Summer so far

After i got back from savannah i headed up north with a few friends. and i mean U.P. north, as in upper peninsula of michigan north. le weather se perfecto. we enjoyed some vistas, old copper towns, and home brewed beer. here's sean and i scoping out the wilderness from a lofty waterfall perch.

after that i headed down to chicago to get back to work on a senior film project. here's the main character. his name's gary.

and then i hopped on a bus for 47 hours and went out to yellowstone to stay with a couple friends. here's a waterfall only reachable by 15 miles of extremely unprepared, feet blistering, hiking.

Something i've been working on for way too long...

So i've had this idear of doing something ship-in-a-bottle-eque for a while now. i started doing some basic modeling of an old trailer marooned on top of a cliff, which was all set inside a bottle, well over a year ago. since then it has taken many forms, and has now finally settled into one.

last quarter i took a class called "the short short." here's how it went (and is currently going)

my film-major/uber-genius roommate, Arnold Lei, and i sat down and brainstormed some interesting shots. then i made this lil animatic

Animatic from Jeff Horal on Vimeo.

then Nha Hoang sketched me up some sweet art.

i then set out on finishing building the set and character

then i did a crap ton of uv mapping and texturing. here's one of the 74 maps

and then it was on to lighting. i havent done any super renders yet but here are a couple very rough previews. after compositing this will like 50x better (i swear)

i set up some simple rigs on the door, knobs, and umbrella and Scott Kennell rigged the character. so now it's up to Katie McGowan for the animation. so hopefully we should be good to go for scadAnimate by august.

oh also! you cant see it yet, but James Littlejohn helped me out with designing a procedural fire shader for the stove. trust me, it's cool.