Youtube made digital video universally accessible and sadly banal. I'll keep my skills on standby for when I need them, but there's no reason to pursue this interest any further.

Click on the video link to see some videos of wushu demonstrations I've compressed and uploaded to the wushu portion of my site.

In order to graduate from the school of fine arts at Uconn, one needs to complete the senior project and exhibit it at the senior show. For my senior project, I created a short action film. This is a link to the page that has the whole movie to view online and many more details.

A quick link to the Project C title sequence

A quick link to the Project C trailer

This is a sample from a freelance project I did for Yomo, an engineering consulting firm. I spent a few days up at Paul Newman's Hole in the Wall Gang Camp and at Mercy Shelter in Hartford to the shoot footage for their team building event. The whole video was is 16 minutes long, but i just quickly edited some scenes together so you can get the idea.

This isn't anything special, but I hadn't used flash in ages and needed to refresh some basic skills.

This is the follow up to the original navigation panel to for my wushu page. The first one featured movements performed by the Zhejiang professional wushu team in 2003. For the new one, i wanted to feature our own students and include weapons as well. This was much more challenging because the weapons are thin and hard to trace. They appeared as a blur in some of the video because they were moving so fast.

For the navigation column of my wushu page, i wanted something exciting and original. I decided on having little guys doing wushu in the background. Originally, they were going to be gifs of wushu performances, but i didn't like the way they looked. Then i began a long process of tracing the motions frame by frame. The whole task required almost every graphic i had on hand to break down the video into frames, align them correctly, trace the figures by hand, and then to animate them. In the end, i'm happy with the effect. Though i can't stand how people say it looks like ipod commercials where Apple used a similar effect, because i came out with mine first.

This was the original intro animation to my site using flash. It represents the rebirth of my site, because i'd actually had lastpatriot.com since 2000, but never really did anything with it. Then when my school returned from china in 2002, i used it to post the photos from the trip and it's been growing ever since. Visitors will remember that there was the link to lastpatriot studios that NEVER worked. It's been saying "coming soon" for years. Don't click the links, they won't work.

I took a long break from doing anything with 3Dsmax because my laptop would simply crash when rendering anything. Then fall of 2005, my little sister bought a new computer for the family. It's an athlon 64 3200+ and by no means a powerhouse computer, but desktops are more suitable for 3D animation. Maybe i'll start getting into it again. This is a simple cloth reaction experiment.

The last thing i was working on before I gave up on 3D modeling on my laptop was textures. At the time, i was still working at the gas station, and i thought it would be fun to render a shelf full of cigarette cartons being knocked over. My supervisor was so confused when i'd lay the boxes out on the floor and take pictures of them. Of course, i never got around to finishing my project, but here's a single box falling.

This is simple modeling of a wushu straightsword with textures. It would have been nice if i modeled a 3D person doing a whole form, but nah.

There are just some things i can't figure out in this program. Here i made a bunch of balls bounce off a plane, but they don't seem to bounce on the surface, but instead intersect it and bounce through it a bit. There are just so many parameters in this program it's mind boggling.

I was going to make an animated short film starring a cube in 3Dsmax, where i tried to convey gestures, actions, and emotion by making a cube bounce around and distort and such. Of course, like all my other ambitious projects, i didn't end up getting around to it, but here was the possible title screen.

This is probably the most gratifying thing i did with 3D animation. it's just a simple ball bouncing down a slope, but the sense of depth and atmosphere gives me a lot of ideas about what else i can do with this program once i play with it again.

An experiment of volumetric lighting. I was thinking if I made an official studio credit for any film projects, I'll want it to be cool and lighted like this.

an experiment with particle animation and forces. simple snow falling, blown by wind.

An idea for what the lastpatriot studio credit. This was early in my 3Dsmax experiments, so i didn't know about caustics, and area shadows to make it look more real.