I am now an Animation Mentor Student. .

Have you ever animated a shot and all of a sudden your arms start flippling and flopping like a unattended garden hose set on full blast? Ever heard the term gimbal lock and thought it was a wrestling move? Ever wonder what the spaghetti box is telling you when you rotate an object on one axis only but all three of them seem to get affected? Well fear not. This may help you understand what is gimbal lock.

I worked on a TV Ad recently and though I can't show any of the work I did for it until it is aired, here is a new tutorial I made to demonstrate how you can combine a bone and morph base facial rig. This is done in 3ds Max. Keith Lango (www.keithlango.com) made a similar rig in Maya. You can view his tutorials from his May 6, 2007 blog. Go to my tutorial section to view the my setup for 3ds Max.

In a month, the new Half-Life 2 Mod, La Nuée Des Diables, will be completed. I am currently a Technical Director on the project. I get to model, rig, animate, write scripts, and help define the pipeline and workflows for the project. Some elements I've done are in my March 2007 demo reel. On the left is one of our promotional posters. 2 of the characters I modeled for the game are on it. The villager (second from the left) and the priest (second from the right.) More details when the game is released.

New Rubik's Cube tutorial added in the TUTORIALS section under Misc. What does this have to do with 3D Character Animation? For character animation, nothing really. For 3D, however, the Rubik's cube is an excellent puzzle to train your mind to conceptualize in 3 dimentional space. I solved the rubiks cube nearly 10 years ago without reading any book or any outside help. I have encountered 3 other people of whom are able to solve the cube and all three of them solved it in the same manner, by completing one side first. The reason they all shared the same method for solving it is because they bought a book on how to solve it.

At the Adapt Conference Auditions, your work animation work is reviewed by Emile Ghorayeb (aka Emilio Ghorayeb) and Aaron
Gilman. If they believe you demonstrated knowledge of the principles of animation, you received an Adapt Artist Card. Here is the one I received.. Companies that were present were, DreamWorks Animation, ILM-LucasArts, Electronic Arts (EA), Ubisoft, Hybride, Beenox, PhenomBlue, Artificial Mind and Movements (A2M)