Knowing deep down that his life’s calling was in the arts, Andrew left his studies of Information Systems Management & Accounting at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and sought the challenge of honing in on what he intuited would bring him the greatest sense of long-lasting meaning, life-satisfaction, and purpose, even if that meant figuring it out on his own, regardless of how long it would take him.
Over the next decade, he worked odd, unrelated, unskilled physical-labor jobs while studying and putting into practice the many aspects of art, web development, and business to fund and fulfill his inexplicable longing to share amazing visual works with you and the world.
Prior to the advent of AI, Andrew had become a self-taught technical VFX artist, utilizing Ziva Dynamics’ tissue-simulation software inside of Autodesk’s Maya, to develop his own digital-double from scratch; to be comparable to Ziva’s own $8,800 commercial offering used in AAA blockbuster films, TV shows and videogames.
Using his acquired knowledge of anatomy, coding, rigging, simulations, sculpting, and 3D-modeling, Andrew built his digital-double framework to withstand the extreme pressures of simulating a wide range of motion, accompanied by fast and dynamic animation sequences, and even be robust enough to handle imperfect transitions from ”dirty” motion-capture data splicing—as demonstrated in the short videos below. A foundation that would’ve brought a level of quality and versatility to all his future works, found extremely, extremely rare outside the professional AAA realm.
However, with AI looming over the horizon, Unity’s decision to make Ziva’s technologies no longer available to the public was the final “nail in the coffin”, and solidified the inevitability of Artificial Intelligence for Andrew. Thus he sought to further his understanding of AI, and harness it to achieve what has always been his mission in the first place: to deliver to you extraordinary works of art.
*These are raw simulation results; there are no blendshapes or shot-sculpting present or relied on; everything was tuned and able to be calibrated at the modeling/sculpting, rigging and/or simulation level; much of which was scripted, so as to meet my—at the time—expected needs of larger-scaled projects for the future.
**Provided reference for Ziva Dynamic’s $8,800 paired digital-double offering.
