Finally HD 720p. Click HD button or watch on youtube. My laptop doesn’t even run the video smoothly without an optimized encoding.
Generalist visual effects from a limited selection of CG work (r03), as a “student thesis” for NYU 2009. We don’t actually have a thesis, just optional classes and projects, only attendance is required (yep college headcount). Projects from Star TV, CFs, and other freelance gigs.
See my other videos for full length animation and tools presentation.
HD download & descriptions on my site: gophercg.

Version r03 is much more organized, newer clips, timing, by subject (kind of?). A pure effects reel is usually under 2 minutes, and animation showreel well above 3 minutes. I’m hoping this generalist demo is not too long.

3 minutes is pretty short, so all my clips feel like a difficult quantity to prune down. Next stop would be to focus and raise the quality. I mentioned the work permit issues here, and keep getting interviewed for some reason, so yes, I’m looking for a (legal) job!

Melscript written for a director awhile ago to test out trail generation with nurbs. It’s much easier in Houdini, but remains a good mel exercise. The VFX tool also updates the trail on demand if character animation changes.

i wonder why screencaps are harder for me than coding and fixing 3d? anyways. I’m organizing the old bird rig into a screencap presentation. Publicizing works is quite important, as it keeps me more organized and on task. I’m still quite surprised why I made 60+ shelf scripts (mostly MEL) just for the BIRD! And a few aren’t just short tool scripts.
Hoping this video turns out well, I’ll do a first pass into revisiting just what this bird does….stay tuned

Screen capture of a few tools developed for past projects
It is similar to a previous maxscript I wrote for recursive plant growth. But since maya has paintfx, the recursive part and manual curve shape designs are not coded into the version for maya. However I added more flexibility with an easier UI.

Future work: more integration with Maya’s other modules besides paintFX.

It’s a simple site so the challenge is more SEO and publicity.
I kind of like the logo, but I’m not sure how graphics/iconish the page should get, or keep a simplistic style (some optics research company). The contact form works now.
Akaylight Corporation

We had our Tisch animation showcase 5/7. I’m quite impressed especially of the longer works. Andrew & Harry’s film worked out well–that painting and shading is awesome. Several friends back in intermediate animation finally ‘disclosed’ their films, and wow, gota see again Bethany’s vaccum dog PK and Connie’s flower seduction.

I really wanted to see SVA’s and other’s animation…happens to be during my finals and graduation (i did see Metrocaf at SVA) maybe next time.

So parts of my showcase is online, plus extras: Experimental animation. It’s mostly exploration into various animated media and computation from prof Rob Fergus’ expertise in image processing. I might explain some coding/procedure behind some works if it can make any sense to people. But the weird visuals come from permutations of {matlab, maya, flash, pencil, me}.

Learning AS3 and how designing (mostly) perpetual animations from code:
Bunnies
It’s a bit psychedelic. I’m thinking of adding interactivity of some sorts, or making it more ‘practical’. Because now it’s mostly experimentation.

See original tutorial  HERE.

JW Player Embedded

Question: How to embed JW Player in any Flash file?

Here’s all the necessary resources and more:

Basic embed Flash in html: http://www.longtailvideo.com/support/tutorials/Embedding-Flash
Embed JW Player in Flex: http://developer.longtailvideo.com/trac/wiki/FlexEmbedding
JW Player API: http://developer.longtailvideo.com/trac/wiki/FlashAPI
JW Player flashvars: http://developer.longtailvideo.com/trac/wiki/FlashVars
load external SWF in Flash stage: link
LONG forum posts: http://www.longtailvideo.com/support/forum/Setup-Problems/11830/Embeding-JW-player-4-0-in-a-flash-website-AS3-
more… http://www.longtailvideo.com/jw/?search=embed+flash

Thanks to some members in the longtail forum, I frankensteined a working presentation without being very familiar with AS3. See example here:
sample portfolio

JW specific imports, or you can import all JW stuff:

import com.jeroenwijering.events.*;
import com.jeroenwijering.player.*;
import com.jeroenwijering.plugins.*;
import com.jeroenwijering.utils.Configger;

Optional, store a URL string of the player with parameters, like size, autoplay etc.

To keep things simple, put all files (yes html, player files, host SWF, all videos) in the same directory. My version did organize elements into a nice folder hierarchy. Though since referencing parent folders (eg ../parent) doesn’t work perhaps due security or silly syntax, my videos folder is in the player folder. I dislike this hierarchy in terms of strict relations, but at least folders separate element types cleanly.

Link in the SWF JW player by the procedure in the above Adobe page, using a Loader object. Take care relative directories in the URL is relative to the html page caller, not the host SWF caller.

Note relationship: html page -> your custom SWF -> embedded (loaded) JW Player SWF

Then some good event handlers as the bulk of you customization:

function loaderHandler(e:Event) //SWF player loaded
function playerReady(e:Event=null) //initialized. Now use the API to send/receive
function resizePlayer(), buttons etc //the interactive UI bulk

Then much of the UI connections just take time. You can see I retained the standard JW skin. You can replace it, use all your own controls etc. All the controls still work, except fullscreen, which I need to somehow intercept and relay to a correct parent "window".

There quite some differences between the WordPress hosted version and blog installed on a private host.

I’m working on an installed WordPress, with lots more flexibility. But uploading has permission problems.

Now I can use the WordPress upload interface, and FTP uploaded files can only be linked by absolute URLs so it’s very cumbersome. I need to upload via FTP, but use short relative links to refer on posts/pages. That would be easier to organize and for future site migration.

Not the shortest, but I got a relative link to work. So allows at least migrating domain name, thanks to a Permalink plugin to change the link addresses.

Also, the wordpress.com version is especially slow (installed is no better, probably the similar WP interface always had speed issues). Maybe using a desktop blogger would help. If they made it all Ajax like Yahoo/Google, then it would be much faster

EDIT: got mass uploading to streamline. After trying several plugins, I decided to forget the WP upload UI entirely. Some plugins did nicely in attempting to organize uploads/folders, but they’re dragged down by some WP UI simplicity/slowness. So in a recent gig where I was asked to place many files in organized folders/categories, I FTPed directly, and used relative links in the WP page posts. This allows a bit more flexibility in future migration. And the folder plugins would place files in the same compatible locations as the manual FTPs. Only difference is the former has a WP database record (which is not useful yet). All the file links work on the pages/posts, so WP installed does have more flexibility it seems.

Also for the default Flash uploader, Firefox is nonfunctional, while Explorer uploads quickly. I find that weird because Flash is the same plugin from Adobe…hmm….

only a few days… and the CS showcase comes. I heard some “important people” are coming to visit.

really late crunch time, but an overview…
platforms used:
opencv in c/c++, virtools or motionbuilder, vicon RT plugin, server/client codes, visual tracker (c++), motion recognition (matlab)

somehow all these need to be connected, in realtime. surely it’s doable!
I got matlab c++ connected via TCP. Lol it’s a little late first time implementing all that IPC stuff. Still need to integrate the actual opencv codes to be useful.

In matlab, I’m testing with 6 shapes, and a user draws some shape for the code to recognize. It’s a closest match, categorization, clustering, regression sort of problem. It’s fairly accurate with good distortions, but overly wacky drawings shouldn’t have a match at all. Once that’s done, the real problem would be curve fitting, which would increase runtime alot.