO COME ......

NIKE - HyperWarm

Very fun and cool project Nike hyper warm,  helping vfx guys with 3D aspects of the shots.
FX done in Houdini.
MORE TO COME .....

Medal of honor

EAMOH - more videos of the project. I was responsible for rigging background characters and cloth setups and simulations. Working with Navin Pinto, really awesome cloth guy. I have learned so much from him. Total length about 3 months. Long hours and weekend. We had lots of fun and gained about 30 pounds. :) MORE TO COME........

NBA2K

NBA2k 2013 @ DD - project. Very cool little piece , I was responsible for all the cloth simulations , uniforms , nets, banners. We used nCloth solver. Had lots fun working on this. High five to Tim P. for the crowds. He did an awesome job.  Viva DD. MORE TO COME .......

EyeRig - simpleTool

Eyerig tool for background characters. Simple tool to build eye setups for characters.
We had about 30 background characters to rig. Very simple tool with UI for the artist.
MORE TO COME ......

IBM - All in the clouds

This piece was lots of fun, I was responsible for rigging all the faces it wasn't anything complex just enough to give us enough control to get what we needed for this stylized piece.I also rigged up the props in this spot(Telephone poles,Flowers,All the wires). Psyop rocks !

IBM - ahead of time

Only helped with rigging the conveyor belts in this piece. By the way conveyor belts = headache. All the credits goes to Psyop people mostly my boy John P.He did most of the prop rigging.Fabio the end came out great man. Awesome work guys. MORE TO COME .....

Marvelous Designer Test

A test done in MD for a quick cloth test. Simulation is coming. More to come....

Ally Bank Commercial

Directed by Buck NYC , I was responsible for all the dynamic elements in this piece as well as modeling some of the props and scene assembly. More to come...

ND_test part 01

This is Naughty Dog test for Riggers and TA's. I hope it's okay to post it here.I wanted to keep it simple and flexible, added some code to control the rig,plot the rig to bones. Simple ik/fk for arms spine. Clavicle rotations,added few extra bones for scapula and trapezius muscle to get better skinning. More to come ....

Tool - copyWeightsBasedOnShaders

Tool to prepare character assets for previs or mocap department. Assets with lots of
meshes making the asset heavy and overkill for mocap department. This tool spits out
a single piece of mesh with identical skin weighting, to keep the asset light and clean.
It also maintain the textures of the meshes.
MORE TO COME ......

Character Rig - WIP

WIP - rig based on JS paper. Really awesome and flexible rig

just to mention few : ik/fk , forearm ik/fk, squash and

stretch , I slipped that anywhere I could , spine , arms, legs,

shoulders, neck etc,, correct mirror control setup , global scale of animation
controls,designed for traditional key frame animation.
Model provided by Thaddeus Mitra Marahaj very talented
modeller from R*, www.thechindian.com
MORE TO COME ....

Mocap Test - Homefront

I was responsible for the main 4 characters on Homefront video game. Skeletons,

deformations , rigging , cinematic animation support. This is a simple anim to see

how Boone moves around before importing him into the engine.

Homefront - official trailer

The official trailer of the game. 7 months of hard work. Looks great ! My first AAA title with THQ/Kaos New York City 2010. I was responsible for all 5 main hero characters, rigging , deformations , animation support for all cinematic scenes. Tool development, batch animation tool , roll bone system batch tool. etc. I hope you like it. MORE TO COME....

Bone based - facial poses

Some facial poses and ranges test for one of the Homefront character before
applying animation sequences to him and getting it out into FaceFX module
of Unreal Tournament 3 engine.
MORE TO COME ...

MotionBuilder - Batch Tool

A batch tool for Motion Builder 2010 , tool used to batch animations when animators
finished their part on the files. It recognizes control rigs as well .
Specify a folder with all your work files. Then where you would like to save the plotted
animation. We had sometimes 2 different locations so that's why 2 output paths.
Then you go get a coffee and take a nap.
Again ...HUGE thank you to Andrew for being patient with me to finalize the tool . :)
Best to Kaos and THQ

SkinTool v.01

Skinning tool that helped us to skin characters much faster than regular way Also kept us sane when fishing for requirements like multiple characters multiple LOD's per character, Granular characters etc. We had to make sure only 3 influences affect each vertex so a script was written to keep that always true. Then we added checking tool for making sure that joints included in skinClusters only had the amount and name of joints that the LOD required. Then I added poseLib using simple dagPose command . I also added a sample ROM that could be referenced in on a character during the process when simple poses weren't enough. Thank you Kaos for the opportunity and HUGE thanks to Zhi and Andrew. I look up to you boys....:)

Secondary dynamics - ears,skin - test

Dog facial deformation test. Skinning, some basic rigging, dynamic curves , Soft body used for the test. More to come...

MBX

MBX aka 18 days ... PS's project , duration 18 days ...ironically. The show never took off but fun to work with Jonah ,Charles, Joe Fiore, Paul. Pretty small team. I was the animation supervisor I was responsible for integration between Mobu and Maya but also was involved in TD work(skinning, deformations, lighting etc.) We only had 20 days to produce this. More to come....✔

Clomp - character concept

Character intro , quick model and quick anim to introduce a character to a client. Designed for a TV show, 3-5 year old kids. 😜 More to come ...

Flash - character concept

Character intro , flash modeled , animated , simulated secondary motions, animation , and render in Maya. Composite it in Nuke. Few render layers. motion blur through composite vectors. More to come ... ✔

Simple Cloth sim

Layer nCloth simulation , basic mocap used to get animation on. Fast motions and fast collisions is next text. MORE TO COME ....👌

Face - mocap retarget One to One - test

Facial retarget in Mobu and then out to Maya.Animation tweaks done in Mobu. MORE TO COME ....😒

Pickle - test render

Haven't had the time to finish the facial for this guy. I have the rig ready though..:) I am really showing the secondary motion on his belly and the clean retarget.:) MORE TO COME.....✔

Pickle-setup

Pickle setup with twist systems , simple and parametric muscles used for secondary animation. Easy to setup jiggle. Still problem with global scale and muscles. Local muscle scale must be used. More to come...✔

Balloon - nCloth simulation

Procedural face rig - simple

These are very simple facial rigs we used for Psyop-IBM project. It was simple
enough to script the whole setup. I made sure the skinning was nice with a nice
fall off to get the basic poses we needed. I also included a animation UI that have
few features , like , selecting controls on left or right side, selecting opposite
control , resetting controls, mirroring controls left-right side. Anything that
would make animating faster for the animators. The build part was written in
MEL and the animation UI and functionality was written in Python.
Guys did really nice job animating these characters. I am a huge fan of Psyop !
I may post a video of how it all worked. MORE TO COME ....

DinoRig

Testing modular system from creatureRigs guys. Awesome system. I love it.
Added few things, which is easy to build on top of the system. Quick skin pass
and animation block out done by my buddy john V.
MORE TO COME......

Update on FaceRig tool v0.21

There is an update on teh face Rig tool. It is still a huge mess
but I am going back to clean and re-write some of the stuff
to improve the whole concept...I am not happy ...Grr.
More to come.

Crusaders

On this small project i was supervising the animation pipeline. Re-targeting the mo-cap animations to specific characters in Motion Builder and getting everything back into Maya. The final render scenes were assembled in 3D studio Max. More to come...😂

Custom - FBX to Maya IO

Simple FBX importer, the function of this tool is to take a folder of FBX animation files and import them on a specific character and then writes the files out as either ma or mb format to be compatible with Maya. Icon's designed by my friend and co-worker Joe Fiore - designer/compositor. More to come...😎

Scoop - loops for web

We at Perspective studios , we've had a guy on staff named Scoop, dear friend of ours. We decided to make him a mascot of kind, if you will. He will be soon entertaining everyone that visits our site. This is a serious of loops of him doing things ... we have BIG plans for him. More to come...😃

Guitar Hero - motionBuilder animations

This is one of the tens of files that I animated for Guitar Hero III. As we all know animating with mocap is not as hard as keyframed animation just because the motion is recorded by talents/mocap actors and then a proper pipeline must be setup to get the optical data motion on your character. This way you have very nice foundation of weights and timing , you as an animator you still have to follow the laws of animation , not necessarily all 12 principles of keyframed animation but some like "follow through and overlapping action" or "exaggeration" must still be applied. Anyway... I used Motion Builder and its awesome animation layer system to animate the girl. The hardest part was animating the guitar being handed on/off from hand to the other. More to come...🙄

Mocap - full performence retarget

Shot mocap , animated on top , added the prop , finger animation. Facial mocap shot separately , put them all together in MotionBuilder , then retargeted to this guy who was brought from Maya. Simple deformations , game style. MORE TO COME...☺

Mocap - full performance

This was shot in the previous studio I worked at , full performance mocap capture, After the tracking was done I retarget to my character body and face , if needed extra animation was done on top of it to meet the requirements. No finger tracking all secondary animation was keyframed (Fingers, eyes, tongue, etc..) MORE TO COME...😃

Cache Setter - simple helper with geo caches.

Very simple cache helper for setting some of the basic cache functionality, like,
start frame, scale, time offset etc... written in one day to help us to quickly manage
large amount of caches in the scene. Used for very cool little project done by
Production Studios. Shout out to David Navarro, director.
MORE TO COME .....

nCloth - simulation Test

Cloth simulation , i used nCloth in Autodesk Maya.
More to come...😏

Squash and Stretch Study

Studying squash and stretch on this simple animation. Rigged up using spline IK .
Added soem secondary motion and fur . Didn't have much time to tweak the fur.
More to come...😶

RigidBody - studies

Some simple examples of RB simulations. Using Autodesk Maya and some third party plugins. MORE TO COME...🤔

Character rig

Hi guys,
This is the girl update pic so you can see
the controls from the side as well.
MORE TO COME...🤨

Game facial setup - workflow

Bone based setup for a game character. Testing deformations and poses.
Wrote a few functions to help illuminate the tedious parts of the setup.
MORE TO COME...😉

Soon to be replaced ...

WIP..Hi guys ..I couldn't sleep as always ..it's 2.00 am and i am still working ..I was messing around with the rig and found more problems ...Have to JUMP on it tomorrow morning,THAT needs to be fixed right away. I started coding the UI for this guy ,I dont know how far I am going to be able to take it ...I am still learning MEL which I love sooooo much ..but I thought the UI could look sexy like this.Okay..now it's 3.45 am and fixed some of the bugs ,vsibility switches for the arms and legs when ik/fk with simple condition node that slip right in and i aslo have to close that geometry looks horrible !!! lets keep the PRO attitude here !! LOL..I am learning some camera tracking now to insert these guys into real footage see,how that's gonna work out ,also, if anyone feels like finishing designing that guy below with the big horns ,please feel free i wanna animate that guy so badly but i am not much of the designer.!!Animation tests of the AliasBoy is next ,I am gonna try to send the rig to few people i know to test animate him ...like a lead animator John C. from Face2Face studio ..maybe He'll give it a try if He's not too busy ...we'll see Okay it's one day later and i wanna add some comments to this .i finished the arms stretch system and add a lower back fk control that missed to actually create,but today i was beating the crap out of this rig trying to break it and found my missing control. lol.anyway ..it's 2 am I am little sleepy.i will continue on the UI tomorrow....more to come ...... 

Soon to be replaced ...

WIP - okay we're little futher,implimented the stretch system into my leg setups and the same we'll go for the spine and the arms.I am giving all the credit to Brad Clark .This system has on/off switch and blends nicely between ik/fk so pretty much full control.I just ran into little problem with my remaining IKs on the legs .problem was when i switch to fk and turn off the stretch system my ball ik and toe ik stay pointing at the endEffector of that particular ik. I have to go over it and catch this error before i move on to the arms and spine.Othe rthan that the complexity is growing ,but I have to say that swaping stuff or adjusting certain parts on this rig is soooooo easy no struggel at ALL . I thought that non-flipping knee control would be good but than i changed my mind and created the same system i created for the arms .The PVcontrol follows everywhere with an option to blend between follow the character or stay locked in the world.Brad YOU"RE THE MAN. I have learn so much from you. more to come.......:) 

Codee - color test

A beauty shot of Codee project straight from Maya using Vray renderer.
Total frame time [0h 44m 58.7s (2698.7 s)]
MORE TO COME.....