Late last year, I was invited to join an exclusive enclave of animators located within Ontario's golden horseshoe. It seems they run community animation challenges at a somewhat frequent rate, and this was exciting to me, as the last animation challenge I had participated in was a Lego stop motion challenge back in high school. Yep its been all BUSINESS since then. Below, we will walk through the challenges and learnings I came across while building this out!

The Learning

I'm always inspired by wild-looking sci-fi renditions on Instgram so I had the brilliant idea to try and create my own world in an interesting style. Perhaps something I could revisit every so often to tell new stories in. Let me tell you. That takes a lot of effort. Below you can see my first attempt at this challenge. A deeper environmental art with a painterly style. ALL things I had never tried before.

I punched a little above my weight here and realised the amount of time required to polish a whole environment was probably more than the amount of time remaining to complete the challenge. This is when you have to take a step back and get off the sinking ship in order to start building a new one. A great lesson about the sunk cost fallacy here. Despite the amount of time and fun I had trying to create the environment, I am ultimately glad I took a step back and came at it with a different approach.

The Process

Now onto the real project and the real process. Early into my second attempt, I had the idea to challenge myself and fully complete this project within Blender. That would involve getting more comfortable with the compositor and finally opening up the VSE.

This second attempt went through two possible versions. As seen in the gallery above, I had wanted to try a version where the asteroids flew around in a circle and slowed only when the Earth was in view. The star system I had built for the straight-on view didn't work for this, and the MATHEMATIC GYMNASTICS I went through attempting to get it to bend around a circle proved to be too much for me, and as such, I abandoned this view. We'll get more into the intricacies of this project below.

The Compositor

This was not my first time using the Blender compositor. I'm sure we have all opened that up to use the Glare node at least a dozen times. But this was the first time I made the conscious effort not to take my frame sequence into After Effects for my finishing process.

To complete the final composition above, I used almost every tool in the box. We're talking ID masks, Crypto Mattes, compositing light groups, etc, etc.

Light groups are something I used extensively on this project. For a stylised render like this, they allow a great deal of granular control over your light sources. In the example above, I am using a light group that contains all of my blue light sources. This allowed me to apply a specific glare node to JUST this light as well as really fine-tune the colour and look of that glow. Ultimatley having this data in its own separate group here allows me to use traditional blending modes (Screen, add, dodge, etc) to apply it over the main image, which once again allows even greater fine control of how these lights appear in the final composition.

Above, you can see my entire node graph for this composition. IT is probably not the cleanest one you have seen, but I did make an effort to label everything. If you zoom in, you should be able to tell what is going on. Simply put, each group is a different colour of dithering effects that I am blending together on the right side. The purple lines represent vector data, and this is what drives the animation of the dithering effects.

Materials

The materials for this were not as important as I knew I wanted to do the heavy lifting in the compositing stage. But with that being said, the 2 main objects in this scene, the asteroids and the earth are both created via procedural displacement within the materials they are using.

We were assigned a limited colour palette for this challenge, and 2 of the colours just happened to be perfect for a cartoon stylised earth, so here we are! The main driver for this material is 2 Voronoi Textures blended together. That matte drives the colours, the displacement and the shader selection, allowing us to distinguish the water from the terrain.

The VSE

Most people do not think of Blender as an NLE, and there is a good reason for this. Look It's no secret that I love Blender and everything it stands for, but I cannot see the purpose of this part of the software. I mean, even the official webpage for it looks incomplete at the time of writing this.

As you can see above, I used the VSE to add sound effects and overlay the 3 of spades card template. The visual overlay worked fine, no problem, and I can see myself coming back to this aspect of it any time. I do enjoy the way it functions as part of the post-processing pipeline along with the compositor within the Blender Render logic. The problem for me involves the audio. I have nearly 20 years of video editing experience at this point, and all I can say is WHY did you make a video editor that has no way to monitor audio levels? I can adjust each clip with a volume float slider. BUT thats jsut it. A float value between 1 and 0. How many db is this? How close to 0 am I getting when I layer all my sound effects together?

All in, the VSE feels like an ancient part of Blender that has not been touched in a decade. I encountered errors resulting in 1byte mp4s and spent too much time trying to troubleshoot the issues I encountered. With some bug fixing and smoothing, this could be a passable video editor and a useful part of the Blender workflow.

Conclusion

Here is the final video again, and this time with sound. Listen to what I managed to smash together with the VSE.

Overall, this challenge taught me an important lesson about failing fast. Digital art is the perfect medium for rapid prototyping. If something feels off, try again. throw it out. Learn from your mistakes; this is the way we will all improve as artists. So from one artist to the next, thanks for reading and happy creating!

The team and I had been tasked with elevating the standard sonic ident animation we use to close out videos. The previous Ident had been outsourced for a very large sum of money to an agency, so the opportunity to bring this animation back in-house was a great chance to get a win under out belts!

The Process

This Project went through many many many rounds of revisions and I am only showing you the portions I worked on. This was a large team effort that involved many people bouncing ideas off one another and iterating through rolling feedback! Below, I'll share a collection of renders from other ideas I had worked through.

Before even cracking open Blender I began by working through the clean vector animations inside After Effects. I often like to work this way as having a a clean vector animation as a base to work from can both act as a base or a fallback if the 3D explorations are not yielding many results.

This is what I referred to as the OT Click, and it's what I wanted the animation in whatever form it took to eventually resolve on. Using this as a building block for what would eventually become the final approved animation.

A big takeaway for me with this project was KEEP IT SIMPLE. As you can see in my early explorations above, this is NOT what I had begun doing. There are cloth simulations and random shapes I spent time modelling and texturing, all in an attempt to flex those 3D muscles but at the cost of ballooning the amount of time this project would take to complete.

The animation above was my first take at a simplified animation and was not far off from what would become the final. I drew inspiration for this from that simple vector OT click animation I had made at the very start of the project. The lines close in from the sides in the same manner that the O and T click together, and when blended with that click animation it creates a very pleasing continuation of motion.

Materials

The only material used in the 3D portion of this project was a default BSDF with the roughness adjusted slightly. The rest of what appears to be materials are all just LIGHTs . As seen in the screenshot below. I used various shapes and colours of lights to paint in the highlights where I needed them, which combined with some simple post-processing gave us the clean and simple result you see above.

Conclusion

Working on the animation for this was a great amount of fun. Collaborating with the team and watching all of our ideas come to life was a career highlight. Something I have yet to mention is that we did secure an outside agency TA2 Studios, to assist with the sound design for this project. See the video below for the full sonic experience! (THE WEB will not allow me to autoplay videos with sound, so you'll have to queue this one up yourself!) Enjoy!!

This is the final entry in the reimagined series, and this time we're diving into the oh-so-important world of security. The original idea with this animation was to show some sort of secure database through abstract shapes. Over time, it morphed into some sort of lock mechanism, but I'm still quite proud of how this one turned out!

The Process

As mentioned above, this animation went through many rounds of revision until we settled on the lock style offset in the lower right corner.

The highlight of this animation is what I referred to as the database power plant structure in the middle. They feature some relatively complex materials and were created using something referred to as SubD modelling. In essence, we create a simple shape and use the power of the subdivision modifier to smooth the shape out. This method allows us to smooth edges by pushing edge loops around or as I have done here, using the edge crease level.

Materials

As I mentioned, the database power plant structure contains a material that I am quite proud of. This project allowed me to practice more of the decal method I had used in previous animations from this set.

I'm sure there are ways to organize this better, for example, grouping the decals as their own node groups, but there is something pretty about a large spaghetti node tree that I keep chasing these down. These sorts of things often make sense to us as artists as we are working on them, and as I'm looking at this now, it does become foggy as to what I was thinking. In the end, that doesn't really matter, as oftentimes we're creating assets that are only needed once. The important thing is that we take lessons from each project we work on.

Conclusion

This marks the end of the Reimagined series, covering all of the assets I worked on at least. The time spent working on these animations marked a great learning journey in my career. Each step plunging me deeper into the world of Blender and all that it has to offer.

Back again with yet another entry in the reimagined series. This week we're looking at INFORMATION and how it can be re-imagined. Working on a marketing team for a tech company I have been tasked with visualising information more times than I can recall, and it's always the same challenge: how do we visualise such an abstract nebulous concept such as data, or information?

My idea with this looping animation was to show a generic cartoon-esque machine that turned something generic (the black spheres) into something recognisable (the company logo balloon) as a way to show how the company's solutions turn messy, unstructured data into something human-readable and actionable!

The Process

This concept was cut early on in the process so I don't have a lot of early works to show. Below you can see me working through what GOBO to use.

Working with simulations can be very resource-intensive, and I have found the simulation cache in Blender to be less than reliable. To get around these problems, we need to create our scenes in a more intelligent way. Enter the MDD file format made by our friends at NewTek of Tricastor fame! We can use the MDD to store our simulation, simply export the simulation and then reimport the MDD file. We get a mesh that contains a shape key for each frame of the cached simulation, as seen below. This allows us to duplicate the simulated shape over and over again, add position or scale adjustments/animation ALL while maintaining a very performant scene.

Materials

With this project I continued to explore the idea of creating a collection of branded materials. This one features another grid, which I used as the primary background.

The graph here shows using a Voronoi texture to drive the grid texture. IT was designed to be very simple and very controllable. The same mindset I had when working on all of the materials in this set. The tools offered in Blender's shader editor offer a near limitless amount of possibilities. As exemplified here using the Voronoi texture in a way that might not seem obvious at first!

Conclusion

This specific animation, while being incredibly simple, offered a great amount of problem-solving opportunities in the form of the complex cloth simulations. Overcoming the performance problem that was presented by using a point cloud cache saved hours of frustration and a great amount of sanity.

Another entry in the reimagined series, this time the ask was DECISIONS to be re-imagined. Again, total creative freedom, just make it pretty and make it loop. For this piece, I opted to create another techy-looking abstract scene focusing on notifications. The idea being these are notifications that need ACTION and require decisions to be made.

The Process

Like all creative projects, this one went through many rounds of revisions and I'd like to share some of what could have been along the way.

UV texture mapping is nothing new, and we're all familiar with its principles; however, with this project, I wanted to experiment with specific UV decal mapping. The ability to store many UV maps on objects lets us single out specific areas or faces that we wish to texture in a unique way. In the example below, I am mapping this icon onto the top face. We will get into this more in the materials section below!

Materials

As mentioned above, we will take a deep dive into the materials used in this scene. As you can see in the graph below, I have created a gradient texture as a base. Added some fine detail with the normal mapping. BUT the new technique comes in at the top of the graph. We are using our UV decal map as the vector position for that image node. This is something that was not obvious to me as I started my 3D journey. MULTIPLE UV maps, VECTOR DATA? What is all of this?

Another Major goal with the materials in this project was to create something that could be unique to our corporate brand. Materials that would have a greater reach than this project alone. You can see some smooth-textured gradients and the stiff branded grid as examples of textures that could be worked into other designs going forward.

Conclusion

Learning 3D to me is like peeling back the layers of an infinite onion. When you look at the world as math, you will quickly realise that the possibilities are endless. A tool like Blender is the perfect platform for exploring this creativity. The proliferation of AI has further allowed this creativity to flourish thanks to Blender's Python interpreter.

This project in particular, introduced me to a texturing technique that I would continue to use in the years to come. As such, we are once again left with an unused project that granted me an invaluable skill. Taking every project as an opportunity to learn is what makes us great artists even greater.

The team and I were asked to create loopable animations that would act as webpage backgrounds for various corporate campaign webpages. That was it, the entire ask, total creative freedom! Beyond that we were given just a handful of words, including Engineering reimagined. This felt like the perfect time to flex some 3D design skills and below are the results of some noodling around in Blender.

The Process

The animation above is the result of many rounds of feedback that I Greg Johns the animator, diligently worked through. So, in the following section, let me present you with some of the other versions that this animation went through.

Below, you can see the viewport view of the original render. This is where I fell in love with curve-based modelling. Almost all the objects you can see below began as a curve path before being converted and extruded into proper meshes. This method gives us extremely smooth shapes with great accuracy, and the power behind this method is the included Curve Tools Add-on. If you haven't stumbled upon that gem yet, please take a look!

Compositing

Let's take a second to talk about the compositing.

This was one of the first projects I decided to take a deep dive into what can be done with Blender's compositing tools. Myself, having an extensive After Effects background I found it to be a bit of a challenge to adapt those skills to Blender's node-based compositing workflow (AND yes, I realise node-based compositing is the industry standard, I've just been raised on AFTER EFFECTS)

The node tree above is for the image below. I had a lot of fun trying to develop some unique glowy bloom effects for this piece. Anyone who knows me will attest to my love for bloom! The most unique part of this comp is the directional streak on the yellow object. This was achieved with some careful cryptomatting and various transform and blur nodes.

Materials

Where do I begin? The shadder editor in Blender is a great deal of fun to mess around with. Every material in this scene was made through trial and error, experimenting with different techniques.

The node graph above is for the orange data cube that ended up getting scrapped before the final draft. It contained a lot of little details that likely were not perceivable to the end user. Such as a procedurally animated data matrix on the side of it, and you can see the simple logic for that in the top left of the graph.

All of the materials in this scene attempted to convey a high-tech feel, something rooted in math and science. I attempted to create a simple grid that most of the later materials were based on. The glass tubes, for example, were meant to represent trace on an integrated circuit board.

Conclusion

In the end we didn't use any of the animations created for this project. They have lived on a hard drive on my computer waiting to see the light of day for years, so Im glad to finally be able to share the process and learnings with you all. MY key takeaway from this project was that things don't need to be perfect. Your client is never going to see how perfect the geometry is or how much of a technical feat the materials you created are. In the end, if it looks pretty and the client is happy, nothing else really matters.

My first and only roll through my Olympus Pen S. Only as of now, but we'll get into that.

Image

• Olympus Pen S
• Kodak Gold 200
• Ungraded
• UN Cropped

Story

When deciding how to present these photos I was a little unsure of what route to go down. BUT as this website is meant to showcase my raw unedited photos I decided it should also include these uncropped half-frame photos. Most of these are not grouped for any sort of artistic reason and in theory, should have been separated but alas.

Let's talk about the camera now. The Olympus Pen S is the oldest camera I own being manufactured in the late 1950's. I bought this from someone In Japan via eBay for a somewhat decent price at the time, as it was proving to be difficult to buy a half-frame camera in my local area. It's a fun camera to have in the collection but seldom leaves my shelf. This is simply because it's hard to use and the resolution isn't great(it's HALF of normal 35mm Math that out yourself).

I think the biggest detracting feature of this camera is the fact that it is a viewfinder camera, and it relies on zone focusing which is something I always struggle to pull crisp focus with. Not to say it is impossible with this camera, just that I have trouble with it. And it is because of that, and the fact that you need to shoot 72 frames to finish a roll, that I have never again taken this camera for a spin.

BONUS

The Pizza Nova set! Honestly just trying to use these up so they don't die on my file server. Nothing much to be said here other than some more focus misses.

Adieu

Thank you for indulging in some camera nerd exploration here.

A trip to my brother's friend's dad's rescue farm'sss.

Image

• Nikon FE
• Fuji Colour 200
• Ungraded

Story

I am normally a fan of birds but these ones were a little wild for my taste. This was an odds and sods farm run by my Brother's friend Michael's dad. His OTHER friend also named Michael is featured in the photos below. However, the most stand-out character of all was BUTCH. the Large turkey in the second photo. This guy was mean. Follows us around making some sort of growling sound. It later entered the home and pooped on the floor. All good though because I saw a dog come and eat the poop. Butch's secret was safe until I wrote it out here.

I do not remember what Nikkor lens I used to shoot this with but I was always impressed with the extremely crisp depth of field it was able to produce. Take a look at the mangey grey parrot. that focal plane must be millimeters wide. Super super crisp.

Adieu

Thank you to Butch for having us this day.

Shots from a 2019 Ontario Door Open Day.

Image

• Nikon FE
• Fuji Colour 200
• Ungraded

Story

Doors Open Ontario is one of my favorite ongoing events. It gives cities the chance to show off a behind-the-scenes look at various infrastructures that are normally closed to the public. These photos in particular are from the Pioneer Tower in Kitchener. Which is right across the street from where my Friend Thaisun lived at the time. So yes a very exotic sight to see.

Only one of these photos is good. The others are EXPERIMENTAL art I would say. We will let you as the viewer decide.

BONUS

As an added bonus here are the remaining pictures from 2019's Doors Open. Both are from Lot 42 in Kitchener. It seems I did not shoot a whole lot of film this time around. OR I didn't realize how close to the end of the roll I was.

Adieu

Many thanks for taking a look at the Doors Open Collection.

A harrowing journey to the top of Mont Royal on a busted-up foot.

Image

• Nikon F3
• Fuji Colour 200
• Ungraded

Story

Winter in Montreal was worth all the blisters in the world. I think - probably not in the moment. After getting lost the first night in town my friend Brad and I wandered aimlessly through the cold streets of Montreal, all while breaking in a new pair of shoes. The resulting blisters made this Mount Royal hike a living nightmare. For reference, this "Mont" has a road access path that leads all the way to the top so it was not much of a hike.

These photos were shot on the very affordable(at the time, not sure what the current year price is) Fuji c200. This was the first film stock I ever used probably because of its affordable price point. I would not let the price scare you though, because the quality does not disappoint. You can see below the range it can handle, both interior and exterior on an overcast snowy day. Decently impressive stuff!

Adieu

Thank you for taking a look at these!

There is just something about this street corner in Bayfield Ontario that transports me to another time.

Image

• Nikon F3
• Kodak Pro Image 100
• Ungraded

Story

Once again Pro image 100 shows up in force. This film stock is cheap and I still have lots of it in my freezer. It is the perfect neutral 100 ASA film for outdoor photography, taking the tones out of the equation and forcing us to rely on the other photography fundamentals!

BONUS

The Bayfield Peir is a portal to the wonderful Lake Huron, my absolute favorite of all the great lakes.

Adieu

Thank you for taking a look at these!

A collection of photos depicting Stratford Ontario's most iconic residents.

Image

• Nikon F3
• Kodak Portra 400
• Ungraded

Story

Oh, Stratford... at the time of writing this it's where I've ended up living, and have been for many years. But when these photos were shot that idea was not on my radar, Stratford was just a cute town slightly out of the way from the area I was most familiar. Fast forward a few years and here we are living the dream in the festival capital of Ontario.

Now onto the photos; there isn't anything significant about these photos, hence the exclusion from my curated Instagram feed. But they are memories and they deserve to be archived!

Adieu

Thank you for taking a look at these!

What did these pigs do?

Image

• Nikon F3
• Kodak Portra 400
• Ungraded

Story

Wow, a throwback to when it was illegal to walk in the park. I hope that I can document some wild evolutions of the earth on this website. A snapshot in time for each one of these!

All we have in this world really, are the stories we tell ourselves and it is through writing them down and sticking them on the internet that we can ensure they outlast us. AT LEAST until my webserver is knocked offline, then this all just lives on a hard drive in a closet destined to be forgotten.... like tears in rain.

BONUS

And as a final follow-up here is one of my favorite photos I have of myself!

Adieu

Hope you enjoyed it!

More like THE blurry pic. I'm not sure what happened but this whole set is off.

Image

• Nikon F3
• Kodak Gold 200
• Ungraded

Story

Say what you will about Kodak Gold (does anyone say anything bad??) This film is great. The Purple hue in the sky here turns this construction site into something otherworldly. As I'm writing this I have the newly released 120 Gold loaded into my ETRSi. One day I will have that roll finished and will be able to post it to compare the results.

This was a quick little photo shoot my brother and I did to use up the rest of the roll on our way back to our parent's house after completing the Blue Civic shoot you can find on this site. Not much to say about it other than how much i love the sky!

Adieu

Thanks for viewing this purple hue!