About Me

I'm an animator and an educator. I've worked at various vfx and animation studios on both the east and west coasts of the United States. I teach animation at the School of Visual Arts and I try to contribute to the community with the thoughts and techniques I've gatherd over the years.

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Recent Posts
Saturday
Feb122011

Scripts page now live!

It's opened up with a couple of tools I wrote for Maya including the playblasting tool I posted about last week.

Tuesday
Feb012011

jab_blast.mel preview

I've been looking at ways to improve workflow lately. Something that I've found moving from studio to studio is that I can spend a lot of time spitting out playblasts to get into edit, dailies, or whatever else they might be called for. I make sure nothing but geometry is showing, the resolution is correct, files are being saved to the correct folder, etc. Now I wouldn't call myself a strong programmer, but I've been using more and more mel on various projects over the years and since I couldn't find anything that did what I wanted online, I put together a mel script that will automate these repetitive tasks yet is extremely customizable. Since I teach an animation class where I require students to deliver homework as playblasts at a specified format I decided that I would try to clean it up and make it usable for them. After that I thought why not make it something I would be comfortable with putting into a production team environment. The result is jab_blast.mel. It consists of two commands. One to run the playblast and one to set consitent playblast settings and output. The current settings window is visible below:

I have some folks beta testing it at the moment but as soon as I feel it's ready I will consider releasing it for public consumption if there is enough interest. Leave a comment if this is something of value as well as any features you're looking for in a good playblast output script.

Wednesday
Nov242010

Suspension and Ground Tracking Test [Vehicle Toolkit]

I worked out a way to do truer suspension and ground tracking inside of Maya. Now I just have to implement it into my vehicle toolkit rigging system. 

Sunday
May232010

SVA Award Winning 2010 Thesis Films

Many of the winning SVA theses came from students of mine including 2/3 major award winners. If you count award winning animators on these theses that would make 3/3. Check them out!

Congrats Eric, Tyler, Brandon, Shota, and Chris

Wednesday
Mar312010

Autodesk Showreel 2010

I saw today that I worked on one of the pieces in Autodesks new 2010 showreel. It's Rhino's Cadillac/Subway spot about 58 seconds in.

Saturday
Mar202010

New Jabimation Facebook Page

I wanna let folks know that I started a facebook page for my work and you shouldn't hesitate to fan it up:)

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