node editor Knife !

Just found this accidentally while using alt + ctrl + left mouse button drag to zoom in and out of the node editor.

if you use shif + ctrl + LMB drag you get a little knife pointer and you can draw straight lines to cut connections between nodes.   As I was trying to figure out what it was I accidentally sliced through  a bunch of connections by mistake.

its kinda cool though now that I know what it is.

-=s

Using extra geo to aid in Weight Painting quick tip

I keep telling myself to put stuff on this blog and I never do..   So I figure just do quick bursts. 

 I'm sure most people do this already , but I thought I'd throw it out there. 

 The image below shows 3 pieces of geo, that upper flap thing there was giving me trouble weighting quickly as the weights on the bottom and top didn't line up, so in many positions that geo would penetrate.    

  a fast quick way to do this is to duplicate your geo and cut off the offending part, and make it a single surface..  In this case I had multiple issues with this geo, so I ended up making 2 extra pieces.  

In this case mirroring and copy skin weights tolerances were too high, or just didn't want to work like I wanted them to, so I knew I couldn't do a regular copy skin weights.  

so the blue geo is a copy of the orange geo ( the hero geo) , that I did a base smooth bind to and smoothed the hell out of it using smoothFlood.mel  ( which I love) .

after getting a semi decent but still penetrating weight map on this flap, I then duplicated it again, and cut off the flap and then cut it in half. 

 I then copied weights from the blue to the cut off flap.. 

 I did minimal weight fixes to the flap. but it was fast as I didn't need to deal with a volume surface. 

I then reversed the process and copied the weights from the cut off flap to the blue geo. but I did the copy ONLY to the verts I wanted.   

To do this select your first piece of geo, and then rt click on the second geo and choose vertex to enable vertex selections , Do not hit F8 as you want your first geo to remain selected as it was. 

you can then shift select the verts you want to copy to , and then run Copy Skin Weights. 

which I did for other parts on the blue geo, and then eventually did the same to go from the blue to the hero orange geo. 

( you can also make a set of the verts you want to copy to , and just shift select that ) 

okay, hope that helps someone..

-=s

Ziploc Fresh Forward with Rachel Ray

All CG,
built some fun rigs and scripts for this one to control the slicing of the fruit vegetables and the zipping and unzipping of the ziploc bags

Cover Girl Domnios with Queen Latifa

All CG except Queen Latifa,
 got to really test out the asset management tools on this one for moving animation from temp geo to rigs to updating and randomizing the dominos.

Jarritos Soda

Jarritos  soda ads

 I was pretty psyched to work on these , as I'm a huge fan of jarritos. I first discoveredit when we moved near Red Bank NJ at Jaunitos Restaurant.  Now you can find Jarritos in small stores and a lot of the NYC food trucks carry it . Grapefruit is my favorite.


For these we built minitature sets and shot them to be used as backgrounds for CG animated characters. The idea was to make them look as if they were stop motion:


Here: I'll let the CD explain




here is the CG  luchador test:   He was  pretty quick turnaround. Andre Stuppert did the rigging and Tony Tabtong animated him..




We made Three ads and one internal piece  I was responsible for all the rigging  as well as hair animation...( shave / haircut ) and some random tools .



Glass Blowers:




Bodga:





Pineapple ( skatepark) :

Musselman's Apple Sauce ads

Worked on these a few weeks back. I was responsible as the Lead Character TD, so I rigged and oversaw the rigging of the packs and their lids.  I was also responsible for the "crack" destruction.