Best site for human reference photos:
http://www.3d.sk
Buy prints (A2 and A3 size) of some of my images here:
http://store.cgsociety.org/browse/cgprints/ciety.org/browse/cgprints/
March 26:
February 16-19: Me and my family went back to Hong Kong for a nostalgic visit, (and for Disney Land) :)
February 6 - 11 2006 : I went to Taipei to hold a seminar for a group of terrific game artists
August1: it's official, I was selected as one of this years Maya Masters at the AGUA before Siggraph! Thank you guys!
May 6: moved website, forwarding activated
April 24: went to Rob Coleman's talk in Singapore. Afterwards I talked to him, and was amazed to find that he knew my name and my art! Not only that, but he had some nice things to say about it too... thanks Rob! :)
February 4: updated the galleries
January 2005: The european client for that long-term job I mentioned has just been jailed for fraud, so the job is gone. I'm moving my equipment home in May. I'll be moving this website to the CGTalk server soon (as androidblues.com, but with a forwarding from the old url). But even though we've closed the old office, Optidigit is still existing, I'm still one of the directors, and me and Alain are still preparing and working towards establishing a training center here. ews:
August 29 2004: just back home after giving a talk at Disney Feature Animation at Burbank, where I met Glen Keane, and Gnomon, where I met Alex Alvarez and Meats Meiers (and shaking Syd Mead's hand!) What an inspiring trip.
September: finally it's been decided, we start on a long term job that will help us in our plans to open that training center I mentioned below. It's not particularly exciting or high-profile, but it's a perfect first step for us in the long form content industry.
June: Rob had to leave us, hopefully temporarily, to go back to China, due to issues with their application for a US visa for Rob's Chinese wife.
April 2004: I went to Copenhagen to give a seminar at a 3d school there, and to visit the 3D Festival. On the way home I stopped in Milan and met Dario Picciau, who's making a 3d feature film about Anne Frank's life. I also worked on another female character for EA, this time for another game, Defjam Smackdown.
December 5: finished four characters for Electronic Arts NFSU.
December 17th Leonard Teo from CG Channel will host a Siggraph event here in Kuala Lumpur, involving among other things book signing of his 'Expose 1' book (there are 5 artists in KL represented in that book, 3 of them from my own company). It's the first official event of the new KL Siggraph Chapter, of which my partner Alain is the chairman).
In October I became 44. [sigh]
In September we hired Rob Chang - yes that's right boys and girls, I'm now working with the famous Lunatique!
He was living in Fu Zhou with his lovely wife Elena, now they live within walking distance from my flat. His project 'Promise' will now be one of the projects our new studio Androidblues will work on (with Rob in charge).
Rob's website
In July we hired Lor and KFC, two excellent 2d and 3d artists very experienced in Maya. KFC stands for Kong Foong Ching but he abbreviates it himself, and on CGTalk is known as kfc.
June: Me and my partner have a
grand and ambitious plan - a combination training center and production studio,
focused on realistic characters of the highest quality, for long form
production. Part of the plan is to admit trainees from all over the world, based
on portfolio. In beginning of June we announced the launch of
this project.
Link
May 9: My still image "One Last
Time" won the first Digital Hero award at 3dFestival in Denmark (Still
category)! It's the first year of the award, but the third year of the
Festival. Maybe next year I can even go there...
It also won Second Rank at the
Animago 2003, category Still/Pro/Fantasy, at just about the same time.
(The winning entry was "The
Icewaste", congratulations!)
January 1, 2003: Happy (Western)
New Year! (Islamic New Year has passed already, Chinese New Year coming
up...)
added an essay on image composition to the How-to page.
December 7: a lot of small updates all around, the FAQ, the gallery, the links, the How-to, and more.
July 1: A lot of news since my last entry. First of all I've moved again, this time from Texas to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, to work closer with my old friend and partner Alain Zaugg, owner of Optidigit Studio. I've also updated the screenplay. Several new 2d images have been added since the last 'news' item, and even a couple 3d pics. Also, as you might have noticed already, I've gone back to the old design on the index page, not because I don't like Catharina's any more but because I used to get more hits with this older design (with all the web-rings on the same page). :)
March 15, 2002: long time since
the last entry. Though I have been doing some minor changes to the site
since October.
Microsoft bought Digital Anvil about a year ago, and many were let go. I was
kept on as a temp worker, but according to MS' new rules on temp workers I could
only work there 1 year, even if it was only 3 days a week. So this Christmas
was the last day at DA - thanks guys it was really fun and educational.
October 22: first real update I felt like since 9/11. A few new images in Gallery
1, not placed in chronological order.
September 15: Again, a new frontpage by Catharina - here's a link to the
old
index page, this last version 'Flashified' by
Catharina
Przezak Harders, a great 3d artist.
July 21: ABC Nightline showed some of my work,
this is a link to the streaming
video.
July 12: new frontpage image
New
gallery of wallpapers by Wesley Flaman begun,
not many yet but it will grow.
July 4: new version of the script "Android Blues" uploaded.
Sorry, because the volume of downloading was too much for our provider, we've
had to take down the mpegs on this site and replace them with a smaller size
streaming solution, which of course is of much lower quality. But you can still
get the mpegs though by following the links there.
June 10: link to Henrik Wann Jensen's paper about translucency to be presented
at SIGGRAPH this year, the model he's using for testing is my own version 3.0
virtual actress.
Here.
May 26: replaced test8.mpg with test9.mpg, added bodytest2.mpg (in the
animgallery)
May 12: added new tests of version 3.1, (face), showing improved look, better
expressions, and more easily connected to facial mocap. (Note: when testing,
I use the most extreme expression possible, which may look ridiculous sometimes...)
face test, neutral
expressions test
May 5: added new tests of version 3.1, (body only), showing much improved joint
deformations.
body test
body test
body test
April 22: reorganized the 3D Still Galleries and added a new one, with many
new images. Gallery 1 now shows images (mainly my virtual actress) from -99
to -01, Gallery 2 covers the earlier years of my actress, and Gallery 3 shows
some miscellaneous non-character stuff.
3D Still Gallery 1
3D Still Gallery 2
3D Still Gallery 3
April 19: Uploaded this
body test, showing 2 slightly
different lighting angles, and
this one, showing
the joint deformation of the knee and hip, which I've struggled so long and
hard with.
April 14: New facial tests,
here. These are enlarged
stills from the animation mentioned below.
These exact poses are not in the animation, I made some variations in lighting
(rotating the lights around to show that my skin shader works in different lighting
conditions), and 4 different expressions. No retouching except for hitting Auto
Levels in Photoshop.
March 4: Finally completed a new still image, the first in 2 or 3 years, this
uses my new virtual actress for the first time - see it in the gallery, it's
called "Flamethrower". There's NO photoshop retouching except for adding some
smoke, and also NO specific geometry editing to make her work in this pose from
this view, I'm quite proud of that since in all my previous still images I had
to delete the skeleton and edit the geometry to get what I wanted. This is a
fully animatable model.
Feb 20, 2001: completed the
first animation test of Ariana
v3.0's face (at the bottom of the animation page). More info about it there.
