This is my demo reel as of August 16th, 2010. As always, I can’t wait to learn something new and make better work to replace the stuff already on there. It runs about 2 minutes and all of the work on it is my own. I give a short breakdown of how I did each piece in my reel guide which you can view right here.

Here are some random clips in their entirety from my reel, all my videos can be found on my Vimeo page.

Here’s some other clips I made that didn’t fit on my reel:

Sweep NURBS can be used to create an interesting type of text within Cinema 4D if you use and position the right splines. This quick tutorial shows you how to make a unique style of typography that appears as if your letters extend well beyond the field of view with a deep bend off in the distance. I think it’s a very stylish way to animate text, and it’s a different take on the idea of 3D text. All you need is Cinema 4D, and maybe grab one of these cool fonts to use:

Quadranta
SMD Black
QUB

Here is part 1 of my Baseball Wall Title Sequence tutorial in Cinema 4D, also with compositing and post effects in After Effects. This tutorial shows you how to recreate the titles seen on ESPN this year promoting their baseball broadcasts. All of the elements in the scene are generated in Cinema 4D to create a portion of a stadium in 3D, and then you import this into After Effects and add your own titles onto the wall.

Here is part 1 of my Baseball Wall Title Sequence tutorial in Cinema 4D, also with compositing and post effects in After Effects. This tutorial shows you how to recreate the titles seen on ESPN this year promoting their baseball broadcasts. All of the elements in the scene are generated in Cinema 4D to create a portion of a stadium in 3D, and then you import this into After Effects and add your own titles onto the wall.

Here is a Univision Promo I did featuring the lovely Greydis Gil. I want to apologize first for the music. It was not up to me to use a track that was written by Mario and Luigi in the Mushroom Kingdom.

This one took a long time to create. I started by making a butterfly in Cinema 4D that was comprised of the pieces of the Univsion logo. I imported the logo as splines and textured each piece to match the corresponding colors. Then I animated the movement of the wings by linking them together with xpresso and driving them with some user data I keyframed. I flirted with the idea of making a sine wave control the movement of the wings, but it looked better to add a little more randomness to the speed and movement of the wings flapping, so I took the manual animation route. I can tell you are on the edge of your seat.

When out of nowhere I defined the path that the butterfly was to fly and attached the butterfly’s position by aligning it to the spline and animating the start and end position. I added a vibrate tag to offset the position and rotation of the spline slightly in order to give the butterfly a little more realistic flight path; it moves more sporadic this way like a real butterfly would. Once I did this for one butterfly, I duplicated many instances of it and tweaked all the animated parameters to make each butterfly different than the next in terms of the way it looks and moves. I refrained from naming them all.

I positioned each butterfly carefully in the scene to get the right distribution through the duration of the animation, making sure of things like they wouldn’t overlapping each other. I tried to make it look as random and natural as possible by neurotically adjusting and constantly tweaking my creatures for hours to have them fit perfectly in my world. I bet that is what God feels like on a day to day basis.

I divided the butterflies into drones and heroes. The drones are the butterflies that fly aimlessly through the scene and carry on their way. They are n00bs. The heroes are the ones that interact with the talent and need to be in a specific spot at a specific time during the animation to make it appear as if they are being swiped at by the net. I ramped up some of their movements as the net is going by in order to make it seem like they are trying to escape urgently.

For the final logo, I had to come up with something that went with the way the scene is shot. She looks up as if something is coming from high up so you have to do something along those lines to make it convincing. They originally suggest I make the butterfly turn into the logo, but that is pretty predictable since it already is the logo. I decided to make the logo big and in 3D and have butterflies nesting on it and flying towards it. Besides looking like a “U” and a butterfly, the logo also looks like a flower, which is naturally what a butterfly would be attracted to. Much like I am attracted to Greydis Gil.

Greidys is the lovely lady in this promo, and I have not seen her at work since I’ve been here at Univision. I really, really wish I would have. If I saw her in the hallway I would approach her and tell her that I am the clever and rather striking young man that was fully capable of surrounding her in imaginary butterflies, so I could obviously make her wildest dreams come true. Then she would say something to me in Spanish and I would have no idea what it meant. Google translate wouldn’t help because I would have trouble spelling and remember what she said. It was probably something quite romantic and how she longs for an hombre like me. But alas I will never know for sure…

What.

Here is a new Univision Promo I did with Cinema 4D and After Effects. They needed it done fast earlier this month because they wanted to air this network promo right after the coverage of the World Cup ended, and they were hoping Spain would win and they could air this promo that has an obvious Spanish theme to it. I got it done with a quick turnaround thanks to MoGraph as always. I made the Univision logo the object cloner, then I offset the smaller particle clones along a spline using a spline effector. I added some chaos to the particles with a random effector and animated the parameters so they moved and rotated along a spline path to make it appear they were coming from the woman’s fan and merging into the network logo. I did the post effects in After Effects, it needed some rotoscoping mostly, along with a few other tricks to make it look polished.

I’m going to start doing a breakdown of my projects when I can. It may help people understand what it is exactly that I do, besides pushing buttons on a computer to make pretty pictures appear on da tee vee.

Oh yea and there’s a BMD new logo in there…change is coming…

Xpresso links the different shapes together and a 1 set of rotation keyframe drives the entire animation. Simple but kind of cool.

You better believe that Sweep NURBS can make text look cool.

I recreated the baseball promos I’ve seen this season on ESPN. I modeled the whole scene in Cinema 4D and did the compositing in After Effects. This scene relies on the camera position being parallel to the wall to recreate the simple and smooth pan along the warning track. I used Mograph to create the wall by cloning the padded panel, and once I modeled one seat I simply used cloners to create the rows. The grass is made with Hair; it really slows the render down but it creates the best looking 3D grass in Cinema 4D. I added the titles that I created in Photoshop to look like they were painted on the wall, and did some color correcting and added some grunge to enhance the scene.

They look very similar to the commercials you see on ESPN, and the best part is that once you create in in Cinema 4D, you can simply swap out the titles to change the teams and games to say whatever you want.

The Red Jays beat the Blue Sox that night 6-4.

Movilencuesta is not a real word, it was fused together by two lesser words in order to properly describe a segment on the show “Republica Deportiva.” I really, really wish I worked on the show Republica Deportiva everyday. ¡Viva las Senadoras!

Movil means mobile, and refers to a cell phone and encuesta means poll, so I made an animation for The Mobilepoll. As you probably guessed, they ask a question that is answered by texting from your cell phone.

I did the compositing and animation here. I didn’t model the phone, there wasn’t enough time for me to work on that part. It’s a very good model found here.

Phones are becoming really easier to model now because they are largely becoming touch screen-based, so you don;t have to model and texture all those little buttons.

I developed the phone’s interface in After Effects and rendered out the animation to be used on the screen’s geometry in Cinema 4D. I then animated the phone to enter the scene and then serve as a transition to the live show where they ask the question. The text was done in Mograph, with a combination of step effectors with the oh so handy delay effector.

Nothing ground breaking here. Besides las Senadoras.