Wow! I've been a bit busy as of late (hence my posting over a month after the event in question), but it's an honor to have my Tahu 90th Anniversary recreation in the formal 810NICLE Day stream! (For the uninitiated, this is completely fan-run, currently two-day stream, and features interviews with official BIONICLE staff, various fan works of the last year, and more.) The stream is currently down, but the full contents are available as a playlist here !

 For some reason or another, I've put After Effects on my list of favorite photo editors. It isn't meant to be used as one at all, but I find its style of masking, color correction, and effects rather useful and pleasant to work with. In one instance of this, I decided to use After Effects for a Sequel Trilogy cover that mimics the stylized look of 2011’s trilogy releases: I fit the printed cover (one draft, anyway) and the sequel disks into a spare 2013 6-disc Prequels case, which allowed me to have each two-disc Blu-ray set in one case, so the spine is a bit wider than the other two. There isn't a giant face on the front, as there is with the other two, but beyond that I feel like the official mural I used for the front cover aligns with the painted look of the other two pretty decently. Here's my latest version of the full image, complete with a couple of other changes for accuracy:  As the printed version shows, some space on either side will be cut off in the f

One shot was never enough.  With real life kicking in and my specializing in a different field, I honestly thought most of Blender was behind me, outside the occasional test or minor project. However, this is probably my most advanced full-CG Blender project yet! I'm really grateful to learn that life doesn't have to put an end to projects like this. In any case, this was a full, multi-camera project rendered in Eevee (although the mask in the final shot was rendered in Cycles), and it used no small part of everything I'd learned (and some I hadn't yet): HDRIs, shape keys, multiple cameras, animated procedural texturing, and even gravity/collision physics. (I still don't dare attempt fluid simulation; the lava in the second-to-final shot used up to 6 shape keys to imitate both generic "waves" and its reaction to the falling rock.) In the meantime, I used After Effects for some minor compositing, sound, all of the final shot outside the mask itself, an

Hello all, Last October, my father (known to Zoom Times as the Grand Emperor of the Zoomlian Empire), a Theory of Knowledge teacher, learned that his school wanted a short video from each teacher in his program introducing prospective students to the program's various subjects. Having noticed that he has a video creator in the house and having a creative concept in mind, he approached me with an atypical script and asked about directing and editing the short film. As it turned out, I'd just recently acquired the video editor DaVinci Resolve and had been looking to test it out, and this helped me grab the basics of the program pretty quickly! This is mostly video editing (done completely in Resolve), although I did use After Effects for two shots, one compositing-focused and the other motion graphics-focused. I couldn't find any stock music that fit the tone my dad was looking for, but Lei Hart's "It's About Time" track worked perfectly, so I got permis

Oh no I guess a couple images weren't enough! Now, this could just be a one-shot project, but...

Now that BIONICLE's return is (in a sense) confirmed and imminent, I decided to jump on the hype train and place the Toa of Fire's latest iteration into some Ta-Wahi scenery!  Tahu himself was made with Stud.io, but the rigging and background were done by myself. I used some displacement maps here to actually affect the ground's geometry, and I was able to use a scratched-metal texture's bump map to add some scratches to Tahu in imitation of his 2001 animation, too!

There's a certain phenomenon BIONICLE fans know of, referred to as "the dream." When I first saw the teaser trailer for the second Doctor Strange installment, I knew what to do. To be honest, this is probably the first time I tried the After Effects rotoscoping tool and it actually turned out well. In the past (e.g. Clash of the Jedi ), the results of rotoscoping would be questionable, need a lot of cleanup, or both, which made me rely entirely on masking instead throughout the ABYDOS duology, but this time it worked out pretty painlessly. Anyway, I used rotoscoping for Strange himself and a mask for the ground; after that, it was mostly a matter of finding as many full shelf images as I could. I stuck them in a pre-comp, then moved it to track with Strange's vision and color graded it to fit in a little better, throwing a CC Snowfall on and tweaking it to match the ashes.