Mazda 3

Taken from The Famous Group website,

"MAZDA3
Client: Mazda
Agency: Sarkissian Mason
About: With our usual flair, Famous pumped out 15 minutes of real renders for the all new 2010 Mazda3. What is even more thrilling is that we did this in 10 short weeks. Famous created 10 feature animations for both the 4 door and 5 door models, exploring in fine detail the exterior as well as the interiors, and display 360 degrees."



Watch the montage

The Famous Group 2009,

Flower PS3

So i was asked back by the crew at thatgamecompany a second time to art direct their next title. After almost a year and half of hard work it came out to be flower. Unfortunately i could not stay for the entirety of the project but was there for most of it.

It was a very interesting project, and something totally not the norm for me. As you can see my website is titled i like robots, and flower, would probably be the fartherest thing possible. Not even in my dreams would i have imagined myself making these scenes, but that was why the project has been so interesting to me. Hey, you need change in your life once in a while.









_____________________________________________
www.thatgamecompany.com

Art Direction

Pontiac, "Lights" and "Escape"

For this project i worked mostly in modeling. We first made alot of assets for building up the city in maya while the project was shooting. Also i made the interior of the bar that the model walked through. This was my first time building an interior, so it took a while to figure out the lighting setup. Also this was the first time i played with n'cloth in maya. Tho its not apparent in the shots, some of the curtains and stuff on the ceiling in the bar is animated with n'cloth. Over all this project was very fun for me, amongst other things i got to stare at the beautiful actress via HD footage all day.





Watch "Lights"

Imaginary Forces 2006,
00:00:30 (320x240)

Modeling

Watch "Escape"

Imaginary Forces 2006,
00:00:31 (320x240)

Modeling

Elegy 2

Update: i have created a separate blog to document the progress of elegy2

please visit elysium

ELGY came out of my desire to have a coherent piece because i felt unsatisfied with my thesis. In the thesis post i talked about how the project almost fell apart because i had forgone planning. Well, ELGY is on halt right now largely because i did too much planning and not enough work. Although, i do have assets for it and the story has more or less been established, i got tired of thinking about it and decided to put it into the back burner.

I was planning on overhauling all the assets in my thesis to do elegy, significantly up the poly-count, add in a lot more details, use dynamics for cloth and particle effects. So far i have one character rigged up, one modeled and some pieces of my environment,

more to come

yes, i do like gas masks too


WIP Here

Images



some more updated renders

Gatorade

I was responsible for modeling Sidney's head and animating a transition from inside his eye to a close up of his face on this project. Besides that i also modeled a lot of machinery. I really enjoyed working on this project. Modeling a lot of mechanical parts and industrial environments is always fun for me. I also learned a lot more about the Maya shader networks while on this project, being that i was lazy and didn't want to texture and UV map everything, so i forced myself to make some procedural shaders that emulated different types of worn metal.

Watch

Motion Theory 2007
(640x480)

Animation, Texturing, Modeling

Transformers

Working on the Transformers trailer was the first thing i did out of college. My teacher invited me into his studio after he saw what i did with Elegy. For me working on this project was sort of like achieving my dreams on my first step. The reason why i pursued art could be traced back to my living room covered with drawings of transformers on scrap paper when i was 5. Working on a title sequence that was about 90% of all my childhood fantasies definitely meant a lot to me.




While on this project, i was in charge of designing some of the methods to achieve the transformations. We tried to use minimal swapping out of the geometry. Obviously the autobot logo at the end was swapped in at somepoint during the transformation, but the 747 is actually made up of parts that also made the transformers text. Animating this project could easily be one of the coolest projects i've ever worked on.

Watch

Imaginary Forces 2006,
00:00:30 (500x375)

Animation, Modeling

Ninja Attack! Darkness Falling

I did this animation in the junior year of college. This was the final project for the game animation class. We studied the process of animating from blocking out the poses to polishing the key frames. Also we learned how to do loops and cycles in this class, and the effects of easing in and out of animation curves.



I was playing Prince of Persia at the time, and very inspired by all the stunts that the Prince goes through in the game. However i felt that the animation in the game was very superfluous and fancy, and also very cartoony. For me personally a ninja would be the epitome of badass-ness, I felt that because of the ninja being a dark character and his very subdued backdrop, his movements should have a certain element of force but be also stealthy and fast. So i tried to make all his moments very clean and precise. He has anticipation and follow through but its very limited and stylized.

Game Animation Final
00:00:30 by Hao Cui

Darkness Falling

Thesis

The thesis was a long process. I started thinking about it in the summer of junior year, where i spent most of my time moping around in an internship for EA. I always knew i wanted to do something with robots, but i cant quite grasp the idea of a coherent story back then. When the time came to start, i opted out of the storyboarding process and went straight for the asset making. Where i thought I'd have the most fun...



The thesis is basically a product of my completely ignoring storyline, well... planning, in any shape or form. Towards the end of the project, i just kept on adding more and more assets until the whole thing became this bloated epic monster. My Maya files were up and above 200 megs for each shot.

When the craziness ended, the end result showed the lack of planning and storyboarding, while the shots are nice, the editing was terrible and the sequences not really well planned out. I felt the animation could have used more work, but while i saw the deficiencies, i hit a mental barrier, and just wanted to build new stuff (hence all the crazy spaceships and robots and jets.)

Overall though, i am proud of what i did, and quite happy with what happened. My biggest regret was not planning, lets hope that doesn't happen again. So without further a due,

Watch

By Hao Cui
Otis College of Art and Design, Graduation Thesis
00:01:45 (400x300)

Turn Arounds
Soldiers | Mechs

Self Portrait

This portrait was done in the style of several of my other paintings where i painted some of my female friends. The true purpose of this painting was really so i can put something cool in my profile for xanga, facebook and myspace. Really i didnt think too much about it..

Layouts for Main Page

The original idea for this site was to have a traditional portfolio site and having the background image be an array so that the background image will be constantly change upon every reload, but now that i've decided to use blogger as the base of my new design, i will still retain these images but probably just use them for the main entrance page instead.

More to Come