About Me: Eric S. Keller When I was a little kid my parents would buy huge rolls of newsprint for me and my brothers to draw on. When I was in high school my friends and I would make comic books on index cards; the bloodier, the better. In college I switched to music, specifically the classical guitar. I reasoned that it would be somehow useful in my future career as a rock star. It wasn't. But it did teach me a lot about learning, discipline, and the discipline of learning. In 1997 I returned to the visual arts when I started to study computer animation. A year later I created my first professional animation for the Howard Hughes Medical Institute Holiday Lectures on Science series. It was a transparent beating heart with visible blobs of blood. I created it in Maya 1.0 on a little blue SGI O2. From 1998-2005 I was a full time scientific animator for HHMI. I have been lucky enough to create animations for some of the worlds leading scientists including Stuart Schreiber, Huda Zoghbi, Eric Lander, and Nobel Laurate Tom Cech. Most of these animations are available on-line at a web site we created called BioInteractive. In 2004 I published my first magazine tutorial in Highend Magazine Magazine on how to import and render macromolecular data in Maya. At the end of February, 2005, my wife Zoe and I packed up the dogs and all our stuff and moved from Washington, DC to West Hollywood, CA. I took some classes at the Gnomon School of Visual Effects (still do when I have the time) where I studied drawing with Kevin Llewellyn, sculpture with John Brown, character design from Neville Page, and ZBrush from Scott Spencer (plus other classes and fabulous teachers). Over the years I have written oodles of nerdy animation tutoriuals for magazines, molecularmovies.org, and highend3d.com. I've also written two books: Introducing ZBrush and Maya Visual Effects: The Innovator's Guide. I've been a guest speaker at Harvard Medical School and contributed curriculum to their courses on Maya for Molecular Biologists. I am currently writing Mastering Maya 2009 (17 chapters!!) which is due out Spring 2009. Lynda.com just released my ZBrush Essential's Video course. I'm now teaching Introduction to ZBrush at Gnomon(starting Winter 2009) and I'm doing lots of freelance work. I'd like to do more personal artwork in the coming years, I think I'm overdoing the teaching thing. My goal for 2009 is to work less and play guitar a little more. My blog is mostly about my work but I must talk about my dogs as well. The website Bloopatone is named after my first dog Blue who died of old age this year. If you'd like to take her for a virtual walk click here. I hope you enjoy the work on my web site. I'm currently working as a freelance animator with an emphasis on scientific animation and character modelling. Please feel free to contact me if you have any questions about me or my work. My resume can be found here. - Eric Keller 11.2008 |
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