Featured Artist Scott Novasic

What is your personal and company background info?

Well, here's my biography/resume/story/background and information. SuperNova is my Animation and Visual Effects Company in Los Angeles California. I have over 16 years of Animation, Design and Visual effects experience which has resulted in numerous Local & National Gold ProMax, Emmy, Telly and Addy award winning experience in Milwaukee, Chicago and currently in Los Angeles. My work has been featured on the covers of color publishing magazine multiple times and I have been featured in Computer Graphics World in a 4 page artists profile as well. I have also lectured on computer animation, compositing and photoshop techniques throughout my career around the country.

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Scott Novasic's Demo Reel

I graduated from the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee with a BFA in graphic design, and a minor in illustration. I began freelancing early on in my career, after working as the Senior designer\Illustrator for the worlds largest music publisher, Hal Leonard Publishing in Milwaukee. I went on to combine my illustration work with 3d imagery as early as 1992. This is when my journey began in successful self employment from 1992 thru 2001, this period was highlighted with the opening up of my own animation and effects studio within Milwaukees largest Post Production facility, The Independent Group. My company was called Independent Effects.

My run of self employment ended in 2001 for very personal reasons. This led to my hiring at WFLD FOX Television Chicago, as the Senior Designer/Animator. I enjoyed 5 and a half extremely successful years at Fox gaining valuable hi end broadcast experience, and winning numerous national Gold Promax awards and Emmy's along the way. A new corporate Image campaign forced on the creative department from New York, led me, and many other creatives at Fox to begin to look elsewhere for a better creative situation. I left Fox to try and be closer to family in Florida. So I accepted the Senior Designer position with the Golf Channel in Orlando. From there I began my first national job search which landed me in Los Angeles as the Senior Designer & Animation Manager with KCBS & KCAL. Helping oversee the historic Hi Definition transition of the 2 stations, including all the promotion that went with it. CBS decided to add the proprietary animation tool, VizRT to the art department shortly after the Hi definition buildout. I was determined to advance my 3d design and animation skills, the VizRT, in my opinion, severely cut into that opportunity.

For the first time in my 17 year career I was located exactly where I wanted to be, Los Angeles California, home of a massive amount of production houses and freelance work. Deciding to move from CBS, to Self Employment was one of the easiest decisions I have ever made. I immediately spent 10 to 40 hour weeks at the Gnomon School of Visual Effects in Hollywood, training In Maya. Since then, SuperNova has been doing well considering the fact that I have only just began to market myself and network here in LA.

What field of 3D do you consider yourself in? What is your specialty?

In 3D, I guess you would label me as a Motion Graphics and Broadcast Designer. I think that those titles are a bit limiting when it comes to what I actually output. I really enjoy incorporating moments and scenes that have a realism and environment to them. I also love combining 2d and 3d elements with live action both seamlessly, and in stylized ways.

How did you get your start in 3D?

I Began my career as an illustrator using mostly Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator back in 1991. As the Senior Designer with Hal Leonard Publishing in Milwaukee at 24yrs old, I began incorporating 3d imagery with a little program called Typestry. It was awesome! It allowed me to output 3d text with amazing rendermana quality. I would make custom fonts with the shapes I wanted to use and have Typestry render them beautifully, (at the time) Typestry also animated. My job couldn't use animation, but I immediately was hooked. Animation became my passion from there on. The first traditional 3d program I used was Specular's Infini-d (to this day I still have 1 animation on my demo reel using infini-d in 1993) I was blessed with early success in my career, and as a result I invested $7500 in this little 3d program called, Electric Image. (around 1993-94)

What was your favorite project and do you have examples?

I have to admit, it's not easy for me to pick a favorite project. In a way, its my next project. I look so forward to creating new imagery and improving my talents as an animator. I'm never really satisfied, which drives me to get better with each and every project. If I had to name a project or animation, I couldn't, there are maybe a a few of them I enjoyed doing a lot. One of those 3 would be the Happy Holidays for NESN. (the New England Sports Network) Simple animation, but good balance and overall look. (I had requests from 3 other clients around the country wanting that same animation, but with their companies names and adjusted ornaments.) Another one would be Fox Investigates. I modeled all of it in Zaxwerks Invigerator. The falling wood is all “fake” dynamics. I liked the idea of creating a dark moody graphic of a back alley way, where investigative reporters sometimes go for clues. (designed and finished in 4 days)

Lastly would be my home of comedy spots involving an actor in a red suit. I concepted, sort of a "bad props" environment for him to navigate in and around, usually ending in something breaking or falling apart. It was fun to do because all of the red suit guy's footage was shot BEFORE I concepted it. So I had to animate and composite things that matched his reactions and timing.

What tools do you use in your business, mainly the software you use?

Electric Image v7 with Paralumino's Plug-ins and many more, Maya Unlimited 2008, Real Flow 4, Poser, Particle Illusion, Zaxwerks Invigerator Pro & Pro Modeler, Photoshop, Illustrator, Studio Artist and the glue that holds all of these Applications together, Adobe After Effects with virtually every plug in you can buy.

What are the strong points that keep you using EIAS for your 3D work?

Where do I start. Cameras quality and speed. Overall ease of use. Overall cost of ownership including unlimited render nodes and the large number of hi end rendering options like caustics, hdri, ibl included in the core package. In summary, EI output quality tends to make me look better than I am, and I like that a lot. Other 3d programs I have used, including Maya and Cinema 4d take a huge amount of effort to get the final output just right. EI takes that very complicated process, and in my opinion makes it easy. This fact is one of the reasons I feel EI has a lot of room for growth among design professionals familiar with, but new to 3d software.

What is your favorite EIAS feature(s)?

Im a broken record here, but its Camera. Secondly is the ease of use. I know thats not a feature but to me, its been critical to my success. With the fabulous learning videos available for FREE by Ian Waters, you can see first hand how well complicated features are implemented in EI. In Maya and Cinema, you have to pay more than a thousand dollars on training DVD's just to learn how to do those same things Ian covers for free.

Do you have a tip or trick you would like to share with EIAS users?

I dont know if its a trick or anything, but when I have a scene that uses a lot of raytracing, refractions and transparency that renders out at, say, 12 minutes a (video) frame. That same frame may render in a minute with no antialiasing on. In an animation, this quality is not the greatest to show a client at the “rough” stage of an animation. (say 900 frames) But at 12 minutes a frame I could never quickly turnaround a sample with a tight deadline. My options are to render with antialiasing at a smaller size which is so 1995 and not real impactful. I found that rendering out the image with antialiasing off is the right thing to do, just at 2 to 3 times the size. Camera still kicks out the rendering in somewhere around 2-4 minutes a frame. In After Effects when you scale the image back down to video resolution it looks surprisingly smooth and nice. And its full size. The aliasing you see is severely reduced. Maybe everyone knows this, but its a very nice way to get the most quality out of your quick turnaround animations at full resolution. There are adittional tools in After Effects that can take the minimal aliasing still visible, down to near zero.

What do you see in your future (projects, 3D, etc.)?

In MY future, here is what I know I will see. I see my first child, a healthy baby girl named Kathyrn Hope Novasic being born via C Section August 27th 2008, in Hollywood California. Wait, that's already a scheduled event. (big smiley face!)

What do I see in my career and in 3d? Here are 5 of my hopes\predictions in chronilogical order.

I see my company SuperNova thriving here in LA. I would like to remain a bit of a hired gun for a large variety of animation projects, like I am today. I see my demo reel and projects taking on a much wider variety of styles and techniques. I expect my 3d skills to continue to improve as a few things occur with me and the 3d industry over the next 10 years and beyond.
I start to learn more of Maya and its wonderful organic capabilities including soft body effects, fluids, particle systems and paint effects over the next few years. (and it will take years) This knowledge will allow me to build and composite elements in After Effects that I currently can not do with EI. If I stay self employed, which is my plan, I see EI continuing to be my core 3d application.
EIAS continues to evolve allowing me to always have access to Cameras speed and quality with additional animation features over time. MAINLY adding adobe illustrator support within Paralumino's geometry generation plug-ins allowing me to animate at the vertex level in EI, and making EI the best 3d tool in the market for Motion Graphic and Broadcast designers. I see even more plug-ins or built in features then taking advantage of this absolutely necessary feature, ai import. I then see this leading to a very nice increase in sales for EI as it targets the right markets, and people, for promoting and advertising this.
Longer term (3-10yrs) I hope to have been using Tesla for a number of years by now. I see Tesla adding Camera for rendering, then adding animation capabilities, soft bodys, a true particle system, a hi end texturing system, the latest in dynamics capabilities along with state of the art animation tools! I see Brian Pohls dream of EI/Tesla making its way back into the Film Industry having a real shot at happening. Slowly, but happening.
After this, It gets REAL cloudy, but I hope I am using the Award winning T - MAS 3d software for most of my imagery. (Tesla - Modeling and Animation System) You never know..... (big smiley face)

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