Vance Miller

Who is Vance Miller?

A Brief history of Vance Miller

I started building things early on. When I was a kid computers didn’t do what they can do now so I relied on standbys like legos and good old paper, scissors and glue. School projects always involved some kind of construction. When I was about 11 years old, I borrowed my father’s super 8 movie camera. It had a port for a cable release which allowed me to start messing around with stop motion animation. Now not only could I build things but I could make them move. Going to college for film production was a natural progression for me and that’s where I continued to focus on animation.

By the time I got out of school, CGI was just starting to come into its own and after a few years I started freelancing in NYC working on a wide variety of projects. Since then I’ve had the opportunity to work on staff at a several companies and I’ve met and worked with some exceptional artists. But work isn’t everything. I’ve been lucky enough to have a very patient wife and two spirited kids none of whom know exactly what I do for a living but that’s ok.

What I do:

  I am the book definition of a generalist. It comes in handy working in NYC since there is always a need to wear multiple hats from job to job or even within the scope of one project. I have worked on things as diverse as character animation to particle and smoke fx. I’ll even do compositing from time to time.

  My strong points are in the lighting and rendering end of the spectrum. I’ve been doing a lot of work lately in digital set extension. This requires a good sense for capturing lighting details in live action plates and duplicating them for the cg set pieces. In addition to the overall lighting, I have to work up material shaders and textures to make things look photo-real.

On the rendering side I work with compositors on figuring out what elements are needed in addition to the usual beauty passes. I even go as far as doing test comps in Nuke or After Effects to make sure everything fits together like it should. I’ve been using vray as my renderer of choice since it was in beta and have convinced many of my clients of its outstanding capability. It’s made it easy to adopt the widely used technique of LWF (linear work flow)and generate imagery as floating point files to maintain as much information in the renders as possible.

CG is a dynamic industry and I’m continuing to learn new apps to stay up to date. The programs currently of interest to me are the 3d sculpting programs like zbrush and mudbox. Along with 3d painting programs like Mari, I think they will have an impact on what I do because of their implementation of the texturing method Ptex.

Vance's Website

Go there Now!