Merry...St Stephen's Day.

Curses, I was to actually post something up on Christmas Day (It's now 1 am as I'm typing this) but I was just so wrecked from the amount of food my Mam cooks. Ryan family Christmas dinners are just so much more then what I generally need to eat in my day to day life. Factor in a bit of alcohol and Christmas movies on telly and you're looking at a paralyzed Kev Ryan.
Nevertheless, I figured I'd post something up, so here's a render of Max*, the main character from the short film I'm currently working on for my graduate year. Naturally, so much is liable to change but sure I just thought I'd put up a quick render.


Also, I was looking through my photobucket account, and found a slide from the pitch for this short film that has what could be my first and final logo for the title text.


Either way, hope you had as Merry a Christmas as I did and are looking forward to 2011 as I am.

Cheers
Kev Ryan

*Yep, his name is so unimportant I just took the name of the program I'm using to make the film. Handy like!

CUBE

So my brother plays in a band called CUBE with two other awesome people. So I decided to draw a picture for them. Sometimes the execution for a possible caricature of somebody will come into my head and I'll just have to do it, regardless if they have asked or not. This is one of those situations.

Check them out and if you're in Dublin, go see them live!
Facebook
Myspace, with songs

Cheers
Kev Ryan

Bit of a Tidy up.

Just a quick update. I'm working away on a new short film for college which naturally has put everything else on hold. Aside form this, while I was looking other Blogger pages I noticed they had nice little navigation bars at the top. So I endeavored to put one up, thinking it was a really awkward process. Although it was only due to my own stupidity that I didn't realise it's actually a fairly easy feature to implement that was right in my face that I just had not bothered to explore. So in future I'm hoping to add a gallery page with all of my stuff up there in the navbar, so a would be viewer of this blog wont have to go through heaps of posts and my own ramblings.

Either way, hopefully I'll get updating this in the meantime with something, if not, then it just means I'm working.

Cheers

Kev

I Heart Sculpting

"Sculptris wants you to make 3D models. Download it and have a go! I'm sure you will enjoy."

So I was shown a program called Sculptris, which if you don't know, is a free sculpting application that this genius programmer called Tomas Pettersson (or DrPetter, as he's known online) created in his free time. He's now working for Pixologic, the makers of Zbrush, to either make the program better or just assimilate all the nice features it has into Zbrush. Nevertheless, I reccommend having a go of it, it's free and allows you to get the basics of 3D sculpting down. I've been having a go myself and have made the following. Hope you like them.
Click for slightly larger






Cheers
Kev Ryan

Ben Has a Hitlist.

So bitta backstory, another caricature picture. I had a few friends over one night for a few beers when one of the lads, Ben, started looking through my old sketchbook. So I got some fairly nice and supportive reviews of my work when he asks if I would ever draw a picture of himself. At this point I let him know that I actually had an image in mind, which I thought would have looked hilarious, that I was planning on drawing when I had some free time. To which he essentially replied "no, don't make me look stupid or something, just draw me normally". So I did, the only thing is he recently started playing guitar with these guys so I took the opportunity to draw a new picture of the band while keeping Ben's previous brief in mind-ish.


I'm really happy with how this picture turned out. Although I'm getting a bit concerned at the amount of 2D stuff I have up here. To that end I'm thinking that the college year, and working on this film should force me to get some nice 3D stuff up. Along with that I've started messing with Sculptris today and I'm thinking of doing some sort of daily sculpting with that as well.
I'll see how that goes.

Cheers
Kev Ryan

Culture: Response

So once again, at the start of a year of ADA, our course co-ordinator, and all-round fantastic individual Gareth Lee, set us a task. To go to something cultural and create a visual response. See my District 9 animation for last years response.
Prior to the task being set I met up in Dublin with the Two Dogs Team to see our friend's band play. I found out during the day that they were to play an outdoor gig, that "Reclaim the Streets" was on and that the band was playing as part of this. We all then found out that the outdoor venue had been changed to Central Bank and that the Irish Socialist Party had arranged the gig. During the gig a funny incident occurred when myself and Mark agreed to give somebody a hand unravelling a large banner. We were then left holding this banner when somebody photographed us for some unknown publication. This was my recollection of that incident, which was what to be my response to the "Cultural Event".
Click to see the full image

THIS IS WRONG HOWEVER
This is what I presented to the class, however it turned out that I had it wrong. It was not myself and Mark who were holding the banner, rather it was me and Claire. Mark was standing beside us thinking he got away without having to hold anything, when he was just handed a sign and told to "HOLD THAT" by a stern socialist. The picture below is a more accurate representation of the incident.
Again, click to see the full image

FIXED
All and all, it was a fun day and we joked about the incident for sometime after. Hypothetically wondering what our parents would think seeing us as the faces of Irish Socialism. A fun image to draw and subsequently fix.

Hope you enjoy it.
KevRyan

I guess we're not model material

I have a story to tell. This day 2 weeks ago a friend invited me and a few others to the opening of a new bar called "Number 6" in Smithfield. We were all dressed up and looking the business for the night having free drink, free food and a good time in what turned out to be a pretty awesome place.
Early into the night a photographer approached the group and asked if he could take a photo of us. We had no problem with this and we all followed him outside, with 2 particular people leading the group. When we got outside he took these 2 aside and set them up for a photo, leaving 4 of us out. As a joke I asked "So I suppose us dregs* will stay out of this one yeah?" to which he fairly coldly said "Yep" and proceeded to take some - probably fairly nice - photos. He assured us we'd be in "the next one" but he seemed to avoid us for the rest of the time he was there.
Now don't get me wrong, we didn't feel bad about this at all, in fact we joked about it for a good while after and have told the story to others since. However I felt I needed to illustrate the situation. As the image, and my own take on it. Were just too damn funny in my head.

Click, zoom and scroll from left to right.
Incidentally, feels like this picture has been cursed, so many hurdles and program mess-ups hindering progress on it. Should've been finished last weekend! Furthermore, making images 15000 pixels wide is...awkward.

Kev Ryan

Pizza Sambo

Bit of an explanation required here. Short version, a mock-up of a logo born from dinner time silliness and that hypothetical company conversation college students have.

Pizza Sambo
So basically when I was younger I went through a phase where whenever I had a what my parents called Salad*, a fry-up or anything else that we had bread or rolls with, I would make a sandwich of everything in the meal. Now of course this was fair enough with the fry-ups as it was just pretty much having a breakfast roll. But every time we had Pizza, I would rediscover the most amazing concoction ever. Simply, a slice of Pizza, in-between two slices of buttered bread. A Pizza Sandwich. Nobody could understand my apparent madness, but I was onto something. Either way, I always joked that I would use Pizza Sandwich/Sambo as a company/website name, and when 3 of us** in college had a "we should totally start our own animation company" conversation, I had an idea for the logo above.

Cheers
Kev Ryan

*They call it a salad, and that's fair enough in that we would have a whole heap of vegetables. However along with this we would have always Pizza and chips along with just tucking into the packets of sliced ham and cheese. However since I don't eat many vegetables, "Salad" just meant Pizza, chips and whatever else for dinner...which of course meant EPIC PIZZA-CHIP SAMBOS!

**The 3 in question can be seen in the caricature in my last post. Also, as I was working on it, the file-name for that image was PizzaSambo.psd

TWO DOGS TEAM GO!

So I found myself happily busy over the summer doing Dare, however about half way through I smuggled home one of the Intuos 4 Tablets we were given (I gave it back before I left) and began drawing a caricature. So yeah, it has been a while since now since I started but I finally managed to finish it. Here's a picture of Myself, Mark Stokes and Claire Meehan. The trio who were put together to work on a Mark's short animation "Two Dogs" in our first year of ADA. I couldn't imagine how the year would have gone had I been on one of the other two teams and I'll happily attribute the majority good times through the year to these two dopes. So here is my gift to them.

You best be clicking it

Cheers guys, I really mean it. Let's kick ass in 2nd year!

Kev Ryan

His name is Robert Paulson (Discretion Advised)

So I'm working on an image that has been sitting unfinished in a "pending projects" folder. I had an urge to watch Fight Club and with no rush to finish the picture, figured I could put it on my second monitor while I painted on my first. I got through about 5 minutes of the film and a piece of dialogue put an image in my head. I figured I could sketch it and ink it fairly quickly. However while I'm now able to draw from scratch with my PenTablet, as opposed to sketching and scanning, I'm still not quick at it yet. So it took a little longer then...fairly quickly. Nevertheless, the image is below, there's two versions, both are a little disgraceful...


I guess it's fairly easy to work out in which scene the inspiration struck.

So this would be my first image, of many, done completely with my PenTablet, which is a bit annoying as I have a caricature on my laptop which is about 3/4 of the way done. It would have made a much better debut but sure I'm happy with how this picture turned out.

Kev Ryan

Dare 2010 Part 4 - Images

The last of the Dare posts...I hope, unless I think of anything else. The following 3 images are part of our promotional images we used for WiiKick and Protoplay. Click for larger.


Our team image, taken on a greenscreen background at first, it's not perfect but it get's the point across.


The Magic of HDRI


X-Ray of our Goalie that I drew in photoshop.


This image was printed out in A6 and autographed "Tayto" by yours truly and were handed out to players at protoplay.


These paintings need some explanation. We had power-ups in our smash scene, and we needed objects to be smashed to release them. I came up with the idea to make these objects paintings, which first meant painting pictures, and then ruining them with big dirty looking question marks before texturing the appropriate meshes.


These are the icons that would fly out of the paintings after they were smashed, signifying one of 3 power-ups.


Well, I thinks that's everything for Dare, I did much more here and there though, sadly I didn't get rendering our crowd animations, but if I figure out a way to get the darn max files working on my pc I'll be sure to put the animations in the previous post.

Phew
Kev Ryan

Dare 2010 Part 3

Boo yeah!!!!

Two final things, first, you can see above both the final design for the logo that I put together and the front of our business cards. It went through about 4 or 5 iterations before I settled on this design, and seeing as it's on all of the team's business cards, I reckon we'll be sticking with it for now. I would post up the back of my card, but you'll just have to meet me in person so I can give you one.

Aside from that, I also have all of the animations I did for our games Goalie character, which we lovingly nicknamed "Tayto", who has been described as looking like a cross between Jason Statham and a pint of Guinness.


He's a little rough around the edges but this is from a few weeks in, the animations were cleaned up since, however I didn't manage to get an updated render.

Kev Ryan

Dare 2010 Part 2

Ok here we go again, with all the flash stuff I did for this competition. First off is a video explaining how to put on our unique peripheral and navigate our games menu. Second is a logo animation for our company and an animated version of the logo our other artist, Kevin McGarry, created.

WiiKick Instructional Video
Nevermind Games Logo
WiiKick logo

MegaSwf is a pretty cool site. Last year I posted up an swf here using that site to host it and it worked out really well. The video has since been removed although I had not created an account then. with any luck these videos will stay on until I get myself some proper web hosting sorted out.

KevRyan

Dare 2010 Part 1

So I'm back in Ireland now after probably the most awesome experience of my life. 9 weeks living in Dundee making a game and another week showing it off to the public. The whole experience thought me so much about myself, the industry and working under the conditions one would expect when making games. The rest of the teams were awesome people and every winning team really deserved their prizes.

Nevertheless, I've got the task now of uploading all of what I've done for dare onto this, starting with this first post with the menu icons that I made.

If you click the slideshow you can see the images in much bigger detail and scroll at your own pace.

Or you could click this and see them all in one huge image.
Each of these were textured onto a large tablet like object with words above them signifying the option the player was picking. Also, our game, being a football game controlled with a wii-mote strapped to the players foot, had the player kicking a ball at these tablets to pick the option they wanted. Which was pretty cool to be sure.

MrKevRyan*

*I'm still deciding what I want to sign these things off as, I'm trying to phase out my old name Kryvin, which meant making new accounts for almost everything, sadly I couldn't get KevRyan for everything.

Nevermind Games

It's been a while but I've been hard at work with Nevermind Games in Dare 2010. I'll keep this brief and simply leave some links to our Website, Twitter and Facebook.

Cheers
Kev Ryan
or KevKev as I'm known in the team.

Photoreal Challenge

So I did the new Photoreal Modelling challenge on 3Dtotal.com in the week I had free before I headed off to Scotland. Here are the results. They asked us to model this and had both a high poly, and a low poly challenge for it, for which I went with the low. I had a budget of 2000 triangles, and managed to do it in 1535.

Here are my results.
Text view and back of gate
Wire-Clay-Final
Heroic Angle
4 Angles


Texture. Diffuse and Specular

Cheers
Kev Ryan

GOT INTO DARE 2010

That is all...

Cheers
Kev Ryan

DARE 2010

So I get an msn message from my good friend Kev the other day. He asks me would I like to join a team of 3 programmers and himself and give Dare to be Digital a go. Heck yes why not, day before the presentation. "Hey Kev, could ya do us a logo and caricatures of the crew" No worries like. 2 and bit hours of work, and...

Behold, the 5 sexy rascals behind NeverMind Games!

So added into the presentation, my small bit of effort seemed to make a big difference. Which is fairly sweet but I'm not too happy with the expression on the bloke on the top right. Although the boys themselves seemed delighted with the pictures. 

The presentation itself seemed to go quite well. Although I tell ya, those Dare judges, they have the uncanny ability to ask questions that none of us could have anticipated. Thankfully the chap we got on the marketing side of things was great at coming up with answers for that sort of thing. 

So with any luck now I'll be off to Scotland now in June, I'll know in two weeks, and I'll be listening to this song to celebrate the hypothetical good news.

Yes the logo will have to be improved, it's looking a bit 80's at the moment. Minus the steel gradient. 

Take it easy.

Kev

Showreel I

So we were asked to put together a show-reel for one of our classes and, by extension, for ourselves. That up there is how mine turned out. I know I could say I want to finish animations and add to it. But sure you could spend forever tweaking and updating these things. I may as well just chun it up there as is for now.

Kev Ryan

Aw would ya look at 'im!

DOGS! In the last 24 hours I've enjoyed the company of Sally the small terrior, Austin the fat Lab and my brothers 2 Staff-Pit-Bulls or Pit-Bull-Staffs known as Maddie and Stevie. Alongside this doggy madness I'm working on a film called Two Dogs...and naturally while working on an animation involving a crazy cool robotic-DogBot, some of the frames stand out as being "wallpaper material". So with that in mind, and disregarding the NDA I set upon myself at the start of the year.


I'll be able to zazz this up something fierce once the incredibly talented Claire Meehan sends some awesome textures my way. All I know is it's crunch time now, and we're animating like crazy!

Now to enjoy a meat-free good friday dinner...and a beer.
Happy Easter everybody!

Kev Ryan

EDIT-Updated the textures on the model, this is how he should look in the final render now. Pimped out with Neon so he is!

Two Dogs Poster!

Ahoy!
So a while back we were asked to put up some artwork for a brochure for the end of year screenings of our animations. I put together an Image rather quickly and was supposed to upload it here. However I since edited it and changed it around and will probably change it around again. But sure for now.


Sadly though my image was not used, however I will put a link up to the image that was used as soon as I can, it's fairly awesome!

April 28th Edit - Got a link to the final image used in the brochure. Check the blog post there and sure follow this guys work while you're at it.

Keep an eye on this space. I'll be putting up my first Showreel soon. Need to add some more stuff into it and get rendering!

Cheers
Kev