ABOUT ME / PORTFOLIO
Hello!
My name is Daniel Mayger. I’m a second year student at BU.
I have spent the last 2 years honing and refining my skills in 3D, visuals, and camera work. I am hopeful that I will soon enter the industry to work!
Please feel free to contact me with any inquires into my work.
Want to get a sense for my connections?
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PORTFOLIO – BEST
A test render, done as research for a lookdev project. The lightweight scene focusses on composition as the main art form, as only about 10 assets were actually used to create this image. Meshes are duplicated and turned into volume passes to fake an actual VDB, saving time and resources.
Independant project.
A Lighting and Look Development project from Bournemouth university, the assignment brief was to use light to create a story. This image was rendered out in VRay for Maya.
Nothing in this image is comped in, and the main lights are fog volumes constrained to various tubes, bouncing to a piece of hidden treasure.
This image uses the golden spiral composition technique to create an appealing image.
Independent project.
A look developed lighting pass, intended for a group project. The golden and blue light contrast one another setting the theme of the image.
No materials were applied here as they were not ready at the time- but I feel it allowed me to lookdev the shot without getting distracted.
This shot was rendered out in Arnold for Maya.
Lighiting done by me.
The inside of the corridor from the scene above. The wall features a football themed mural, as well as several shaders for glass, metallic and other materials.
This was rendered out in Arnold for Maya and was a set in a group project for a sporting company. This shot was later pushed through the animation pipeline. I managed the UV’s, Textures, and Shader Development on this scene.
This shot uses a lot of volumetrics- Aistandardvolume, to push out the lights and give an ethereal haze to the image.
P.S, I also develop music and sound! Check out my portfolio below to see the soundtrack that accompanied this scene.
A textured shirt from the aforementioned group project. This was the shirt of our protagonist, Casey, and was textured in baked from high poly and painted in substance painter. This shirt was interesting because I had to manually mask and paint out parts of the baked height map due to artifacting from the bake. This solution proved effective however, and the output rendered perfectly.
This PBR workflow is a mix of torn apart smart materials, and a lot of stencils to build up flowers and decoration from basic shapes.
I custom made many of the stencils in photoshop and procreate to gather the milder effects you see, like the purple faded dots in the centre.
This was just one of about 20 pieces of texture work I did on this project, please see the links below to view more.
To view the full video, check out my social links below.
Creating this video utilised two types of animation. Keyframe, and mocap. The mocap data was captured and was used for scenes involving full body movements like walking. This data was collected using 6 point tracking, (head, hands, waist and legs.) This tracking also incorporates eye tracking data, determining the angle of the character’s gaze, and how open the eyes are. I was able to create blendshapes for each of these states, which are then mirrored in real time onto the character.
The keyframe animation was done in blender, and involved me manually recording movements onto the character’s rig. This allowed for a more in depth control of the final shot, meaning I could fine-tune my camera and character movements. Recording the mocap data was good fun as it allowed me to be expressive with the character by acting rather than animating, but keyframing the animation allowed for a more refined look.
The wolf character used was one I modelled, rigged and textured myself over the past few months.
Once I had all my footage rendered and recorded, I took to Premiere Pro adding music, foley, voice acting, colour grading, whilst also editing together the final piece. The video came out to be 50 seconds long.
After posting the video to youtube, titled “The Last Snack,” the video amassed 27,000 views, and 3,000 likes over the span of a month before slowing down. Comments from the video expressed praise for the animation style, comparing it to that of “Beastars,” an anime I referenced when creating the character, which was excellent to hear. I definitely plan to make more content of a similar nature soon.