I grabbed a simple scene from one of Jeremy Birn’s old lighting challenges to test out V-Ray.  I’m hoping to get some more in depth work with this renderer in the near future.

So it’s been awhile but I did make it to California safely. The trip was amazing; it’s definitely something I’d like to do again when I have more time. We took it fairly slow but ideally I would like to spend closer to a month traveling, with many more detours and stops. A northern route might be interesting as well.

Lexi and I settled into an apartment in Long Beach in the beginning of September, and we both started looking for work. We had done research and prepared as much as we could before the move, so we were able to start sending out applications right away. After a few weeks I saw some new listings from Digital Domain, and ended up applying to a position titled Digital Production Administrator. I got a call from a recruiter a few days later asking me to come in for an interview. I ended up coming back the next week for a second interview, where I got to meet some of the leads in the department. The interviews went really well, and they offered me a job which I accepted.

It’s been about 2 months since I started at DD, and work has been going really well. I got 6 weeks of training which made the transition as easy as possible. The job itself consists of managing render farm resources, archives and restores, dailies submissions, and keeping data moving between Venice and other DD locations. Not exactly the most glamorous gig in town, but I think it provides me a nice foundation to build upon. Also I get to skip over that whole intern thing, which was a major factor in accepting the position.

I put some of the CG work on hold as I plan my road trip to Los Angeles. I’ll be traveling with a few friends on the 8 day, 3,000 mile journey. We could probably do it faster, but we’re taking some detours to visit the Grand Canyon and Las Vegas. Two places I’ve never been before, and this is probably the best (only?) opportunity to see them. I also made sure to schedule a trip through Nashville which is another city I’ve always been curious about.

I’m thinking it will get really painful around Arkansas, but hopefully pick up around Albuquerque or Arizona.  To further complicate things I’ll be traveling with my dog, a 60 pound pitbull, and as such will be at the mercy of pet-friendly hotels.  Hopefully she doesn’t get too antsy on the long rides through the desert, but I figure we can just pull over and run her around for 30 minutes whenever she does.  We could probably use the pitstops anyway.

We’ll be taking the Southern route and the total state count looks like 12: PA, WV, OH, KY, TN, AR, OK, TX, NM, AZ, NV, and CA.  Hopefully we can collect a few photos from each state and even some HDRs, that is if my mirror ball ever gets delivered.  They sent me a red one last time.  RED.

I’m trying to get more comfortable with Mental Ray on this project. The fruit are all simple models, but most of my time has been spent in texturing and shading. Textures were done from photo references and the shading has all been done using the mia_material. This shader is a lot different than what I’ve been using in my previous Renderman-based projects, but I think I am starting to get a grasp on it. I’m planning to take this model and integrate it into some footage at some point, so I’m going for a more realistic render here. This is also the first time I’ve payed much attention to linear workflow, which is a lot easier than I originally thought it would be.

Got some more practice with green screen keying in Nuke today using some free footage from Timeline GFX. Did some testing with HueKeyer, Keylight, and IBK. Ended up using Keylight for a solid garbage matte and combined it with the IBK. It helped that I had a clean plate to reference, but I’ll be experimenting with some intentionally worse scenarios in the future.