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Making Solo: A Star Wars Story

Making Solo: A Star Wars Story

My book, ILM Presents: Making Solo A Star Wars Story is out and I got to sit down with the team at StarWars.com to chat a bit about the book. Excerpts from the interview below… “The first time we put the cast into hyperspace was really fun,” …

Lucasfilm Releases Trailer for Episode VII

Lucasfilm Releases Trailer for Episode VII

Lucasfilm released the teaser trailer for Episode 7 today. I am loving the new job at Industrial Light and Magic and am happy to see this trailer being enjoyed in the wild.

Trick Work

Trick Work

(Originally published in the March 2014 VFX issue of ICG Magazine) “What a vista opens before us at the very mention of trick-work! There is hardly a single fantastic idea which cannot be given existence upon the screen. The masterpieces of the …

Wrangling Waves

Wrangling Waves

Cortes Bank is a break 100 miles off the coast of California created by a giant underwater mountain that makes the water shallow enough to create breaking waves with 30-60 foot faces in the right conditions. Sean Collins, who runs surfline.com, is the master at predicting these waves and had just moved our timetable up...

Surf's Up Course at Siggraph

Surf's Up Course at Siggraph

On Monday, August 6th 2007, the Surf’s Up team presented a half day course detailing The Making of the Animated Documentary. If you couldn’t make the course, you can download the course notes [6 Mb PDF file].

From Mocap To Movie

From Mocap To Movie

Course # 28, SIGGRAPH 2005 Los Angeles, CA, USA Important Note: I am part way through reformatting these course notes from the original and the below is a work-in-progress with errors. In the meantime, please feel free to download the full course …

Convert a 3d point to 2d Screen Space in Maya

Convert a 3d point to 2d Screen Space in Maya

Very often you want to find the 2d coordinates on the screen for a given 3d point. Here’s a little mel script that knows the projection math and takes care of generating the data in a “raw channel text file” format. From here, it’s easy to generate …

Stuart Little Effects Animation

Stuart Little Effects Animation

The evolution of the first Stuart Little film was a very interesting process to participate in as we created the star of the film to fill the empty mostly photographic plates. This was one of the very first times a CG character held a major role in a …