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Me: Eric Keller

Hi and welcome to my Blog. This is a hastily compiled record of my digital art and computer graphics experiments. I am a freelance CG artist living and working in Hollywood CA. I have written several books on Maya and ZBrush. Below my blog you'll find links to the books and tutorials I have authored and co-authored. I also occasionally teach at the Gnomon School of Visual Effects in Hollywood.I named my blog "Bloopatone" in honor of my first dog "Blue". She passed away a few years ago and I still miss her even though she was very grouchy and liked to bite me!

I'm proud to be an instructor at The Gnomon School of Visual Effects in Hollywood. Take a look at the work of our students and instructors on the Gnomon School Blog and the Gnomon Workshop Blog

Here is a link to my Artstation Page

Here is a link to my Demo Reel:

Eric Keller's 2016 CG Demo Reel from Eric Keller on Vimeo.

Sunday, October 5, 2014

Seriously? more Fire Ants?

Yes! of course!

So I finally got around to taking the plunge on GPU based rendering. I got Octane on Saturday afternoon, never used it before in my life. I went through the manual and by Sunday evening I was able to convert my Solenopsis invicta model into an Octane-ready render. I'm so happy with the result! These images are straight out of Octane/Maya 2015 with almost no post process in Photoshop (just some levels tweaking and the logo/watermark). they rendered - with depth of field blurring and all - in a fraction of the time it takes me to render in mental ray, and they look better than my mental ray renders! Compare these images with my earlier mental ray renders from a few weeks ago. They are not as grainy, the shadows look wonderful and have some nice color bleed in them, The translucent quality (admittedly a little overdone in these images) is nice and juicy, and I was able to generate them in IPR so I could tweak the shaders and see them update in real time! I've always hated IPR in Maya because it crashes a lot and many features are not supported but now that I have Octane I can use IPR and see all my loooovely shaders emerge almost instantly and zero crashes so far!.

These renders were done using the Octane Maya plug-in  but  I love Octane stand-alone as well as it  has a great node based interface and feels very stable on my machine (I'm using an NVidia Geforce 780 Ti, Windows 8 Maya 2015). You can't actually get the Maya plug-in without also purchasing the Stand-alone version but the software is very affordable given the ease of use, the power, and the result.  I'm not sure I can go back to CPU rendering after this. I feel like Otoy has got it right as far as rendering goes. It is not as simple as rendering in Keyshot but if you understand the principals of physically based rendering then it is not too hard to pick up. The stand-alone node editor reminds me of Nuke (one of my very favorite programs). I don't feel like the Octane Maya plug-in is missing anything compared to Octane stand-alone and it feels rock solid - even more stable than mental ray. The main advantage of using the Octabe Maya plug-in over Octane stand alone is that I get instant feedback without having to export the scene as an OBJ or Alembic cache. However I did some tests exporting animated Alembic caches from Maya and bringing them into Octane stand-alone and its seems to work very well with a few small glitches which are most likely the result of me being a noob.

Of course these renders are far from perfect, still a little too glass-like and I'm sure my textures could be optimized further but this is after just a few hours of messing around and reading through the manual. The real test is rendering an animation which is my next goal, I hope it works because I'm so sick of being disappointed with mental ray crashes and ridiculous render times. There are a ton of features in Octane which I have not touched yet so I'm hoping things get even better from here












All this work is leading up to the first episode of Entomology Animated which I hope everyone enjoys, but honestly I don't care if people like it or not because I'm having fun! I'm sure many people wonder why I'm wasting time modeling, animating, and rendering ants when I could be doing aliens, orcs, Mechs, or fabulous babes with giant guns. I mean ants are boring right? they are ants! who cares about ants? To this I reply: you will never be able to design a creature as amazing as an ant, you're just not clever enough to compete with the brutal creative force of evolution, and if you don't believe me, its time to put down the comic books and start studying some actual science. Ants invented air conditioning, agriculture, animal husbandry, siege warfare, and social media, some 50 million years before Homo sapiens arrived on the scene!.... Yes I've had a few drinks....

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