Chad
Briggs is the post production supervisor at ExpandMail, a company
producing streaming video e-mail marketing. He's been there for the
past 18 months. Starting in the 2nd quarter of 2001 he has started his
own post production house in Dallas, Last Dragon Post. Chad is also a
active member of the Local Alias|Wavefront user group in Dallas and
puts together small workshops for students and professionals in the
Dallas area regarding Maya and many other post production software
tools.
Chad
also spends time trying to imitate Maya's sculpt/deform tools on his
body in the gym, and studies dynamics and FK/IK playing Basketball.
Occasionally, he can also be found doodling in various independant film
projects.
Recently, Chad entered the Dallas area's "Sexiest Geek Alive"
contest (see right) and did the Cow proud by winning -- could it ever
end otherwise??? His fellow team members here at the Creative Cow site
modestly all took credit for the victory. But rumors have it that it
was coach Ron Lindeboom who was there in the corner feeding the gallant
warrior ice chips, who kept yelling at him: "Get back in there,
remember you're a Cow!" that spurred Chad on to victory...
"It was inspiring," said Chad in his National Enquirerinterview following the victory. "The women of Dallas were all lined up
for the contest and my lips were swollen by the end -- I didn't think I
could go on much longer but then Coach Lindeboom kept packing my lips
with ice while he kept slapping me back to consciousness! In the end, I
won."
When
the swelling subsided, Chad returned to work at Last Dragon Post. He
says life will never be the same and that "...the best part of it was
that I met my wife through it all." (Not really but when I get on a roll with these twisted tales there's no stopping me. Boomie.)
In
an interview for his local newspaper, Chad brought his victory into
perspective with these thoughts: "I believe i have a very deep and wide
range of geekdom. Not only am I a tech geek, but I'm a fitness geek,
computer game geek, book geek, major movie geek, music geek, journalism
geek, comic geek, and many more categories of geekdom. Thus, I believe
i can bring bipartisanship to the world of geek and unite them under a
single geekly flag." About the only thing that was missing from Chad's
acceptance speech was the obligatory "by this victory, I hope to bring
peace to all the nations of the Earth and to end suffering for all."
(So we added it here.)
How
sad to have peaked at such a young age -- all that's left now is to
model, animate, render and share his memories of an ill-spent youth with his friends.
You can find Chad Briggs hosting in Creative COW's
MAYA forum.
One common request or problem i've seen several Maya users stumble across is how to properly animate a ribbon that zips across the screen and is flexible enough to bend and twist in various ways. While it sounds simple in concept, it may not be as straightforward and obvious as one would think to set this up properly with the maximum animation capabilities. In this article, Chad Briggs demonstrates a solution that he came up with in response to a recent gig.
In this article, CreativeCOW leader Chad Briggs reviews Maya 6 Killer Tips written by Eric Hanson, Kenneth Ibrahim, and Alex Nijmeh, and published by New Riders Press (August 2004), ISBN: 0321278534, and finds that "reading Maya 6 Killer Tips was a revelation, [it] is an excellent book that presents just the right information you need to take your mastery of the program to the next level.
In this tutorial, Chad Briggs will guide intermediate/experienced Maya users through creating hair with PaintFX. Once created, this hair can be animated and deformed through Maya's dynamics/cloth engines. This tutorial will focus on the creation of the hair.
Always looking for good reference materials, Creativecow leader, Chad Briggs takes a look at Maya 4.5 Fundamentals by Jim Lammers with Lee Gooding published by New Riders Publishers. Read why Chad gives this book 4 1/2 COWs.
