To take a little break from the Production Pipeline posts, here are a few other things I’ve been working on this quarter:

This is a shader that I wrote entirely in code! RenderMan SL, to be exact. I am taking a class called Procedural Shading to finish up my Computer Science minor. It’s really tricky, but the results are so much more gratifying than some of the programs I’ve had to write in the past. Every lab is done twice – once in RSL, once in another language called GLSL (Open GL Shading Language). GLSL is much less friendly, but unlike Renderman it’s a realtime renderer. I’ve learned so much but the homework takes a long time to get done. It’s a weird experience to spend countless hours on someting that would take me five minutes to set up in Maya… but I think it gives me more appreciation for how and why Maya works.

The other thing I’ve been working on is a set of 3 ads for Imagine RIT. I lead a really amazing team of 4 that won RIT’s video contest for the festival, and was responsible for the concept, brick texture, and some of the compositing. We have our last day of filming tomorrow and then we need to finish up the other two ads.