Da'mu

Da'mu is a character I created and modeled for the "Creative Pre-Production" class at Ex'pression. The class entailed creating armatures for our models, sculpting them with super sculpy clay, baking them, and finally painting them. Additionally, we had to create a short animatic that told a story about the character, which I will post later once it's uploaded to Vimeo.

"Olympic Whispers"

I worked alongside over a dozen fellow students at Ex'pression College for Digital Art to create this short film from scratch in 2 weeks for presentation in the Cinemagic International Film Festival for Young People.

The project is part 2 of 3 in a series of films, where each segment was required to begin with the last frame of the one that preceeded it. Instructors were not allowed to offer any help beyond introducing us to the project. 

My roles on the project included animation, painting skin weights on rigs, and providing troubleshooting help.

A part of "Olympic Whispers" from Cinemagic's International Film Festival for Young People from Michael DiNocco on Vimeo.

New "Tommy"

Second strip done for Firecracker Weekly, a print/digital newspaper aimed at children in the 6-14 age range.

Piano Turntable

This is a piano I modeled in a week in Maya. This was for a 2-week modeling and shading workshop (we didn't quite get through the entirety of the shading part...modeling ran longer than expected I think) taught at Ex'pression by Pixar veterans, Andrew Dayton and Josh Qualtieri. Both are modelers there, with Andrew being a hard-surface guy and Josh creating ground-planes and shaders.

During the workshop, we learned about critical elements for model construction, such as proper edge-flow, polygon efficiency/optimization, how UVs are layed out for film as opposed to games (though UVs in film are well on their way out the door), how to use Pixar's Renderman for shading, and why it is important to distinguish texturing from shading in the film world.

We also learned how to make our models feel more realistic by utilizing "wear" passes to make the object feel like it has been used. If you look around, you'll notice how there is rarely a perfectly straight line on any hard-surface. By doing this, you'll end up with fantastic and subtle occlusion in your AO passes and give your model that extra, "Oomph."

This model is sort of a hyrbid between game and film quality. In a film, this could get away with being a medium-to-long-distance object. In a film, the flat panels would have edge-loops running through them to create even quads, but in a game they would devoid of these extra loops to save polys as seen here. Of course, at roughly 35,000 tris, this would be never really be acceptable in a game unless it a realllly important piano...maybe not even then :P

The Starfish Ninja Teaser Trailer is Finally Here!

The Starfish Ninja teaser trailer is finally here! Directed by Joe Daniels, with music done by Emmy award-winning composer Eric Arvai, the road to completion has been a long one. Hundreds of hours of work from dozens of talented artists went into this project. Starfish Ninja has been the brain child of Joe Daniels since 2005 and it has been an honor to contribute in finalizing the first step toward his dream of making SFN a television series for children and adults of all ages. The story revolves around our reluctant hero, a Starfish with a dream of becoming a ninja, who finds himself forced to take on the responsibility of saving the ocean from a variety of nefarious sea creatures and villains.

The rendering was done using Maya 2012's new Viewport 2.0 Hardware rendering, allowing renders to be pumped out at 1-2 seconds a frame (compared to ~10 sec/f when using Mental Ray). The compositors and lighters, Asif Haque, Janine LaBar and Curtis Cheung, did an amazing job here considering the unusual workflow. Shout-outs to my fellow animators, Kimberlee Allyn, Gillian Mantchev, Elissa Peterson and Zsuzi Czompo, whom I worked side-by-side with for months to bring the diverse cast to life. To Peter Whiteside, Abraham Rodriguez, and Jenna Kind, our dynamics crew. Without their contributions we'd of had no bubbles, sand poofs, chains, or billowing sand clouds to take each shot to the next level. And, to Claire Bussell, Jared Newkirk, and Robert Garcia, our modelers, who created epic environments and set-pieces for the characters to live in. I apologize if I've missed anyone here (let me know so I can add you!). Just know that your hard work and dedication certainly have not gone unnoticed.

Anyhow, without further ado, here it is: the one and only Starfish Ninja!

SFN Audio Storyboards

Storyboards I did for a Starfish Ninja dialogue test using audio from Karate Kid 2. The timing is too fast in a few places, but this was just meant to give the animators a quick read of the idea/scope (rather than being an actual animatic) of the project.

Tommy

Tommy is a character I came up with several years ago. The tone and style of the comic is heavily inspired by Calvin & Hobbes with a good dose of Lio thrown in the mix (which in and of itself is heavily C&H inspired).