soymint

I started working on animation in 1995 at Varga Studio in Hungary. I moved to LA 1997 to be a technical director at VirtualMagic Animation, then worked at Disney as a CGI lead from 2002. I left Disney and LA in 2006 when we decided to have Sophie, the cutest baby of them all (this move is hard to explain especially to people that don’t know Sophie.)

During the years I had the privilege to work with a bunch of talented people on probably hundreds of commercials and titles like Kipper, Jonny Quest, The Powepuff Girls Movie and about a dozen movies at Disney.

I’ll list some of my contributions here that are closest to my heart.

created grass field effect to match art direction of sequence

• each blade of grass was set up with an fk rig driven by expressions to achieve the effect of slightly blowing wind
• created simple gui controls for animators (like wind speed, cycle offset etc)
• proxy version of grass field played real time in Maya

supervised butterfly effect set up (Ogawa San, where are you?)

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created firefly “particle” effect

• fireflies actually used randomly selected hand-animated cycles to satisfy Director’s expectations

worked with Art Director and Director to set up color key for sequence

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set up rain particle system and fog environmental effect
worked with Art Director to create color keys for sequence

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planned out layout of environment based on five drawings from Art Director
created camera move
supervised modelling and texturing of environment
wrote rib exporter plugin for Maya to export polygons with texture information and render as subdivision surfaces inrenderman
devised solution for the most challenging part of the shot where the camera turns around 2d hand-animated Tarzan and slowly tracks back over a great distance

• provided 3d proxy animation for 2d animators
• created plugins for Maya and Toonboom’s USAnimation software to allow Tarzan to be animated at the same size throughout the turnaround and track back

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created crowd system, which involved:

• placement of crowds based on 2d density maps
• the supervision of modelling and cycle animation
• creating provisions for the animation cycle scheduling to be fully overwritable by animator
• proxy replacement, geometry exporting and renderman rendering pipeline

seduced, then married the producer (bwahahahaha!)

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based on findings from the Mulan 2 crowd system, set up an exclusively Maya pipeline and system which allowed movement

of characters

• special attention was paid to prevent characters’ feet from slipping and sliding above ground
• created gui to allow easy animation timing and placement of characters
• supervised character set up and animation

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set up look for sequence
created cloth and fire effect
worked with animator to achieve and control depth of field effect of shadow puppets
rendered and composited elements

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for my last two years at Disney I’ve worked on the Tinkerbell Movie; I didn’t stay though the whole production, but while I was there:

• supervised modeling of main characters
• supervised setup of blend shapes for main characters
• supervised body and facial rig setup for human characters
• set up pipeline between between Disney and outsource studio
• worked with animation director to create “2d animation principles applied in 3d” curriculum for subcontracting studio
• managed set up and implementation of studio’s asset management system

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All images and movies are copyright their rightful owners.