winter project '09

so i've been modeling this new character named Jim. modeling this character i've been
concentrating on topology, making sure there isn't any weird warps in the mesh. so far it's been going well & i haven't ran into many problems, the modeling is probably about 50% done. i found that adding edge loops are easier by beveling rather then using the edge loop itself. i feel like i have more control over where the lines will made rather then maya calculating the edge loop itself. the only flaw i've encountered using the bevel tool is sometimes tris will be developed between edges that aren't being beveled. i try to stay with as much quads as possible, but a couple of tris won't do much harm. i usually look over the mesh smoothed out to make sure there is no weird warps in the mesh cased by the tris. also, sometimes i can over come the tris by merging some vertex where the edge loops meet.

so over all my goal is too have a clean mesh model & then laying out the UVs & successfully texturing it.

here is some wired images & a quick render of the model.
i think when i'm ready to post up a WIP for CG Society i'll play with some test metal textures & a templete with the name of the model to make it a bit more presentable to people.

images:

textureing!

so it's been awhile since i've updated about anything
and i'm getting to the end of the 5th quarter.

i've whipped up a low polygon model ship to experiment with texturing.
this model is going to be part of my matte painting project, but
a lot of it won't be seen in the matte painting because it's just going
to be a quick fly by with some dark lighting. so i'm not too worried about
it being really realistic.

i've learned a lot about uv layouts with hard surfaced models,
rather then organic models. also creating the textures really helped
me out to understand how to go about using the tools
in photoshop to really make my textures work, rather it looking like
a pasted photo on to the uv layout.
hopefully the next model i create will come out better :P

i still have to make the bump & the specular maps, and some more editing on
the textures.

here is a work in progress:

Update on Summer 09 Project!

So I've been having a good break for the past couple of weeks.
I've been working hard learning more about rigging in maya, which i have discovered to be more awesome then i thought it was going to be!
There is a couple of tools/techniques i've learned that help rigging a lot.

One of them that I'll talk to about a lot is the set driven key tool that maya has.
It started as I as a lot of rigging reels that have added attributes in the channel box that help a lot out with animation for the animator.
I was wondering how to achieve a technique to help me as well.
After browsing on the internet and finding out more & more, I figured out how to work the set driven key tool.
In a nut shell the tool is a pre-animated keyed slider, kind of like the blender tool.
So I'm siked on learning this tool in maya.
Imma go experiment with it right now!

New Summer 09 Project

Since I've been out of school for a couple of days I've set my self to start a new personal project.
I was planning on making a short animation film with a decent story, I still haven't figured out the story, but I plan on working hard the story!

My expectations for this project is to get a good project down with all around strong points, including: modeling, animation, story, & composting.
I'm not necessarily concentrating on perfection, but aiming to get more then half of it done with in the summer break.

My characters are pretty much going to reflect on the robots from transformers.
I'm so amazed with ILM & how awesome they did with the movie.
By the way "awesome" is big understatement, no words can describe how epic it is, haha.
I can ramble on & on about how fantastic the transformers characters are, but I'll stop there ;]
I also wanted to have a little gundam wing's characteristics in the robot models too.
There character design is pretty awesome too.
They should make a live action movie about that series too.

Currently I'm modeling my first character.
He resembles a lot of optims prime's futures in his face, but then when I got to the body it kinda transfers to a gundam body.
This is probably about four days worth of work, hopefully I can finish it by the end of this week, with starting to make the skeleton for it & get started on rigging it.

Image:

End of Summer 09 Quarter

SO! I'm officially done with my summer quarter 09 at school. Two more to go! :D
I'll be posting my final projects, with the exception of me posting my sound design project already.

My big project for Digital Comp currently compressing for Vimeo & will be enabled under this post when it's done. That darn project came out to be almost 7.5 GB! Animation codec is a really big one ;]

I could say this is project came out pretty much how I wanted it to, except some fancy typography. Making every single image was well worth it, even the text was made by me! It was a lot of work! I did learn a lot from this project. Most of all I learned how to manage my time pretty well with this project. I had some time to put some 3D elements that I made in Maya. What I was most siked on was getting the look of the project to be on my 3D elements. I find it hard most times to get 3D elements to go with 2D elements, but I'm deff closing that gap & learning my way to make it work well.
I tend to fix some of the animation of the texts & add a couple of elements, but it's mostly there.

Alt Energy from Ryan Somerville on Vimeo.

Sound Design Final Project

My favorite sound design project of all three quarters, hands down!
Deff inspired me to make my own SFXs for my own videos.
Can't wait to get my own copy of protools at home! :D

Sound Design Final Project from Ryan Somerville on Vimeo.

The description I threw up on vimeo:

Programs used: Protools & Reason

Description of Project:
To recreate The Fifth Element case scene's sound design.
We were only given the dialogue, with the exception of it not being cleaned up.

The first task was to clean up the dialogue, remove grain, fix the volume, & so on.

Then we were to make out own sound effect from scratch. We were given a big database of various sound FXs, non were specifically made for this project.
We had to use techniques that required us think in different ways of mixing sounds together & messing with the pitches & so on.

The next task was to compose music. A use a song of our choice to edit down to fit the scene.

Overall I loved this project till the very end.
I spent endless hours making the SFX and fitting them down to the last detail and enjoyed each moment.
My teacher was great in teaching three quarters of sound design, wish we had more classes we could have taken.

progress with life!

SO! I wasn't able to post this up a couple of days ago, I was quite busy with school and internship interviews. OHHH WHAAA!
Did I say internship interview? :P
So yeah, in the begging of the week I had two interviews for an internship.
Apparently both liked me and wanted me to come in. I couldn't take both, so I went with the first, b/c it being in a place I want to go more towards.

I went two days so far this past week, it's pretty cool!
There is only two people that work there.
Even though there is only two of them, they have a lot of clients.
The creative art director is quite cool, he gave me a couple of bumpers to
remake to match a next season of a show, project runway.
It's cool to see how things are layered out.
What I noticed & have been learning about is the little things that spice up the
over all look of the whole scene.
I'm having a good time there, I'm SIKED! :]

Also I've been working on my new title scene right now,
here is a quick preview of it! (Looks like Tron a bit)

Example:

The Interview

Tomorrow I have my first official interview for a job in the industry I want to get into, I'm very excited.
Hopefully all goes well & I leave with a good impression.
;]

Tank! 3D Modeling!

I've start my new title scene for my 3D modeling/animation class.
I picked the Military Channel to do my project on.
The style I wanted to go for was kinda of a computer interface look where you can only see the outline of objects, specs, & all that kinda stuff.

Examples!









I am very aware that this is a very popular look that many people have done in the past, so it's noting original, but heck! it's just awesome to create for yourself!
I plane to add some differences to the style, so hopefully that will work out well.
I can't wait to get this one done & see the outcome!


So far I have started modeling a tank. I have been enjoying modeling this baby, I tend to go down to some very small details on this model.
I could probably use it in another future project that will be used in a different way, who knows!

Time: 2ish hours?

Finished Transfomers Title Animation (ALMOST!)

So when I came to class yesterday, I had thought my title animation project for my 3D modeling/animation class was due.
Unexpectedly it was not! BUT! The surprising thing was that I didn't have to struggle to finish the night before!

This time around I actually had a big project with a big challenge ahead of me, but I guess all the hard work I put in paid off pretty well. Now I have a week to fix up any small errors with texturing, make audio more lively, & a couple of other minor things. I'll also be able to render it in higher quality this time.

Hurrr is Prooojectoooo:

Transformers Title Animation Remake from Ryan Somerville on Vimeo.

Transformers Title Animation

Haven't posted anything for awhile.

I'm currently rendering my Transformers Title Animation project for my 3D Animation/Modeling class. I'm rendering my second version of the animation that will be combined with the first one I rendered earlier today.

The first render was consisting of just a nice simple texture, with the second one I changed the texture's settings a bit with roughness with the bump mapping, how it received light, and a couple of settings. I also cranked up the motion blur with the second one to give it more life, or just a better look. I love motion blur options on Maya & After Effects :P
Makes everything look smooooth & nice.

When the rendering is done with the second one, I'll bring both of them into After Effects to composite them to get a better look between them with blending modes & such.
After that I think I'll wrap up the project with some sounds & a "how it was made" video to present the project.

I'll post up a picture & video later, don't want to slow down the computer, stupid rendering taking up my CPU's memory usage! :P

Seven to Eight Years of Braces

Today I finally got my braces off, it's been quite a long time that I've had them on.
Feels very different!

Laura & I smiling for the camera :P

Renewable Energy Story Board

So for one of my classes the assignment is a all quarter assignment. We are giving scripts & get to choose from the scripts. The scripts are all about how the economic drop, renewable energy, free speech, & a couple of others.
Looking through them & seeing which one was more to my liking, I picked the renewable energy script. I figured that one will be more of an graphical element to them and I was able to make some smooth transitions between each scene.

I've been story boarding for about two hours now, I'm thinking that I may have too much going on in just a short amount of time, but maybe not. It's suppose to be three minutes, so hopefully all goes will with the timing.

I'm suppose to be building the images as of now, but I believe my project will got way smoother if I story board a lot before anything done on the computer.
I think in any project that story boarding should be a main concern before anything else.
After this will I hope to finish finalizing the story board & start building my images.

Internship

Yesterday when I got home from work I passed out after a long 8 hour shift, when I woke up I checked my e-mail & got a message back from the production company I've been e-mailing back & forth for about two months.
They asked when would I want to stop by there location and talk!
I'm siked!

If there is anything I want more, it is an internship or a job in my field.
To be around people that I know that are passionate as much about their career as myself would be a place I would want to be, it would help me be inspired & learn a lot from much more experienced people that have been in the industry for sometime.

29th Day of Summer Picture

29th Day of Summer

Today was pretty hot, kinda getting use to it by now.
I think i gotta switch to tanks rather then collared shirt, gotta sacrifice the flashy style for the summer look.

Day started, as always waking up at 7:30ish, feeling a bit lazy.
Worked on my Transformers title scene a bit on paper, still kinda scared to start working on it in Maya, but I'll make it work.

I attended my 12 o'clock class, 3D modeling/animation class, learned about more animated with graph editors and motion paths. All to confusing, glad I have my notes to refer back to.

Then came along my 3 o'clock class, film history. I thought it was going to be an alright class session, but then was let down terribly. We watched Citizen Kane, which is clammed to be best American film. I'm not sure what it was, but I did not enjoy the movie one bit. It was probably the fact that it was an old film, black & white, & not being modern. I do appreciate old films though, but this one was just horrible. As what I was scared of from the begging, which was falling asleep in class, was happening watching this boring film. Hopefully the upcoming films are not so bad in the class.

The drive home wasn't so bad, only about 30 or so minutes. I worked on my story board, scripts, & style sheets for my Digital Comp class. The topic of my 3 minute script is on "Piracy," which is totally hypocritical on my part, ha ha.

Watching Oceans 13
those sly thieves ;]

VFX Breakdowns

It's amazing in the world of Visual Effects now days.

With the computers we have today it seems that we can pretty much simulate something from real life that looks decently close with enough time & knowledge put into a project.

Television, Movies, & Video Games show off these Visual Effects very well these days.

Audiences of these medias don't realize how much hard work is put into these Visual Effects, but I guess when the audiences don't realize the Visual Effects, it's when the Artists are doing there job very well.


Some websites that I found that show off how much work is put into just a couple of seconds into visual effects with television, movie, & video games are:

for some Video Game VFX breakdowns:
http://brandonriza.com/3DVisualEffects/HTML/3DVisualEffects.htm

some Movie VFX breakdowns:
http://www.moving-picture.com/index.php/vfx-breakdowns.html

& a Television show with VFX breakdowns:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oTUs7hDq2PA


It's very inspirational to me to see these kinds of things, just makes me wanna work to a higher level!

:D

Saturday Moning/Afternoon

The day started with of course waking up at 7:30 am sharp, the time I always wake up.

My ears were greeted by my family talking in the living room about the tour da france, yes, rather then the singing birds outside my open window.

I quick brows around the net to my daily visited websites, motiongrapher, the come up, myspace(gay), & lots of others.


With all that happening in the first thirty minutes of my morning, I started to work on my homework :D

My concept for my first title intro animation for my 3D modeling/animation class was in remake the Transformers title scene

which can be viewed here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZuMKsFb_aMw&feature=related

here you can see that i was very productive though out the morning:



I started on drawing the animation steps for the letters transforming into the date release:


fuck soggy cereal:


me for the morning:


i've got work in two hours and a half, i think i'll go ride for a bit
>_<