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that's me - picture taken long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.
Put my face on front of a scanner and pushed the "scan" button.
The result of this experiment is not giving very good reference about how I actually look, but at least you can study my skull to perfection :)

The strange 29 years old person on the left image have been sticking with CG for a while. Around 11 years to be more precise. Of course not all of them in production, it was needed some time for self education before getting into the industry.
I was always interested in computer graphics. At the beginning it was more of unclear feeling than anything else. I can remember back in the days, having big fun with PC-Paint, Deluxe Paint and bunch of other little apps, but could not explain why - just liked the feeling of visualizing my ideas.
I can clearly remember the day when my cousin shown me the first version of Autodesk Animator 1.0 and 3D Studio 2.0. After I saw him ( he is a die-hard programmer ) pulling a fast ugly animation out of the aa.exe thing I literaly got a call from "above".
From that moment I knew what I have been born about.
In the next couple of years I spent enormous amount of time learning how to do 3D. I did it myself. And did it that way, not because I like doing things the difficult way, but because I had no other option - no quality literature at that time and very slow internet access in my region. So, the situation though me how to solve the problems myself, of course I realized this years later.
Time passed, at some point I got into the University, wasted 3 years there, but then something happened - the cuttest girl in the grade turned eye on me, lucky I ... she got me :)
The next 2 years we were in the heaven. Hanging around, lying on the beach, pretending that graduating - boy, what a life ! Then we decided to go more serious. Married and got our first child ( a wild boy ). Then I realized that the things will not work the way they did in the past - my little family needed better financial support. We were at the last stage of finishing the University and the time was good to move forward and to find a job.
Spent 1-2 years coding web data bases and designing web sites, but the situation was still in the air. So, the next step was to get a job in the CG industry. That was what I really wanted to do. Shortly after that I got the first job offer from a film studio. This was the beginning of my real career. In the next few years I switched several studios, software platforms, moved to the States and got my second child ( a baby girl ) ...
These days I am at Imageworks as a td guy.

I know, that for many people the CG is just work like any other, but for me it's like hobby.
Actually it is much more - it is my true passion.
Even now, father of two little kids, I am spending good part of my free time expanding my skills and learning as much as possible - I really enjoy this process.
Sharing knowledge and ideas with people around me is another thing I really like and appreciate when others are doing the same.

You can always write me at pshipkov@yahoo.com, if you want to talk about something, or just to say "Hi".

 
I hope that the information on my web site will be usefull for you in one or another way.
 
[ DEVELOPMENT ]
NAME: Muscles 4.1 ( last update: 01/30/2005 )
DATA: Tools for muscles creation. The muscles can be used as smooth skin influences, sculpt deformers, wrap deformers, etc... Can be used as collision objects for dynamic skins ...
NAME: OverBurn 1.6 including VoxelEditor ( last update: 05/09/2006 )
DATA: OverBurn creates dynamic structures similar to OverBurn's plug-in for 3DS MAX or LightWave's HyperVoxels, using combination of particles and fluids.
VoxelEditor brings ability to select voxels directly in the viewports and to immediatelly edit their properties.
NAME: PaintSkinWeights 1.2 ( last update: 22/02/2007 )
DATA: A complete hack of Maya's artPaintTools. The default tools are powerfull, but the workflow is somehow not the best available around. The key word here is "efficiency".
NAME: StretchMap 1.0 ( last update: 07/10/2006 )
DATA: A VEX SOP for Houdini. It generates point attributes based on geometry deformations. The produced data can be passed to shaders for local control over texture maps ( like displacement, bump, specular, etc. ), or can be used for further manipulations over the geometry.
NAME: ComponentsConstructionHistory 1.0
DATA: This tool provides a simple UI for managing of groupParts nodes. Using these nodes you can store groups of components ( sets of vertices, faces, edges, CV's, etc. ) as construction history elements. These elements can feed data to modifiers, deformers, etc. This is a 100% common graph functionality, but is not covered by the default UI.
NAME: PointsManager 1.0 ( last update: 11/27/2005 )
DATA: A generic attribute manager - operates with any kind of multi/multiArray attributes. Supports all the available deformers and geometry shapes ( + vertexColors for mesh primitives ). Transfering of point data between shapes with different topology, located on a different positions in the space, is not that big deal anymore.
NAME: ShoulderRig 1.3 ( last update: 01/23/2006 )
DATA: A very old and stable working technique for keeping shoulder / armpit area's volume in extreme poses. As result, deformations look better and are more controlable.
NAME: SmartCalc 1.2
DATA: A calculator with many cool functions - numeric systems ( HEX / DEC / OCT / BIN ), 3 memory banks, metric systmes, equations, extended aritmetic functions and many others. Best works on IE 6.0 or later.
NAME: Flatten 1.0
DATA: A simple tool for flattening of geometry. Usefull in many situations, for example: having elements moving in and out from a character body - spikes, horns, nails, tentacles, etc. Most likely you will need something to compress their shapes when inside the character's body.
NAME: BonesOnCurve 2.0 ( last update: 01/15/2005 )
DATA: This is a new kind of IK/FK solution. It is very usefull for facial setup, cloth, rope or rubber rigs. Version 1.0 was dumb, 2.0 is the real working thing. It allows Hermite spline evaluation - for tension control and smoother deformations.
NAME: WaterDrops 2.5
DATA: In fact these waterdrops are combination of particles + expressions. Current implementation gives nice control over every motion aspect - positionPP, velocityPP, scalePP, colorPP, massPP, dropping ...
NAME: InteractiveDispalcement 3.0
DATA:

Here we have interactive displacement in the viewports. What you see is what you get.
NOTE: This is not a HeighField node and it works not only for planar objects !
NAME: SolarSystem 1.0
DATA: An approximated simulation of the Solar System. All major objects are listed here, except comets, meteorites and recently discovered satellites. Integrated UI allows easy control over many simulation aspects. Just open the scene and execute the "solarSystem" command.
NAME: RubicCube 1.0
DATA: A game. It allows full interactive control over the cube ... just like in the real world.
NAME: InteractiveDistances 2.2
DATA: Tool for visualization of Environment Fog Distances and Camera Clipping Planes. And of course, it allows direct interactive control over them directly in the viewports.
NAME: Scissors 1.0
DATA: A simple tool for slicing of syflex cloth objects at dynamic simulation time.
NAME: DistanceConstraint 1.0
DATA: This script creates distance constraint.
NAME: PolyCounter 1.5
DATA: This script creates a list containing all polygonal objects in the scene + details about vertices, edges, faces, UV points count. You can directly select any one of them using this simple UI.
[ TUTORIALS ]
[ forceFields, particles, fluids ]
[ rigid+softBody fun ]
[ oceanSurface ]
[ blendShape tricks ]
[ motionBlurred SW particles ]
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[ RENDERING ]
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