jason rubin interview on epileptic games

if you are slightly interested in hearing some insight into how games are created...do yourself a favor and check out this interview jason did with epileptic games:

jason rubin interview

if you are interested into getting into games or becoming a game developer...do yourself a BIG favor and check it out AND take notes.

some little tidbits of gold in there. plus he mentions iron and the maiden:)

dreamhive at 3December in atlanta

Autodesk has been doing this really cool, "off convention" event for a while now called "3December". it is a fantastic venue for folks like me who really love the laid back, fun loving atmosphere of the user group meetings.

this year it's really neat because its a quad-city event happening in los angeles, toronto, london, and atlanta on the same day. even if you can't make it to the event, you can check out stuff online. pretty neat.

you can find out more about 3December on their website


anyway, we're very flattered that the creators of a software we hold in the highest regard, mudbox, have invited dreamhive to come to the atlanta event to give a demo with mudbox and how it is currently being used in production on our current project, iron and the maiden.

if any of you folks out there are gonna be at the event, please let us know. please come to the demo and heckle me(billy) and have a drink with me after the gig.

one year!!!

the dreamhive would like to take a moment out of our superdee duper busy schedule to give ourselves a hardy pat on the back. november 2nd was our one year anniversary.

we've had a very successful first year. our work on Iron and the Maiden is getting close to being finished and we are really getting excited. We've gotten the opportunity to do something the way we like to do things and we really feel like it's gonna turn some heads. jason rubin has been a great collaborator on this project.

we also had the distinct pleasure of getting to work with some very talented animators, modelers, and riggers here recently.

ready at dawn was a great crew to work with and we really enjoyed going by their studio and getting to see the cool stuff they are up to.

we also have been working on another super cool project that we'll hopefully get to announce soon.

hope, as always, is still moving along. we've been toying with some character design changes that will take full advantage of our production pipelines.

all in all it has been a super cool first year.

we would like to thank our families for their continued support and limitless patience. it would not be possible to continue forward without their efforts as well.

i personally could not have asked for a better set of partners. we each compliment each other in our expertise. the fact that we managed to live together in a one bedroom condo in san diego for two weeks without killing each other speaks volumes towards our professional and personal relationship as a studio.

stay tuned...our second year is shaping up to be better than the first!

hearts and thoughts going out...

we here at the dreamhive have several friends in the southern california area. i received this photo this morning from one of my friends.

anyway, we just wanted to take a moment and let all our friends, family, and clients know that we are thinking of you.

please take care.

getting close!!

heya folks.

sorry for the radio silence, but we are working diligently on finishing up our work on iron and the maiden. please stay tuned because when we're done, we're gonna be posting it on the site.

Dreamhive's SIGGRAPH 2007 Coverage!

Not able to make it out to SIGGRAPH in San Diego this year? Have no fear! We got you you covered. We're blogging our notes from the courses and sessions we're attending as well as highlights from the conference in conjunction with highend3D.com. You can check out our coverage on our supplemental blog located here:

http://thedreamhive.highend3d.com

Enjoy the coverage!

Comic Con 2007--Thursday/Friday

enjoy!!

WOW! a big couple weeks coming up!

heya folks.

just wanted to drop a general note letting everyone know we will be in soCal for two weeks starting wednesday. we're going out for comic con and staying through the 10th of august for siggraph.

we have some really big stuff going on for us at comic con. some of dreamhive's animation on jason rubin's iron and the maiden will peak it's little furry head out in the form of a 30 second teaser piece. if you're going to the con, make sure to check it out and let us know what you think.

the dreamhive would like to thank jason for his generosity in sharing credit for our work. the animation will also feature the dreamhive's logo animation. that is such a big boost for a studio that was established less than a year ago. we're really stoked!!

jason has also given us our first official shout out for our contributions to the iron and the maiden universe in the form of 3d art credits on the iron and the maiden website the just went live today:
Iron and the Maiden official website

sharing is good:)

speaking of sharing, definately stay tuned to our website and blog. the four of us will be staying in a little condo in mission bay for two weeks. anyone out there that knows the four of us, knows that we are going to have some humdinger stories to blog about.

also stay tuned because shortly after the premiere of our animation for iron and the maiden's teaser, we'll be posting a flek of it on this page and a quicktime of it on our studio website.

whee!!!

francis drawing iron

check out this neat flek of francis manapul drawing michael iron from the iron and the maiden comic series...

jason's visit

so, hey...jason rubin came out to orlando today to go over some finalizing stuff for iron and the maiden, and he brought presents!!!

this is a limited edition mashup cover of the prelude issue for iron and the maiden. now...they offered this comic during the entire show. i think there were only 200 copies of issue #0 floating around out there, signed by the artists. cool!!

but what makes ours even more exclusive is that we actually have the creators signature too! there are only 50 of these and we got four!!

thanks a ton jason. we enjoyed the visit and loved the schwag!

more hope tests...

some exploratory visual tests...

3d storyboarding

one method that we apply to everything we do is a process called 3d storyboarding. its not exactly an animatic and definately not a 2d storyboard. its kinda in the middle. this helps us address staging, timing, and pacing fairly quickly. it also helps get a common visual language set up very early on, thus allowing for the locking down of shots. this is critical in regards to other processes in our pipeline, something that allows us to work on digital assets AND animate in tandem. which is much more efficient.

time=money

anyway, here's a peek at a 3d storyboard panel for an animated hope short that we plan on starting production on by fall. as you can see, we have the ability to explore the 3d space quickly and get exactly what we want, which allows us to commit to a shot.

this is also a good way to rough out ideas for print media, like a comic book...



...if we ever decided we wanted to do something like that;)

enjoy!

congrats to flektor!

as you may or may not know, jason rubin is one of our clients. a great one at that actually. he is a perfectionist like us and a great balance of hands on/hands off management. we're working with him on his original property, iron and the maiden. the capacity of this relationship is yet to be seen...

...for now, we want to congratulate jason on another venture of his...flektor. see, jason is crazy like us when it comes to taking the "idle hands" theory to the nth degree. on top of the iron and the maiden property(look for the series of comics to be released august 1st..."iron day"), jason had also joined forces last year with former naughty dog cohort andy gavin and jason kay from kay2ventures, forming flektor, inc.

anyway, today they officially announced that flektor has been acquired by fox interactive media...owners of mySpace.

announcement on flektor's blog

congrats jason and the flektor team!

fun hope stuff

here's a little mood piece/early viz dev for a portion of the animated short we'll be working on after our initial work on iron and the maiden wraps up.

iron and the maiden

the comic's release date and publisher has been announced.

this is something that is really cool in many ways. the most immediate(and only one we can talk about right now) is the message this sends to creators out there who want to stay independent and own their property...yet get something produced that gets great backing.

build it and they will come. jason did this sooo right. one core philosophy of his is simple yet very, very powerful. assemble the right talent. pay them what they deserve. let them do their job.

on august 1st everyone will see the result of that philosophy when this series is released. the dreamhive has been fortunate enough to get to see and read the entire series along with the alternate covers. we've been blown away by everything we've seen and read. it is truley his singular vision backed by a collaborative effort of some of the creative world's top talent:
*francis manapul
*joel gomez
*danimation
*comic craft
*joe mad!
*jeff matsuda
*christian lichtner
*jim lee
*michael turner
*chris bachalo
...and more to be announced.

good luck to jason and aspen. can't wait until august 1st!! stay tuned for more including how the dreamhive is involved in all this...

still here!

heya folks.

rest assured, we're still here...just busy as hades! we have lots of cool stuff going on, some of which we will be showing here real soon.

stayed tuned...

30 minute exercise

heya folks,
here at the dreamhive we're always trying to keep our skills honed in the midst of all the craziness. for me, what that occasionally entails is quick studies..

idea here is to decide ahead of time, what the focus is gonna be and quickly get to that spot. for the beast model(from a concept by a good pal of mine matt long) i wanted to focus mostly on the design of the face. so minimal work was put into any of the other elements minus overall mass and form. for the torso, the focus was the sternum, abs, obliques, and overall posing.

enjoy, i'll post these from time to time when i get little pockets of time to do them. next up will most likely the female form.

Panel Discussion Recap

The panel discussion this past Thursday evening was a lot of fun. We had some great questions and had a good time sharing our experiences across the various sectors of our industry with the crowd. Thanks to Troy Buchanan for setting up the event!

Orlando SIGGRAPH Panel Discussion

I'm proud to have been asked to be a part of a panel discussion in association with the UCF Siggraph Chapter and the Orlando ACM Siggraph Chapter. The panel discussion is entitled, "SIGGRAPH Afterhours : with people who've been there, done that, and etc...". Here's a pic of the flyer for the event >>>


As a professional in the industry I really enjoy opportunities like this to share life lessons and insight into our industry with students studying in our field. I'll let you all know how the event goes! - Wes

wes' workshop at fiea

wes is one of the most humble folks i know. so i'm gonna post a follow up to his workshop at fiea on friday for him. that way i can toot his horn for him...did that sound dirty? i think it did:)

anyway, wes' workshop was great!!

all i can say is that i love being involved in a career where you are constantly learning new things. friday was no exception for me. i really learned alot from wes' workshop as i'm sure the students in attendance did.

another thing that we were reminded of at fiea was the sense of energy and synergy which makes up what is most fun about our industry...the excuse to use our imagination on a day to day basis and to collaborate with others who are like minded and share your passion.

it was awesome to see the student's work and to be reminded of what we really wanna establish at the dreamhive...a pure sense of artistic collaboration and storytelling.

we would like to thank brian, tom, and all the folks at fiea for making us feel welcome and for setting this whole thing up.

...and thanks wes for doin' us proud!

the hive coming to soCal!

so, next week the dreamhive will be "touring" southern california. we're pretty excited about making this trip and totally stoked about the folks we're gonna be talking to. it's going to be fun. we're gonna be around anaheim monday night and tuesday. we'll then be in L.A. wednesday through friday morning.

we've pretty much got our schedule booked up but please contact us if you'd be interested in meeting up with us while we're out there. we'll see what we can do.

hopefully we'll have some fun pictures to post of our trip when we get back.

Guest Lecturing at UCF's FIEA

I'll (Wes Grandmont) be guest lecturing at the University of Central Florida's graduate school, FIEA (Florida Interactive Entertainment Academy) on Friday, Feb. 23rd. I'll be doing a three hour workshop entitled "MEL Scripting: Core Concepts & Workflows" which will be a whirl-wind introduction to the essentials of MEL scripting , or at least what I consider them to be ;) I'm very excited to be returning to UCF to lecture again, my experience last spring teaching their undergraduate Character Modeling and Rigging class (Geometric Modeling as they called it) was fantastic.

The Dreamhive Studio Store

Wanna take a little piece of the hive home? Our studio store is up and running (follow the Get Dreamhive Gear! link in the right column). We only have a few items right now including a super-cool mug (pictured above), but we'll be adding more stuff in the near future, some of it featuring characters from our original animation properties.

dreamhive work featured on mudbox site

at dreamhive we use mudbox to author our high res meshes and to do some other pipeline specific stuff. we were fortunate enough to get to participate in their beta testing program where we instantly fell in love with its ease of use and intuitive workflows. plus it can extract surface maps like no one's business. supa fast.

anyway, we were very honored when we were contacted by the fine folks at skymatter to ask permission to add one of the models we were working on to their online gallery.

check out the entire gallery.

the work in this gallery is amazing and we are very stoked to be included alongside such craftsmenship.

anyway, pop by the mudbox site sometime and peruse around...feel the love!

hope's mySpace page

curious about hope? drop by her mySpace page to see her in action and see some of the development that has gone into one of the dreamhive's original properties. request to be one of her friends and drop by often to check out updates.

yet another accent on the dreamhive's ability to stay on top of what's new out there, is the fact that we are using flektor in this blog AND hope's mySpace page.

flektor is a new internet experience being pioneered by andy gavin, jason kay, and jason rubin. the dreamhive is participating in an exclusive test of the technology, so we can't go into detail much right now. let's just say its going to change how we share tidbits about ourselves online.

we've also integrated hope's flek into this blog so you can see that you'll be able to keep up with hope via our blog, mySpace page, and probably soon...our main site.

enjoy.

need hope?

of course you do. don't we all?

well, right now the dreamhive is hard at work on an original cg action adventure series that will give you hope.

make sure to check back frequently to see concept work for hope-the animated series as we progress.

Our New Studio Blog

Well it's a new year and we've finally got our site up and running! Billy, Tom and I are nearly halfway through our first contract and we're very happy with how things are going thus far. Starting a new studio is a dream come true for all of us. It feels alot like when Becky and I became parents. We thought we knew what it was all about and we thought we were ready, but when it happens you are still surprised at what you're capable of when you are really thrown into the deep end. To our friends and family, we thank you for your support and well wishes. -Wes III