This was a technical animation piece I did for Ex Machina, Robert Lepage's production company in Quebec. I was contacted by Carl Fillion, Robert's stage designer, and contracted to work with him on a Maya animation they needed in order to clearly communicate the motion of the set to the actual architects and engineers who were building and programming it. The stage was to be a giant interactive performance platform that the talent would perform on for the Das Rheingold performance which went live in the beginning of September 2010 at the New York City Metropolitan Opera house. This was an exciting freelance project for me and am indebted to my wife who works for Cirque du Soleil, who if it were not for her network, I would not have landed such an interesting project.

Above, is the side orthographic of the animation of the set. The timing between the stages transitions was not too much of a concern as was the actual posing of the set and the inbetween transitions. Carl Fillion and I worked closely on this, and I must admit, that the man is a mechanical genius, and has a great vision for how things in his production should come together. The animated visualization was rendered using the toon shader in Maya, and the fully rendered animation at the top of the page was rendered using mental ray. The overal result is nice and communicates well what needs to be communicated.

Well, this really is not a piece I had done for any freelance gig, but rather this was done because I was between jobs and wanted to do a visualization piece based on some sort of product design. I actually own these headphones, and decided that they would make a great subject for a nice rendering. I used Softimage XSI and mental ray for the image.