Another iPhone sketch!!!

And yet another one.

Well I simply haven't been able to stop finger painting on this damn thing. :)



- Posted from my iPhone

And another.

It's pretty adictive.


- Posted from my iPhone

Another iPhone sketch.

Iphone sketch

Yup. I have an Iphone. I love it. My beautiful girlfriend decided to surprise me with it a couple of nights ago. I've be looking at all the cool painting and 3d apps available for it and I even bought a couple. The best one in my opinion is the one called "layers". Why? Because it has layers and it has a 'smudge tool'. Here's a little test I did with it this afternoon.

Life drawing

Some tabletop sketches

Stubble and tatoos.

Mudbox for Linux

has announced that DreamWorks Animation SKG, Inc. (NASDAQ:DWA) and Sony Pictures Imageworks are integrating Autodesk Mudbox software into their Linux-based production pipelines. Autodesk Consulting’s custom development team worked collaboratively with teams at Imageworks and DreamWorks to port the digital sculpting and texture painting software to the Linux platform...
Click here for more info...

Miner

Acrylics on canvas

This was to start getting a feel for acrylics. Not amazing, but it's a start and it was very relaxing to do.

Some gear for my miner.

Started dressing him up a bit.

Avatar trailer.

Ok, so I'm probably a little late on news considering I'm working on the movie and that almost everyone with an internet connection has already seen this.But here it is anyway.
Avatar.
The new trailer.This is what has kept me busy for the past 6 months. I joined the forces late in the game to help out on the final big push. Everyone at Weta has been working so hard and so passionately on this movie. It has been a very humbling and inspiring experience. To have some of the best talent the world has to offer is one thing, but to have them working so hard and relentlessly is truely incredible. It has definitely taught me a lot about humility, stamina and focus. Nothing gets done with random eratic spurts of genius. You need constant, sustained and well managed genius to achieve something like Avatar.
So without further adieu ladies and gents, Avatar.

some slight progress

update on the old man

warrior

Mastering Mystery.

I have opened a new blog. Yes, yet another one. But it's ok, because I've closed a whole bunch of my other ones which turned out to be useless to make room.
This one is going to be special. Different. It's going to be a documentation of my journey Mastering Side Effects Software's Houdini.
Now, I'm not a complete newbie at it. I've been messing around with it for a while now. I even organised a training event in Wellington which a lot of my Weta digital colleagues attended.
I've been looking at it for a few years actually, but I only got a real introduction to how amazing this piece of Software was when I started working at Doctor D a year or so ago. I was impressed. Very impressed in fact. So impressed that I think I can make the following informed exclamation: Houdini is the best pipeline foundation, lighting and effects software ever made.
For the most part it makes Maya feel like an old broken piece of abandoned freeware in comparison. Houdini is incredible and most people won't believe me when I say that but it is EASIER to learn than Maya. Way easier. nothing is hidden in menus and intricate plugins and scripts and platform despondencies and buttons over here and over there and random f**cking attributes that mean nothing but seem to blow up everything in your shot. The entire package follows a rigid Mantra (no pun intended) of nodes and groups and expressions. Everything throughout the package works following this same pattern and thus makes it very easy to learn. Once you've learned procedural modelling in Houdini then you also know particles, dynamics, lighting and compositing. Yep, believe it or not, with Houdini you can do it all in one package, and hook it all up together in the craziest way imaginable. If you have used Nuke or Shake and you want to get into 3D, get Houdini, period.
Anyway, to come back to my original point. I've made a new blog, and hopefully I'll have time to fill it up with impressions ideas and tips and tricks for you out there who are intrigued by Houdini but are still using max (shudder)... Aaah.. It's ok, I still love you. Just wipe your dirty hard-drive, install Ubuntu, Houdini and maybe Nuke and I won't have to slug you.
So I guess after this amazing intro you'll have no choice but to visit the MASTER OF MYSTERY!
First post coming up now.
PS- ICE in XSI, that all so "cool" ICE, has been in Houdini under the name os VOPS for freakin' ages! And it's thoroughly stable and integrated. Just wanted to ad that.

Quick Zbrush old man

wip of Rei

This has changed slightly from the original Rei Ayanami, but I don't really care it's more of an exercise. :)

My version of Rei

Just another notepad sketch

a post from simon's girlfriend :)

hey everyone, simon is working crazy hours at weta so i've been helping him out doing everything from making sure there's always a nice of bottle wine at home to updating his blog for him! :) even through working 18/hr days he managed to get these nice drawings out to you :) enjoy!

Notepad sketches.

When you think I'm carefully taking notes about this shot we're reviewing... I'm really not.

A scratch pad sketch...

I did during a boring review.

Napoleon LeGrand

So looks like my colleagues at WETA don't have any respect for me either... God damnit, I swear people will respect me! Even if I have have to conquer all of Europe and bend them forcefully to my will!!! eerr...
Thanks to James Dee for this wicked rendition of the awesome person that I am... Why do people keeping laughing...

More play - Wu shu kid

Zbrush play

Moto Kid

Quirks

My new home office...

...and my first little project.

Robot sketch.

I met the Toro.

EVA type robot sketch.

For my going away, the lovely friends at Doctor D bought me a set of wicked markers. So I thought I'd give them a try today. I love these things!

Off to WETA!

Well here we are. I have been talking about heading to Wellington, NZ for a while now with my girlfriend. Recently we decided that it was time to leave Sydney. I have been here for 4 years and I really can't stay any longer. After looking at the positions WETA had to offer, by a stroke of luck, I was told by my friend Ruth that Layout was looking for people. I thought the department would be a great way to satisfy my technical hunger, and help me build up a wider skill set. I'me very excited to be starting on Avatar in 3 weeks.

My new website is up.

Click here to go to my super new site!

Thanks so much to my beautiful girlfriend, Charm. She made me this site in about uuhh, 3 seconds and it looks better than anything I could have imagined. It's - temporarily - using Charm's webspace so this address is a temp.

My new reel is online. Vimeo rocks!

Simon Legrand - Showreel 2008 from slegrand on Vimeo.

Where the Wild Things Are - Trailer.

I worked on this doing modeling for a while at Animal. It was actually a very hard experience. The models needed to be 100% accurate to the practical mask, across all shots and all masks. I worked on the Tzippy character mostly.

Where the Wild Things Are | Directed by Spike Jonze from JoeL K on Vimeo.

Comcast Rabbit.

I worked on this at Animal too. I was brought on after finishing the Carlton draught one. I rebuilt the rabbit topology (original sculpt was by the amazing Dave King) I also did some lighting on this.

Comcast Commercial - A Genetically Modified Rabbit/Panther from Tim Dorr on Vimeo.

The carlton draught skyshow...

...on which I did a Sh*t load of work back at Animal.

Carlton TVC from Dan Patmore on Vimeo.

Rendered with hdri.

That's just a test for my showreel turntable setup. Not quite there but hey, I upload stuff so I can show my friends at work and talk about it, it's easier than having it on my usb memory stick.

update on the doc'

Start on a Doc Manhattan

Not there yet, but I decided to post a wip anyway. :)

update on pose

Focusing on posing.

Newtek: Lightwave CORE announced

Lightwave core. As described on the website, is a new 3D application core built by the Newtek. The way that it's pitched is that it will more or less like Lightwave, but the inner cogs will be brand spanking new. I sounds like when Softimage relesed XSI. It actually sounds really great, it's definitely about time we got some shinny new code in this old maya and max dominated industry. Now the kicker for me, and the only reason I mention it here is that it is meant to be fully cross platform. Meaning "LightWave CORE™ operates under all modern Windows flavors, from XP to 7, from 32 to 64. LightWave CORE™ is also a Macintosh COCOA application, and last, but certainly not least, Linux.". Yes, Newtek knows it too, Linux rocks. Thanks guys.

As if I wasn't busy enough (continued)

Well. Back to that idea of me working on other people's projects. I decided to give it a miss. This film is basically going to be nothing but VFX and I decided that it wasn't worth the months of free work involved. I'm, at the moment, concurrently writing a short "savate" film (which is turning out to be not so short) and another feature length script which has started appearing on the blank pages a week ago. Writing is nice, and I enjoy writing for story, not for VFX, so that is my main priority for now.
The other project taking my time is an electronics/mechanical project that I will release here all in due time. The moral of this post is... I don't want to do CG in my spare time.

The Spirit is out.

Well... let's just say that at least I got see my name on the credits. The movie was, errr, visually great, but uuh, storywise... I, I, I just don't know... I just don't know.

Cool fun movie to watch when you're either stoned or drinking though. (so I've heard). :D

As if I wasn't busy enough.

So after accepting a fulltime position at DoctorD in Sydney, as a senior 3D artist, here I am still attempting to fill my out of work time with more work... I guess we'll get to rest when we're dead... But I do need a holiday. I really do.
I would be involved as the VFX supervisor, and I'll hopefully do a good job of it.

New Zbrush thing.

I haven't had time to work on a lot of my own things, but I had an hour or so of sketching last night so I remembered I had a blog and thought I'd ad to it.
By the way this was entirely done on Linux with Zbrush running through wine, and basically performing better than on win32 (much faster reading and writing of virtual memory).
Of course the 2D editing was done in Gimp 2.6 which freaking rocks once you get used to it.