3D/VFX
My work in 3D design and animation is mainly based on the interactions between physical actions and objects brought to the digital world. I’m a highly technical person and my creativity is best brought out when bouncing ideas with other people and working as part of a team.
Be it through mocap, programming, scripting or virtual production I think there’s something truly amazing in seeing or doing something with your own body and have it transformed into something else on-screen.
Meka Hummingbird
It’s quite amazing how much of a difference a couple of years of experience make. First picture was made using Rhino and V-Ray while the second was made with Blender and rendered with Cycles.
Some things don’t change though, like how hard it is to find the exact font you’re looking for in Japanese.
The inspiration for the robot design was obviously Mecha Godzilla but also a certain Pokémon. I’ll leave it up to you to figure out which one..
PO-YI
Meet Gala and Masha as they work and have fun on an alien planet.
This was a first exercise for my class on facial mocap, in which I basically did all the mocap work XD. It's kind of sad to me that the facial performance is not a big part of the final short but it was kind of rough, so I understand why my teammates decided to edit and cut it the way they did. The texturing and shading in this whole thing looked amazing so it would be a crime not showing this off.
I'm just glad that you can see motion on the face at all! It was really hard since I had to make the whole face skeleton from scratch, the face didn't have human proportions and I had to find my way around an unfamiliar software. But it was a fun experience, shoutout to the rest of my team that managed to elevate this short to something else through the editing and 3D work.
Full credits in the description of the YouTube video.
Rendered in Cinema 4D with mocap performance from Dynamixyz.
Father Ship
A young scrap gatherer finds out his long lost father is alive and goes to rescue him, but what he finds there is not what he expects.
Pardon the quality, this is captured directly from the viewport because it doesn't merit rendering at this stage. I still have the mocap performances, guess I could finish this someday.
Have you ever had a project that fell through? This one is that kind of project. This was the final assignment for a class a couple of years ago at uni. Long story short things fell through with one of the teammates and it was left like this. I did end up using this story concept for a radio play for my audio production class, in fact the music used in this video comes from that. If you speak spanish and for some reason want to hear that you can find it here (cringy voice acting warning).
Cirque De Boules
A fantastical circus filled with the most amazing stars of the business!
Please excuse the occasional glitchy green frames. It's been years since this was exported and I no longer have access to any of the Unity files. This was one of the first group projects my class did with motion capture. It was really fun to play with those tools and I was really proud of how it turned out, specially the shader in the characters (shoutout to Ilan Derech for figuring that out).
Full credits in the description of the YouTube video.
Mocap from Motive OptriTrack.
Bardo - Opening Scene Mocap and Previz
This is by far the highest profile work I’ve ever done. I was brought in by the team from Cinética Studios to help out with an experiment at Estudios Churubusco. We used motion capture to record the performance of Daniel Giménez Cacho while he was suspended 10 meters in the air, hanging from a crane. At the same time we rendered in real time a visualization of this very scene in Unreal Engine for director Iñárritu to watch.
Though my work done there was never intended to reach the big screen, as it was mainly an experiment for the production, I still hold it dear to my heart and I’ve been told it was used as reference for the artists working on the final scene. It wasn’t my first time being on a movie set, but it was my first time working on one and I couldn’t have hoped for a better first project.
Mr. Sandman Barbershop Quartet
Unreal Engine has made it really easy to implement a facial performance to their Metahuman models. This little experiment took me just over an afternoon and it was a good use for a song that was stuck in my head for days even before working on this.
Beach Wallpaper
Commissioned animation made in Unreal Engine 5 to be used as a background wallpaper. Despite how quick the project was made I’m satisfied by the aesthetic of it.
Katamari Prototype
Isn't Katamari Damacy a wonderful game? I wanted to try my hand at making it in Unity. The result? This nifty video of me playing the prototype for 2 minutes with the game's OST in the background.
Currently the ball is controlled using the mouse but if I ever finish this I would like it to be controlled using a big trackball like those Monkey Ball arcades (which shouldn't be too hard to DIY), add camera animations and a little prince running behind. Of course level design would be a nice thing to have but that's a little out of my scope. Maybe I'll ask for help from some of my friends.
Made in Unity.
Auto Adjusting River Prototype
My attempt at recreating a TeamLab installation I saw while on vacation in Japan.
The river and houses are tied to physical objects in a mocap stage, allowing for real-time movement corresponding to those positions. This is scalable to a longer spline object in the Unreal engine and whatever number of objects you want to use for mocap given you have enough markers.
Made in Unreal Engine with Motive OptiTrack plugin and software.
Yu-Gi-Oh! AR Prototype
Did you know that I'm a really huge Yu-Gi-Oh fan? I have my GX Duel Disk toy hanging in my bedroom wall. So naturally when working with Vuforia AR in Unity this was the first thing that I thought of.
Currently this demo only works with the monsters shown in the video, they can change between standby and defense animation when touching the card artwork and attack when the cards get close enough. This is a really old prototype that I've not touched in a long time but I think it has potential to work into something more elaborate, though it would be dependent on the available 3D models of monster cards. But really, it wouldn't be too hard to program the rules of interaction and with a little collaboration from the players this could be used as a really good spectator camera for tournaments or stuff like that.
If anyone has the cards showcased, an Android phone and would like to try this let me know and I can provide the APK.
Made in Unity with models ripped from Yu-Gi-Oh! World Championship 2007 for Nintendo DS.
Abroad in Mexico City
This project aims to illustrate the experiences of four people who moved to Mexico City. Some came running away from something, others for family reasons or work but each experience is very personal and difficult to transmit. This project is intended to create empathy in the user and have them visually explain these stories. Created for virtual reality (VR) using positional audio.
The audio of the project is in spanish, if you don't speak it some of the impact is lost, though the visual cues do manage to express some of the intent.
Full credits in the YouTube video description.
Simulations from HoudiniFX.
Blender Donut
My result of the Donut Tutorial from Blender Guru. My first ever project to come out of Blender. I'm really liking it so far but the keyboard shortcuts are whack, that's going to take some time to get used to.
Digivice (Digimon Adventure)
A little something from one of my favorite anime of all time. I first designed this with the intent to 3D print it but haven’t gotten around doing that. The screen and the buttons are separated from the main body and were meant to be “functional”, with springs pushing the buttons up and a small LED for the screen.
Designed in Cinema 4D and Rhino, rendered using Cycles and Blender.
Elucidator and Dark Repulser (Sword Art Online)
Can you tell that I like anime? This designs were actually 3D printed for a costume but they’re in rough shape now so I think a render is more presentable. I swear they look exactly as they did printed XD.
Designed in Rhino, rendered using Cycles and Blender.
Rubik’s Cube
I honestly haven’t been able to solve one of these so I used technology to help me. This cube was made in HoudiniFX and it solves the cube from any random starting combination. Shout out to Peter Höhsl who was kind enough to share his own cube file for me to learn with. Even though the final process is different (his takes a solved cube, shuffles it and then plays those frames in reverse if I remember correctly) it did set me in the right track to get mine going.
Designed and rendered using HoudiniFX.