Customer Case Study - University of Santa Barbara, Conversions & Engineering Visualizations by Peter Allen

Peter Allen has been the marketing and creative content director for UCSB College of Engineering (UC Santa Barbara) for the last 3 decades. The University of California, Santa Barbara, commonly known as UCSB or UC Santa Barbara, is a public research university and one of the 10 general campuses of the University of California system.

Peter is a prolific visualization artist, having started started off with early Wavefront software on SGI machines and slowly migrating through various versions of Alias Studio and PowerAnimator to using Autodesk's Maya, 3ds Max, Mudbox and Softimage as his main production tools, in addition to various rendering platforms such as: Renderman, Shot, Keyshot and Octane Render.

For over a decade Peter has been a core user of Okino's PolyTrans-for-Maya 3D conversion software using it to bring together various forms of visualization data for acccurate and dazzling rendering + animation. PolyTrans-for-Maya allows Peter to import and assemble 3D assets from various external 3D packages, CAD sources, visualization sources and molecular file formats into Maya.

As quoted by Peter:

"Working in a research and teaching university with students and faculty is a stimulating environment. Everyone I work with is passionate about their field and every project is usually investigating something that either has not been done before or is pushing the limits of what currently is understood about a field of study. In addition, as marketing director, my job is to promote what is being taught, learned and invented in such a way as to accurately depict the content in an enlivened manner. Consequentially I get all sorts of files: from students who are learning simple 3D modeling in Modo, Rhino, Solidworks, Lightwave, 3ds Max, POV and more. There are XYZ data dumps from experiments, protein and atomic structure data, CAD plans for building expansions, STL files for model testing, DXF data, materials crystal data, electron density data, all from a variety of machines and software versions. Often each of these data types has a "flavor" of the year and in order to get them all into Maya and often back out again in clean form I use Okino's PolyTrans-for-Maya.

Okino has seen me though countless third party software upgrades, platform and OS changes, fixed my own bad modeling habits and has enabled me to spend more time listening to what the client needs and less time time explaining why I could not use the files that I was given. I love the look on a student's face when I show them an enhanced image of what they poured their dedication into. I owe thanks to Okino's CTO Robert Lansdale and his team at Okino for a lot of that satisfaction."

Peter's life has come full circle, combining his interest and university studies in engineering, biology and computer graphics as a key scientific visualization specialist for UCSB. As a pre-medical student at UCSB he got his start doing hand drawn/painted cel animation for Developmental Embryology and Plate Tectonics tutorials in 1984... made a brief sideways leap to do a few animated commercials and worked on the TV series HeMan Masters of the Universe... then back to UCSB in his current position. His work can be found throughout UCSB literature, including UCSB's Convergence Magazine, the award-winning magazine of Engineering and the Sciences, which is designed to offer insight into the breakthrough, interdisciplinary research and teaching at UC Santa Barbara. As marketing director for the College of Engineering his responsibilities include web pages, print and presentation media and he is able to use his 3D visualization imagery and animation to enhance these branding and marketing tools.

Peter's image gallery can be found online here.

Click on any image shown below to see its full scale rendition.

Copyrights

All graphics are Copyright by UCSB Engineering and Peter Allen, All Rights Reserved. No images may be reproduced without the explicit permission from UCSB Engineering and Peter Allen, permission which Okino Computer Graphics has received.