Hey everyone....this section is devoted to common questions that I've recieved from people through email or on msn messenger. Hopefully the addition of this section to my site will help you out a bit if you're curious about how I work :)

Did you go to school for 3d/animation/*insert-subject-here*?

No...I am completely self-taught and learned animation during highschool in my spare time.

What books/tutorials/resources did you use to learn 3d/animation/etc?

95% of the time I learned strictly through trial-and-error methods and through the application of observation (in combination with reading the max help files). The rest of the time I picked up some techniques from websites like cgtalk, the3dstudio (while it still had a forum) and Comet-Cartoons (to name a few places). I never really bought any books on cg during my early learning stage, although lately I've purchased a few books in order to help me refine my skillsets (Stop Staring by Jason Osipa....cgToolkit books on rigging etc.)

Where can I find good tutorials/resources which deal with *insert-subject-here*?

Google.com or cgtalk.com.

Can you write more tutorials and/or can you write a tutorial on *insert-subject-here*?

Although I wish I had more time to write tutorials....they usually take a long time to put together and therefore I rarely have a chance to make one. Hopefully in the future I'll have time to make more.

For your film "the Beast Within" did you use any 3rd party tracking software?

Nope...all the tracking for "the Beast Within" was done using 3dsmax's camera tracker utility.

How did you rig the wings/feathers on your sparrow?

The wings' rig consists of 2 bones....the forearm bone and the upper arm bone.

The feathers were modelled as individual objects and then were given orientation constraints to control their rotation, which were weighted in accordance with their rotational distance from either the upper arm or lower arm bones. If a feather was rotationally closer to the forearm bone than the upper arm bone, then the forearm bone was given a greater influence on it then the upper arm bone (and vice versa). Might sound tricky but it was a really easy setup. Here are some images and playblasts that will help to further illustrate how the rig worked:

sp_playblast.mpg
sp_shaded.jpg
sp_wing.mpg
sp_wires.jpg
sparrow_screen.jpg

How did you do the transformations in your Sony ad?

All of the transformations were done using visual tricks like flipping objects around to reveal new parts, or occluding them from view for a frame or two and then hiding them so as to allow large parts to disappear within smaller parts etc etc. Everything was done manually and keyframed by hand. If you watch the animation frame-by-frame you can basically see exactly how I did everything...and you'll also notice how simple the transformations really are. What helped the shot was that there were a lot of very simple things happening at once, which gave off the feeling of something really complicated happening (which is also a cool visual trick).

***more to come!***