Demo Reel

 

 

Tech Reel

 

 


Tools Website

 

 

 

Hi my name is Christopher Emerson and welcome to my portfolio website! I am a 3D artist with a variety of interests including sculpting, texturing, lighting, and scripting. Art has always been a large part of my life and has continually grown in the past five years of exploring 3D.

I am currently a Character Artist intern at Backbone Entertainment.  In addition I also developing some valuable modeling and animation tools for Autodesk Maya. I like exercising both my technical and creative sides as I believe together they open new possibilities.

Christopher Emerson
Number: (805) 451-7913
Email: Crispy4004@gmail.com
Website: CGSanctuary.com

Objective: To obtain a Modeler, Lighting, or Technical Artist position in the game or film industries.

Education:

  • California State University, Fullerton, BFA, GPA: 3.6.

Job Experience:

  • Backbone Entertainment, Febuary 2012 - Present

Character Artist Intern.  Creating and polishing characters as well as building tools to facilitate the work.

  • Zoic Studios, May 2010 - August 2010

Intern.  Modeled and textured assets for production.

  • 3Dtotal.com, Siggraph 2010

Booth Volunteer.

  • CGArtist.org, June 2009.

Multi-Pass Rendering with Christopher Emerson - video tutorial.

  • Santa Barbara City College, 2006 – 2007.

Tutor for Intro to 3d Animation, Advanced Animation, and open lab.

Software Experience:

  • Maya
  • Mental Ray
  • Photoshop
  • Zbrush
  • Mudbox
  • Fusion
  • Nuke
  • Autodesk Composite
  • Unreal Development Kit
  • 3D Studio Max
  • Shave and Haircut
  • Xnormal

Skills:

  • Character and environment modeling
  • High resolution detailing, sculpting, and texture map creation
  • Maya Tools development with Mel, Python, and Python API
  • Multi-Pass Rendering and Compositing
  • Maya Hair creation and rendering
  • Troubleshooting

Awards:

  • Scholastic silver Key for Excellence in Drawing. – 2005

References: Available upon request

About the Scripts I Write:

Each of my scripts are designed to enhance Maya in Production.  Everything has a very practical purpose, either to make common tasks significantly faster, or get past hurdles in the application.  I hope you find them as useful as I do.

Retopo G

Re-topology Super Script

More Information at:

http://retopog.com/


RenderBuddy.mel

RenderBuddy.mel is my own personal “Pre-Render” Mel script that sets up all Mental Ray render settings before you render a sequence.  This makes up for the lackluster “Presets” in the Maya Render Settings window.  Use it to manage Render settings across a large number of scenes and stop wasting time setting up each individually.

This includes all the necessary Render Passes, Features, Quality, and Indirect lighting values.  In addition, with RenderBuddy.mel you can create specialty passes, like a Subsurface pass, by just adding a tag like “_SSS” to your materials.  All Settings are adjustable in the script file so you can customize it for each project.

Not Publicly Available

 


MaterialMatte.mel

 

Info:
Have you or a comp’er you work with ever needed a scene broken down into Matte Passes? Chances are you have run into the following problems:

  • Material and Object ID’s are a pain to setup in Maya.
  • Material and Object ID’s are causing horrible aliasing issues.
  • My compositor does not integrate well with Material and Object IDs.
  • RGB Mattes are a pain to setup in Maya, and even harder to create good naming conventions for.
  • “Write_to_Color_Buffer” node needed for RGB Mattes increases render time 5x due to a bug in Maya 2010 and below!
  • The Comp’er is struggling to find the exact Matte he needs out of many RGB Matte passes.
  • 3rd Party buffer writer is not giving you enough Custom Passes.

My Material Matte Pass Creator will help you avoid all these issues simplifying the workflow for the Maya user and compositor alike. Easy for everyone, the way it should be. As long as you maintain logical material naming conventions in your scene, my script will do the rest of the work and organization for you.

Requires Maya 2009 or Higher.

How To Use:

1. Select All Materials you want to have Matte Passes for.
2. Run Script.
3.(optional) – Set file output to EXR in Render Settings for easier selection in compositing.
4. Render “Matte” Layer.
5. Extract Alpha Channel from Image in compositing to use as Matte.

IMPORTANT WARNINGS

- DO NOT select any of the initial shaders.
- If you get an Error about a locked attribute, run with nothing selected.
- Only Use With Materials, do not select geometry.
- Make sure your Camera and Material Names never exceed 27 characters total.

Download David Johnson’s Edition With More Features And Better Stability Here

Download my original version below:

Download

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New WIP, Mental Ray Talk, and My New Useful Script

 Welcome to the first blog entry on my new site! I’ve got plenty to celebrate the occasion. To start with I began working on a self portrait that I’m probably going to expand into a full character in the future. It certainly will need some cleanup with the hair and some more variation to the skin but I’m happy with how it’s progressing.
 
 I’ve been very excited to test out some of the new advancements with Mental Ray 3.9 on this project, as well as a variety of new techniques coming out the mental ray community. In the past year, there have been an increasing number of character artists switching to Vray. The draw to Vray has always been there, whether it was DMC sampling, dependable passes, better IBL lighting tools, etc. but the subsurface scattering was always a weak spot. That was until Vray’s SSS2, which gave a sense of color bleeding between the skin layers, often surpassing Mental Ray’s results.
 
 Many seem to have made the switch, declaring Mental Ray too dated and poorly integrated. However after exploring the hidden functions of 3.9 in addition to Maya 2012′s fixes, that is at least a partially inaccurate assessment now. With progressive rendering, unified sampling, a new IBL node, and Importon driven Final Gathering, Mental Ray is catching up. Certainly each engine will still have their advantages, but in light of all this Mental Ray is starting to stretch it’s own rendering muscle at specific tasks.

 One of the biggest, and I cannot stress this enough, is hair. The new unified sampling is capable of Raytracing Hair at speeds faster than Rasterizer. Up till now, that might as well be unheard of, and saves me from needing to comp hair after the fact. Couple that with a new community based skin shading method that is closer to Vray’s SSS2, and I believe I have quite a powerful combination for my needs.
 
 

 

 Switching gears, I though I would also reward anyone who has read this far with a new script. If you use displacement maps in any sort, this script could be a life saver. Chances are you are familar with the Alpha Gain and Alpha Offset on any file texture node used to control the intensity of your displacement. What you may not be aware of is those values are directly related to the size of your model in the scene! Yes, that includes both 32 and 16 bit maps. This script will create an expression that lets you safely scale your model without potentially destroying your displacement. It will also give you the option of freezing transformations without wrecking the relationship. There is really no reason not to run this script on every Mesh with displacement you have.
 
 
Scale Safe Displace.mel
 
If you like it, don’t hesitate to say thank you!





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