Creative COW Forum Host, Web Writer, Contributing Editor
George Polevoy
Moscow, Russia
I
was born into a family of Architects in Moscow, Russia. I believe my
uncle, a nuclear physics student at the time, trained me to solve
problems from nuclear physics in my early childhood, so that twisted my
thinking from the very beginning.
I
graduated from the Lyceum of Information Technology in Moscow. I took
some drawing courses at Moscow Architectural Institute.Then after the
Lyceum, I started to work as an intern digital animator in Animatek
International - a software and production company. It was very
beneficial to work in such a great community of artists and scientists.
While working as an animator and a 3D modeler, I was studying
programming technology intensively and was programming 3D algorithms
all my spare time. As the result of my efforts, I have created some
plug-ins for 3ds for DOS, including my own implementation of
subdivision surfaces algorithm, cloth dynamics plug-in, and also a bone
deformation plug-in. None of these development have grown to a
commercial products, however.
Later,
I started to work as a software engineer for the same company. I have
developed an original ocean water simulation formula with a real-time
rendering engine for a "Surfer" game. At different times, I was
carrying out different tasks, from programming and maintaining
rendering networks to 3D animation and teaching artist personnel to
work with the 3DSMAX software. My most successful task at Animatek was
technical supervising and support for a 3DSMAX-based movie production
project, where we needed to start without artists actually knowing the
new package. I was reading 3DMAX and Character Studio manuals at
nights, and during the daytime, I was teaching others to work with the
software.
Currently,I'm
working in a digital studio at a film and video production company
called TEKOFILMS.Here at TEKOFILMS, I'm mostly doing digital animation
for commercials. One of the clips with my 3D animation (Samsung, Vacuum
Cleaner - Elephant) won an award at a TV Commercials festival.
I'm interested in advanced techniques involving programming, scripting and software integration.
I'm happy to answer questions at CreativeCOW.net. My goal in life
is to always find the creative way and to never stop learning.
(However, sometimes my producers ask me to stop.) My experience also
includes a year of Web design and programming and multimedia CD
creation.
Here's a quick tip from Creativecow leader, George Polevoy for our ''Preparing Graphics for Video'' series. George often uses the ''High-Pass'' filter in Photoshop in addition to the regular "Clone Tool" in order to create seamless tiled graphics.
This is the project file George used to create the Cosmic Winds movie. The file uses native 3DSMAX procedural textures, so it will not open on anything but 3dsmax4.
George Polevoy explores a method of creating a flowing title effect in Adobe After Effects. With this technique, you can add a variety of effects, such as smoke or fire, as well as an abstract 'flowing' for a visual element.
NURMS (Non Rational Mesh Smooth) or Subdivision Surface technique uses low-polygonal mesh to control the shape of the smooth surface.In this tutorial, George Polevoy demonstrates his favorite techniques for symmetric NURMS modeling and 3D sketching, enough to build the model, similar to what you see in the first pictures. The model you see in the pictures is not suited for very advanced animation, which could require different topology and more refinement.
