In contrast to your typical child finger-painting, playing with crayons, and drawing stick-figures, Andrew found himself tracing the baby Godzilla raptors from the 1998 rendition directed by Roland Emmerich. However, without the necessary guidance that could identify, protect, and properly nurture this level of yearning early on, Andrew was reprimanded in the beginning of elementary school by one of his teachers for plagiarism, for turning some in for a project. He didn’t know how to handle it since he was just a child and was raised to not only respect and believe positions of authority, but he was also conditioned to put the American school system on a pedestal especially since his family was from a poor country. And so, he took it to heart and felt so much shame that he didn’t tell his family and instead chose to keep it to himself. From then on, Andrew was stunted and scared away from art believing he could never be good enough to make his own works that other people could actually enjoy and appreciate. No one cared that he stopped; something he had grown accustomed to.
Over the years, he managed to teach himself the basics of Photoshop, just dabbling here and there; but spent most of his time browsing online art portals and searching for the best artists and works he could find, just to long from afar.
It wasn’t until he fell disillusioned with college his junior year after seeing key instances that contradicted his belief that university was about meritocracy, that he reflected deeply on where the path of a degree would take him. In Spring Break 2013, Andrew left his studies in 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.
For several years, Andrew found himself unfulfilled and falling short from trying out various different ventures, only to always have art be there to pick him back up. After cycles of this, he eventually clued in to the possibility, that perhaps he was meant to rediscover what had been suppressed since his childhood. Thus, while working odd, unrelated, unskilled physical-labor jobs he transitioned into studying and putting into practice the many aspects of art, all to fund and fulfill his deeply-held aspiration to share amazing visual works with you and the world.
Although Andrew thought he would build his foundation of skills with Photoshop, it wasn’t until YouTube’s algorithm randomly fed him a video of someone sculpting inside Pixologic’s ZBrush, that his purview of what he thought was possible expanded. Andrew’s belief in himself had been so stunted—it wasn’t even conceivable that CGI was accessible to ordinary people like him, let alone the notion of sculpting inside a computer. It wasn’t shortly thereafter that he sought even more creative freedom, which led to him discovering the vast and technical world of 3D VFX, which had the power to give his still sculptures life. It was from following this curiosity, that Andrew realized that the baby Godzilla raptors he traced as a child were, in fact, created using 3D VFX.
So prior to the advent of AI, Andrew had worked his own way up to 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. If he was going to make art to share to the world, he was dead set on being one of the best.
Using his acquired knowledge of anatomy, coding, rigging, simulation, 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 to his future works a level of quality and versatility so rare it would’ve been extremely difficult to find outside the professional AAA realm.
But most importantly for him, Andrew built the evidence, with his own resourcefulness, ingenuity and dedication, proving that with time and consistent, concentrated effort, he could become comparable to teams of professionals who not only had decades of experience in the industry but who were near the cutting-edge of the integration of technology and the arts.
However, as AI in art rapidly advanced seemingly out of nowhere, and Unity’s decision to make Ziva’s technologies no longer available to the public, Andrew’s shift towards using Artificial Intelligence became clear.
Despite the temptation to give up after all these years, of sacrificing the path of university, along with forgoing countless weekends, vacations, holidays, family, friends, and relationships in pursuit of mastery, Andrew instead chose to deepen his understanding of AI, and harness it together with all the skills he’s learned and character traits he’s acquired—to achieve what has always been his mission in the first place: to deliver to you extraordinary works of art.
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.
I often encountered the thought of “why am I spending so much time and effort on a single concept, that I won’t know would actually work under the stress of movement. And even the thought of posing it and having to resculpt/model everything in accordance sounded awful.” This built up frustration, which when combined with the discovery of Ziva VFX, served as the catalyst for the deep-dive into simulation, and with it animation and motion-capture.
