After something like ten or maybe seven years of the chalkboard motif, I've decided to
totally redesign my site -- mainly because the code for it was so ugly.
Apart from some stuff in the "About" section, there isn't much to see here, at the moment.
I'm just letting you know.
You can listen to some of my favorite music while you're waiting for me to fill up this site
(assuming you've got Adobe Flash installed in your web browser, of course.)
-- Milo
Like I wrote on the front page: Not much to see, right now.
I am kind of in the middle of something, but I'm not in the mood to go on about it just yet.
So, what would you like to know?
About you.
About your work.
Who made your site?
What's this thing that looks like a tree?
Wow. OK, how much time do you have?
Actually, I'm not quite ready to get into all that. I'll go on about myself some other time.
OK.
(Résumé available upon request)
Primarily, I'm a computer graphics technician for video games. Basically, what that means
is that I develop work pipelines for artists, and serve as a liaison between the art and programming departments of
gaming companies. I act as a technical director and a buffer between left-brained and right-brained
personnel.
From the art department's point of view, I obviate their having to deal with technical issues
by (1) explaining complex tasks to them in artistic terms, (2) creating tools that perform the more mundane parts
of their jobs and accelerate the rate at which they can create assets, (3) taking on highly technical
graphics-related art tasks myself, and (4) mentoring artists who have yet to grasp technical concepts with which
they need to be familiar.
From the programming department's perspective, I know enough about what they do that I can be
trusted to engineer the artists' workflows such that the programmers get graphics that they can use, and in a
timely fashion. (Of course, getting things done on time is largely dependent on good management, which any
experienced video game developer will tell you is probably scarcer than one can reasonably expect.) I'm
also the person programmers contact when they have special needs or
ad hoc tasks that just can't wait, and
that they themselves don't have the time or the artistic skill to perform.
My experience as a CG tech goes back to the early 90s, when I worked on the first couple of
NFL GameDay and
NCAA GameBreaker American football video games (which wound up being the best-selling sports titles
for Sony's first PlayStation). In addition to my standard duties of creating environmental graphics (I
built and textured most of the stadiums and playing fields) and all of the football helmets, team logos, team
fonts, and playbook drawings, I also generated weather effects. This was all back in my Alias PowerAnimator
days.
My programming skills came into play on my next big project, which was the hit MMORPG
EverQuest, on which project I was the sole character
modeler, UV mapper, and rigger. During my seven-year stint on
EQ, which spanned development of the
original release and the first three expansions, I authored numerous MAXScripts and other tools, which were
used by designers and artists alike to populate zones, automatically deform meshes, and other tasks. My
main tools during this period were PowerAnimator and Maya (modeling and scripting), 3D Studio MAX (UV mapping,
rigging, and scripting), and the
WIL programming language (non-3DS MAX
auxiliary tools). It was during this period that I learned Java, MEL, and MAXScript.
After EQ, I left Sony Online Entertainment to work as a founding member of Sigil Games Online.
I was the character art techincal guru for
Vanguard: Saga of
Heroes; I developed the character art pipeline from the ground up (everything from workflows to naming
conventions to file organization), and created and maintained a slew of character art tools (and a lot of
documentation that few people bothered to read). I also provided assistance to the coding department in
creating tools for our character artists. During this five-year period, I learned C++, and I wrote
countless MEL scripts and numerous Maya API plug-ins, some of which I
posted to CreativeCrash (back when it was called HighEnd3D).
When Sigil Games Online went bust, I took a five-month hiatus to spend time with my wife
and our newborn first child, and to devote significant time to a big project that I'd been considering for some
time (and on which I still work in my spare time, of which there is precious little). My next employer was
Red 5 Studios, an MMO outfit located in Orange County. I was
employed as the studio's sole art technician, and I spent most of my time there writing MaxScripts and C++ plug-ins
for 3D Studio MAX. During that time, I also expanded my programming experience to include C#, which became
my favorite language pretty much instantly (although my love for it is seriously threatened by the beauty of F#,
which I picked up shortly after starting my next gig).
I'm currently employed in Los Angeles at
Kung
Fu Factory as a senior programmer. My duties comprise loads of MaxScript and C# tool development
(including a
Morpheme-like animation transitional tool
currently in use by our designers), the integration of
FaceGen into
Sony's PhyreEngine via the FaceGen C++ API, technical assistance and pipeline advisement for our art leads, and
a little proactive SQL database set-up, management, and implementation (with an eye toward improving the
efficiency of KFF's art pipelines). In my private moments, I fiend on F#.
You can see a fraction of my most recent Maya work in action, here:
Automatic deformation
Animation
Facial deformation
Miscellaneous Maya
Java
|
(Oops! To see these media, you need to install version 9 or later of Adobe's
Flash plug-in,
and turn on JavaScript support in your web browser.)
Click image/video or play/pause button to stop/resume playback.
Character models by Den Beauvais,
property of Sony Online Entertainment.
|
Thanks.
I did.
Well, most of it, anyway; I designed it, I created the graphics, and I programmed it.
The image and video player is
LongTail Video's highly versatile and overall brilliant
Flash player, which employs
Geoff Stearns'
SWFObject code.
The music player is a
Last.fm widget that streams music
that I like. You can always press the stop button if you don't enjoy good music.
Thanks.
It's a drawing of a tree.
Ah.
Yeah, but what does it signify?
*Shrug* My wife has a bachelor's degree in psychology. She asked me to draw a
tree, once. So I drew one.
Whatever.
