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.
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.
