SO I finally got around to putting my thesis up on youtube. It's on my website already, but I guess youtube is easier for some people to check it out. Hope you enjoy. Check out all the other Ringling Thesis Projects from this year too!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=twIz-jM3x84

The sun set from our balcony at home

Here's my desk

Here's the courtyard at my studio. It's so relaxing to walk out side and see this everyday!

Just finished my first week at DreamWorks. It is such an amazing place! It's everything an animation studio should be! I can't describe just how happy I am to be here. I can have icecream everyday for free if I want to!!

The wifey and I have been busy moving into our new place. We had a headache of a move and had to fight tooth and nail with the movers for trying to over charge us for the stuff they did. Like oh I don't know....$65 for packing a large box that only had a dog leash in it!!!!! They ended up breaking stuff, dragging our mattress on the street, and losing one of our boxes somewhere in Kansas!!! This companies name was ATLAS. I strongly don't recommend them to anyone!

We had to ship my jeep cross country and it seemed fine until I tried to use my turn signals and found out they aren't working. Something must have rattled loose during transit. Of course the car movers say they won't pay to have it checked out because they didn't touch the blinkers.

The apartment we found sight unseen....actually turned out to be great! We lucked out there and we are very happy in our place and it's in a good location 2 miles from my studio. The dogs thought stairs were really cool at first, but they are going up an down a bit slower these days now that they realized they have to climb them every day.

Moving truck comes at 8am. I-10 westbound is about to become our new best friend. Here we go!

Well....I'm going to DreamWorks!

I just got hired to be an entry level surface artist working on Kung Fu Panda 2 in Glendale!!! We move this Friday coming up and I start in 2 weeks! Cross country trip here we come!

Just realized today how much I'm going to miss the 11x17in printers at school!

I'm a college graduate! Again! Now I'm job searching. I have a few good leads right now, and two of them are going very well. Hopefully I'm lucky enough to have one of them want to pick me up. Both are amazing companies! Hopefully soon I'll know more. Now that school is out I'm having fun spending time with my wife, adjusting back to real life, and still finding time to do a little modeling and art on my own. I actually have started jogging again so my transformation back into a healthy person is beginning again! 6 months from now I'll be just like I was before Ringling.

Senior CA end of the year show is tonight! 4 hours long, but it's going to be awesome! I can't wait to see all of our classes films up there on the big screen!

I am currently job searching. It is not something I like doing because I want to finally get into a studio, sink my teeth in and just work on amazing things with an amazing team of people. I got a taste of that during my internship and I really want to get back to that world of creating entertainment and actually getting paid to do it.

There are two studios I am very interested in right now that I have applied for and if I was lucky enough to go to either one of them I would be excited beyond words. All I can do is wait to see how things turn out. I'm finishing up loose ends at school and trying to pack my life into boxes to move.

We all made posters for our movies based off of Oscar nominated movies of the past. Did you know that Transformers not only was nominated for 2 Oscars, but it won one of them!

LowPolyModel

So just to take a break from all the highly detailed texturing stuff I've been doing for my Thesis, I decided to make a low poly environment model today. This was really fun to do. All together it only took a few hours and I'm happy how it turned out for what it is. I'm going to do a much more detailed environment next. Something Next-Gen systems could handle. Normal Maps and Baked lighting here I come! (Nerd alert!)

I'm liking the way it has turned out.

THESIS has been turned in! It's finally "done." I still have some things I need to fix and make better, but the grading part is over with. It is such a huge relief to have that deadline over with. I'll get some more stuff up in a little while, but I'll be sleeping a lot more and working on getting a job now. Graduation is coming!

comparison to the original

I still have some more "junk" to add to it to make it messy like the painting. Some chains, extra parts, and hoses. I need to bring the rest of my shots up to par first and then I'll come back to this one again. The rocket is not as prominent in the 3D version because the story has evolved to reveal the rocket in a different shot. This is just part of the teaser to see it now.
Latest version

Original Concept Art

After 2 months of battling with rendering errors and problems on the new render grid system they installed this year, I have finally managed to get an image that is acceptable for what I was originally envisioning. I've been able to render at home a little at a time with no problems, but when I would try to render at school it would never work correctly!! I would never have been able to batch render the whole thing at home before the final due date! Just as an experiment they reinstalled the old render farm from last year and after one attempt at rendering a scene it came back perfect. It turns out this ENTIRE TIME it wasn't my files that were messed up at all. It was the render farm!!!!!! The new farm is Linux based, the old farm Windows based! SO MUCH TIME WASTED!!!! ARGHHHH!!! I guess I did become much more versed in the intricacies of render settings that I tweaked countless times trying to correct problems that were never problems! I'm finally getting scenes back and making adjustments at a much better pace now.

A few minor updates to my character Floyd.

Further into lighting and I'm now finally getting some results that I like. Here's how far this shot has come along.

Finally started making some headway into lighting and texturing. I need to do a few more passes at this and get the fur beard back on and do come composting effects to it then I'll have something nice hopefully.

Here's an update on my Thesis Character progress.

I still have a very long way to go with the lighting and textures of my set, but This is a general idea of what it will look like. The ground, mountains, and sand is all just temporary place holder stuff. It's also missing a large hangar door that will go right there in the front and center. I am at least happy It's not all gray still.

80's sunset Silhouette! Ha ha I started actually drawing a little with silhouettes and found this could be a cool way to start making some environments as well. Next time I'll spend some time making something that would be a cool concept piece. This was just for fun messing around with the tools.

Couldn't sleep so I decided to have some fun with silhouettes. Roughed out a little sketch in Photoshop. This was a fun little exercise that I think I will do more of in whatever free time I find. School is starting this week so there won't be much free time around working on my thesis, but I'll sneak in a few.

Here's a test render of my thesis character. I still have a lot of work to do with the textures and beard in the spring, but I needed to show a proof of concept so I made up a quick rendered version.

NEW WEBSITE!!!

You can check out my new website at
http://www.ghett.com or http://www.greghettinger.com

I learned how to use ZBrush to create normal maps and displacement maps as well as create color textures. I'm currently working on finishing the tutorial to explain how to do this and bring it into Maya when you are using Renderman.

Here's my thesis character. I'm still not done texturing it and this was only the first pass attempt at the beard. I'll get more into detailing him in the Spring.

Well, I've been back at school for a few months now busy working on my thesis. Haven't updated in a long time. I'll get some things posted soon. The internship was great. I had a lot of fun. Working on my thesis is a lot of hard work, but I find it to be enjoyable because it's my creation. Yea animation!

So I haven't posted anything in awhile because I've been working at my summer internship at EA Salt Lake during the day and working on my thesis at night. Not a lot of time for other things. I love animating and working for a video game company is awesome! I can't say anything about what I'm doing because of the contracts I signed, but I'm having a good time working on it. AS for my own stuff I've been coming up with a lot of ideas for things while I sit and model so I've been jotting them down and maybe I'll knock out a few sketches later on. If anyone has actualy read this far down congratulations! you are probably the first person to do so. I'm going to pick up painting again so that I might have some more things ready for next years megacon.

This is my junior year demo reel



Demo Reel 2008 Shot List
1. Take 2 Exercise: 2nd Semester, 3rd Year
2. Exaggerated Push/Pull Exercise: 1st Semester, 3rd year
3. In/Out Exercise: 1st Semester, 3rd year
4. Real Push Pull Exercise: 1st Semester 3rd year
5. Sit/Stand Exercise: 2nd Semester, 2nd year
6. Jump Exercise: 1st Semester, 2nd Year
7. Poly Choice Model: 2nd Semester, 2nd Year
8. Nurbs Choice Model: 2nd Semester, 2nd Year
9. Lighting/Textures/Layout: 2nd Semester, 2nd year
10. Blend Shape Emotions: 2nd Semester, 3rd year
11. Lipsync: 2nd Semester 3rd year