Phill Mayer’s Portfolio

This project was inspired by Light Art Performance Photography. View some at www.lapp-pro.de. To create this project I used SideFX Houdini. There is a sculpture that is driven by music, in this case Tinie Tempah’s Pass Out. The individual arms represent set frequencies and rotate accordingly. The blue circles are created every time there there is a deep enough bass note. From this information in the CHOP’s network particles are emitted from a POP network. The background plate was created using Vue. The final images were rendered on SCAD’s renderfarm and compsited using Nuke.

I was recently inspired by a clip from CSI Season 10, Episode 1. The episode opens with a large “walk though” of a scene where time has been frozen. I decided to recreate this effect except with a glass of milk frozen in time. I shot the background plate using an HVX 200. I had the talent in the plate hold still for the duration of the shot. I matchmoved the plate using PF Track. After the 3D camera solve was complete I created a RealFlow simulation to simulate milk splashing out of a thrown glass.  To create the look of milk I used physical subsurface scattering in Maya with Mental Ray. Next I rendered out the milk using Maya on SCAD’s Renderfarm. I took the individual render passes and composited them into the original plate using Nuke.

As a followup to the mechanical mirrors project I have created an animation now driven exclusively by CHOP’s in Houdini (instead of an image sequence). The song D for Danger by Original Sin was used to drive the animation. Inside of the CHOP network the audio was split up into unique frequency ranges for each point of the sphere. As the frequency changed the circles were moved in and out by the sound. In plain english, the music made the circles move based on what notes and how loud they were.

This piece was created with SideFX Houdini. Inspiration for this animation came from installations created by Daniel Rozin. His installations use hundreds of mirrors (and other surfaces) to reflect the environment to create a dynamic image. The image is created by calculating luminance values from a camera mounted inside of the installation. I used a similar method in Houdini; my original footage (Lucid Pictures) was run though a VOP SOP network to calculate the luminance values. These values where then used to determine how much to rotate the thousands of mirrors to form the final animation.

This project was completed for my digital materials and textures course. The object of the assignment was to create a scene entirely with procedural textures. The sculpture is made of silver and inside of the sculpture is a giant soap bubble. The only file based textures are the clouds which I created using vue 7, and the texture for the wood floor. Below are images showing the shading networks used in Maya and Mental Ray to create the look of the materials.