Bill Watts

About

 

Hello. I'm Bill. I am a technical artist currently based in Portland, OR. I have a MFA from the University of Texas at Dallas in Arts and Technology. I specialize in creating intuitive and emotive character rigs for 3D animation. I have been involved in a number of animated shorts, some of which I hope you will enjoy during your visit to my portfolio. 

 

I am a big believer in procedural workflows and have endeavored to automate much of my rigging with Python tools designed to speed up the process. It's incredible how much more efficient one can work when they are able to write scripts on the fly to handle repetitive or complex tasks. Python is my preferred language, but I also have experience with Mel and C#.

 

Autodesk's Maya is the environment I am most comfortable in but I do have some experience with Cinema 4D. As for vFx, I have had the opportunity to utilize Houdini and Maya's dynamic solvers to generate a range of visual effects for use in animated shorts.

 

In addition to animation production, I have worked with Vulintus in the development of Opti-Speech. This real-time human tongue visualization is based in the Unity engine and utilizes input from a NDI Wave electromagnetic device. This data is calibrated for the Unity environment and applied to a rigged model of a head and tongue. A demo can be viewed here http://www.vulintus.com/optispeech/

 

Beyond my day job, I dabble in a number of other digital arts including video generation & glitch, projection mapping, terrain generation, and 3D printing. 

 

If you would like to contact me, please utilize the sidebar form or send me an email at wdwattsiii@gmail.com.

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-Bill