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: