Portfolio – Recent Work

Architectural Motion Graphics

Work from my time at Foster+Partners in London.

Luxury Brand Work

Then, in Manchester, at The Hut Group, spent some time doing lots of luxury brand renders and animations. The focus was on pushing visuals and making them feel premium. They owned a bunch of brands, but they all stayed under the same tone umbrella.

This video was for their rebrand. Lots of sleekbased-on-real-life models and particle effects.

Same, but this time for a more tech oriented sub-brand they owned.

Fintech Fun

Now, at BlockFi, lots of animations based around the card and cryptocurrency coins. Saturated colors and an overall playful feel dipping into nostalgia.

It’s a relatively new company and they’re still working out their visual identity so I’ve worked within a wide range of styles, but I’ve also tried to base all of the highly visible 3D stuff on their existing 2D illustrations, working up a 3D style guide for freelancers, agencies, and 2D designers on the team who want to learn 3D (I even still do the Scotch/C4D Fridays over hangout, minus the Scotch).

Character Rigging

You’d mentioned that you all were doing quite a bit of character work. I’ve really been pushing hard on that.

I’ve done some projects at BlockFi that required different sorts of characters with various levels of complexity.

Here’s a character for a video. This was all Maya because the rig had to be really flexible, powerful, and fast.

TANGENT – CROWDS

Crowd explorations…

So, take this character, it’s a weirdly proportioned character with bad personal taste (rigged and animated in Maya).

Houdini can sort of understand that rig when you bring it in. It doesn’t understand the controls, just the points (what parts are what – hip, ankles, etc).

One thing you can do is applying motion capture data to it. This looks a bit unsettling, but you get the idea. This is free motion capture data download from Adobe and applied to a character that had been rigged for hand animation in Maya.

Where this gets cool is taking ‘clips’ that you’ve hand animated and using them like a video game would (in a game you’d have an animation for walking, running, standing still, etc).

Here I have two really quickly done looping animations done on a character.

If you feed these into a crowd sim and tell it to go, you can do all sorts of stuff. Massive groups of people doing different things: seeking things out, avoiding things (including each other), stopping and taking a breath when they’ve gone a certain distance or if they bump into one another. You could have certain groups go to one area and others go to another and each group could have it’s own animations unique to that area. Try to ignore where they overlap with each other… they can avoid each other but that takes a little more time and I wanted to get this up.

So many interesting ways to go with this and this took just a few minutes to set up, I just plugged in those ‘loops’ above and scattered them onto a grid and pressed play.

Too, it’s a good example of all the programs playing nice. Character animations in Maya brought over into Houdini and piped into a simulation, then you could take this to C4D to add motion graphics or other elements and render.

Maybe it doesn’t apply, but I think it’s even more interesting now that we live in this sort of world of Edward Hopper visuals where characters are all disconnected. I don’t think that’s just animators being lazy, I think we live that world now, too. It’s striking and comforting to see lots of things interacting.

There can definitely a zombie/insect vibe to crowd stuff, but on the other hand, people don’t do them with more friendly, playful minimal characters. It doesn’t have to be humanoid characters, either – it could be shapes that interact and illustrate concepts. I think there’s something there. But that’s all just an aside.