Gnomon has moved to a new home in North Hollywood, after a couple years of research, design and development. It was a huge project for us and very much a collaborative effort between myself as the lead designer, and architects, engineers, construction and our staff who coordinated moving a 35,000 sqft college into a larger footprint. Click here for more info, renders and photos.
Blog
Founder/Director, Gnomon
The Voice in the Hollow
An African fable of sisterhood, envy and ancient evil.
Written and Directed by Miguel Ortega. Production Design by Tran Ma. Produced by Gnomon / Alex Alvarez
This film is the result of a convergence of several events that would take a while to explain, but in short, I am very happy and proud that they happened and that we have this awesome film as a result. Funded by an Epic MegaGrant that I submitted in 2022, Miguel Ortega and Tran Ma, via Gnomon’s support, produced this haunting film in Unreal Engine 5 over the course of about a year. Their passion, dedication and skills are truly inspiring.
Lustmord
Over the past couple months I've had the opportunity to create a bunch of visuals for Lustmord and Karin Park who will be performing live together later this year. It was honestly a huge honor as I've been listening to Lustmord for years. Their album, Alter, is hauntingly beautiful and I expect the show will be too. I produced about 45 minutes of animation across 28 shots. Unreal Engine 5, Quixel Mixer, ZBrush, WorldMachine, Gaea, Maya, etc. While UE5 was still in beta and rather quirky, it really represents a huge leap forward.
Tartarus
At the outset of the Unreal Fellowship we were given a prompt, ‘conflict’, and given a week to come up with an idea, storyboards and then an animatic for a one to three minute short film… which we would make over the course of a month using software we’d never used before. 100 artists, 100 stories, 100 shorts. This was a little stressful but also pretty exciting! Ultimately, I came up with something more ambitious than time would allow and what I completed does not yet reveal the story but… there is one. Heh. Anyhow. Five weeks ago I had never used Unreal. I now know a tiny bit of Unreal. :)
Unreal Engine
On June 25th I turned in my final project and was officially graduated from the Epic Games Unreal Fellowship. Five weeks of intense Unreal immersion with 100 industry professionals from literally all over the world. It was an experience that I will remember vividly for a long time and, while intense, it was awesome. After 20+ years of using Maya, it was amazing to finally be in a real-time environment. Not that it replaces Maya, since you still need to do so many things outside of Unreal but… it is really liberating to not have to wait for renders. You sacrifice a few things but… it is so worth it.
Vicar VI: Vitrificar Inveteratus
As we breath our last breath, it is exhaled by the Vicar.
Sculpted this guy in ZBrush on a stream last week, then finished up the lighting/rendering in Maya with Redshift. I played a bit with the render passes in Photoshop, used Embergen for the fire, then tweaked color in After Effects.
The Last Thing I Remember
28 second loop with sound. I started this on a Gnomon livestream last week, and then just kept playing with it over the weekend. I tried out Adobe Audition for the first time to do the sound/ambience which was really fun and intuitive. It has a bit of an 80s vibe, but that’s really due to the synth I used: OB-6 from DSI. The melody sounds unique yet familiar… not sure if I made it up or if I’ve heard it somewhere before. Hmm.
Embergen
Recently stumbled upon a new tool that is in beta called Embergen. It’s really fun and extremely intuitive with amazing performance for creating smoke, fire, etc. While a few important features are missing, such as the ability to work on imported animated meshes, I can’t wait to see what the final 1.0 release will be like! Anyhow…. about a month ago I started streaming with Josh Herman on Gnomon’s weekly ArtJam, and this is the first image I’ve completed mostly live, including layout, zbrush, rigging and fire/smoke. I did a few things on my own time, just cuz it was hard to wait an entire week between working on it. So Embergen... pretty cool.