About

Star Wars. Jurassic Park. Batman. Die Hard. Indiana Jones.

These are just few movies I grew up watching over and over again in my early childhood, besides all the Disney animation. During my teenage years,  computers were really exciting for me – drawing on MS paint, trying to unfold the magic behind “layers” in early Photoshop versions and experimenting with very basic pascal coding. The fascination of movies returned even stronger in High School, when I got SD DV Camera as birthday present filming many DV tapes and furthermore cutting and editing the footage in hobby programs like Pinnacle studio. I was at the age of 17, when a friend of mine showed me some still images done not in Photoshop, or just any other photo editing software, but in Alias Maya – a tool making possible the creation of an image from scratch… a software for the creation of 3D animation. This was the moment, when I felt in love with the thought about being able to create ANYTHING. To be not anymore limited by “sets and costumes”. To have no limit, but the sky.

Learning 3D software was not an easy task, when there were not many free learning materials of good value at the time. Reading books about Alias Maya and relying mostly on 3D tutorials from digital tutors still got me started and I was able to become an Internship in a local TV channel, where I could expand my knowledge in Adobe Premiere and After Effects as well. In the meantime I started studying the relatively new  course of studies “Visual arts – animation kino” in New Bulgarian University, Sofia. The theoretical foundation during the first two years (history of arts, different cinematography-, animation-  and painting courses)  contributed a lot to my artistic development. Unfortunately, the satisfaction of the practical courses was not so high – the assignments and semester projects involved only hand drawing and paintings, which conflicted with my desire to create artworks in a 3D digital medium.

During my 2nd year in New Bulgarian University, I created privately the 2 minute short film “Das Erlebnis”, with the further intention to cut a showreel and apply for an University in Germany, where the practical tasks should be in the field, I loved. I picked University of applied sciences Darmstadt and spent most of the time creating animation characters and doing  TD support for my fellow animator colleagues, mostly because I already was proficient with the software. I realized, the job of the technical artist involves its own way of creativity and I enjoyed doing it for every one of my undergraduate projects.

Star Wars. Jurassic Park. Batman. Die Hard. Indiana Jones.

These are just a few movies I grew up watching over and over again in my early childhood, besides all the Disney animation. During my teenage years,  computers were really exciting for me – drawing on MS paint, trying to unfold the magic behind “layers” in early Photoshop versions and experimenting with very basic pascal coding. The fascination of movies returned even stronger in High School, when I got SD DV Camera as birthday present filming many DV tapes and furthermore cutting and editing the footage in hobby programs like Pinnacle studio. I was at the age of 17, when a friend of mine showed me some still images done not in Photoshop, or any other standard photo editing software, but in Alias Maya – a tool, which makes it possible to create  an image from scratch… a software for the creation of 3D animation. This was the moment, when I felt in love with the thought about being able to create ANYTHING. To be not anymore limited by  the “physical presence of  sets and costumes”. To have no limit, but the sky.

Learning a 3D animation software  was not an easy task, when there were not many free learning materials of good value at the time. Reading books about Alias Maya and relying mostly on 3D tutorials from digital tutors still fueled the autodidact in me to keep learning and experimenting. At the I was able to become an Internship in a local TV channel, where I could expand my knowledge in Adobe Premiere and After Effects as well. Meanwhile I enrolled for the undergraduate course of studies “Visual arts – animation cinema” in New Bulgarian University, Sofia. The theoretical foundation during the first two years (history of arts, different cinematography-, animation-  and drawing courses)  contributed a lot to my artistic development. Unfortunately, the satisfaction of the practical tasks was not high enough – the assignments and semester projects involved exclusively hand drawing and paintings, which conflicted with my desire to create artworks in a 3D digital medium.

During my 2nd year in New Bulgarian University, I created privately a 2 minute animation short film with the title “Das Erlebnis”, with the further intention to cut a showreel and apply for an University in Germany, where the learning subjects should be more concentrated in the field, I loved. I picked the University of applied sciences Darmstadt, where I spent most of the time creating animation characters and doing  TD support for my fellow animator colleagues, mostly because I already was proficient with 3D workflows and software. I realized, the job of the technical artist involves its own way of creativity and I enjoyed doing it for every one of my undergraduate projects.

Aleksandar Atanasov, August 2012.

2015 – edit: I am planning to enroll for a postgraduate course in Bournemouth  University and that’s why I decided to use this blog as part of my Digital Portfolio. A few reflections about my life after my student years in Darmstadt:

After I did my Bachelors Project in VFX I really enjoyed the taste of FX and RnD work. Unfortunately, my portfolio at the time consisted primarily of low poly characters, various rigs, a few character animations and a dozen of rather fast lit and visualized Maya scenes ( yes, I really regret not taking the time to render the projects with global illumination and overall more dynamic and interesting lighting ). As a true Maya fan I undertook a quest of glory to learn more about FX workflows in Maya. At this time Fume FX for Maya was still not commercially released, nor was Krakatoa.  So I took the Phoenix FD route (through beta testing) as a main fluid simulation tool, which was complementing to my VRay learning experience  (both Plugins developed by Chaos Group). Adding DMM and PulldownIt into the mix for destruction work, it seemed like pretty good way to go. Learning these tools, I entered into Cinesite’s Inspire Internship 2013 and had great time creating the FX shot “Inspire BMW, can’t scratch this”.

Still, it didn’t took long before the initial feelings of joy got replaced by disappointment. As easy to use and cool to play with, these third party applications did not blend with Maya flawlessly. They were (and still ARE) lacking major functionality and the small teams developing them just can’t implement the improvements fast enough. After reading and writing long posts on their community forums, I did what every self respecting FX Artist should do – I chose to not be tool driven anymore, to break the heavy chains of plugin dependencies. This is how I fell in love with Houdini and its natural procedural tool building nature. At the same time I started working as 3D Junior Artist in the animation department of Eder GmbH in Stuttgart. A Maya job, which motivated me to use every minute of my free time into Houdini.

As the months past, I was doing all kind of jobs at Eder – some more pesky, others more exciting – I am flexible enough to do any generalist work. At the end of 2014, I got myself (as most experienced artist with FX and Fluid simulators) into development of internal FX pipeline with Phoenix and Maya – building rigs and presets for high resolution Dust and Debris simulations. On the side, I was becoming pretty good Houdini user – wiring VOPs, writing VEX and doing vector and matrix calculations feels even more natural and fun.

My first real Houdini project is barely finished now, meanwhile I’m familiarizing myself with Houdini’s  Python module and I’m updating my portfolio. What an exciting year indeed! 🙂