Way late to updating about this: Final Demo Reel for CATO

I apologize for updating so infrequently. I have been having difficulty learning how to use Blogger. Anyway, I have finished my final project and my final demo reel, which you can view below, and with that have finally graduated.

Some stats on this project:

It took about a year from beginning of the concept/planning stage to the final exported product you see here. I have been working on this while learning Maya from the beginning so there is a huge gradient of mediocrity to my current ability. I touched up the old parts here and there but there is still a lot of things I would have liked to change if I had more time.

• All of the modelling is done in Maya.
• The UVs are done in Maya as well, though I went through a period of using UVLayout for certain objects. I eventually switched back to Maya when I got tired of exporting and importing everything as .obj's and I found a really really great plugin for Maya called UV Deluxe, which mimics a lot of UVLayout's functions plus more! I highly recommend checking it out if UVs are your thing.
• Texturing was all done in Photoshop. Most of the images used in textures were found from free websites or just in Google Image searches. I am in the process of compiling my own library of textures with a camera of my own, so hopefully the Google Images thing will happen less in future projects.
• Normals were all made with Ndo2. Really really great program that I highly recommend. I look forward to using Ddo in the future as well.
• Rendered in Mental Ray. It took 5 days on 40 computers at ~5-10 minutes a frame. I had 7 render layers. Lights separated on 3 of them (Sunlight, Lamps, Ambient), one for AO, one for Contours and two more for the particle effects.
• Composited in After Effects. I think I'll take a look at Nuke in the future since it is used way more frequently in the industry.
• Video put together in Premiere.
• Final Polycount is 252,600 tris, 129,100 faces.
• 47 materials

I am very glad with the way this project turned out and even more glad that I can finally call it finished and start working on something else now that I have all the knowledge gleaned from this.

Now that I am graduated, I have been spending the last few weeks looking for a place to work. An interesting opportunity may be presenting itself in Victoria, of all places, but other than that I haven't had much luck. I'd really like to get with a studio in Vancouver, if at all possible. If you need a modeller or a level designer or an environment designer, hire me already! /s

Thanks for reading. Hopefully I will be updating with more frequency from now on. I think I've got this Blogger thing finally figured out.

Kyler

Quarter 7 Demo Reel

March 2013 Quarter 7 Demo Reel

Finally got all my work finished just barely on time even with an extension. Feels good to be finished. My newest demo reel is above. It has a few issues that I couldn't quite sort out due to time constraints, but all-in-all I am pretty proud of how it turned out considering it's my first ever large completed project. I intend to buff-up both of these projects even more whenever I can and re-render this reel to be top-quality but for now I think it's a good representation of my skills.

Life Drawing Jan 2013 - March 2013

My Life Drawing from the Latest Quarter

With my 7th Quarter coming to a close, my final Life Drawing class has also come to an end. I've taken snapshots of what I consider to be my best drawings and will share them below. Some I am proud of, others I am... Less proud of, but all show me a lot of progress, especially from my first few quarters when I had never drawn a thing in my life.

These are just the newsprint drawings. If I can get some photos soon I will add some images of the Watercolour and Black Paper Pastel drawings as well.

Latest Work - Grandfather Clock

Time for Modeling

The last week (or two) has been spent trying to get all of the objects in my Private Investigator's Office scene completed and ready to set up and render. It can be daunting managing the geometry, UVs and various texture maps for so many objects in such a short time so my effort has been stretching out across all of these objects at once and very little was getting done. I decided this wasn't working so I began working on this clock piece with the intention of getting all of it complete in one go before continuing with any other part of my project.

The grey background washes out the colours a bit because I haven't added any kind of lighting yet. In fact, all I have added to the geometry is some nice UVs and a diffuse map. The texturing took much longer than I was expecting so the Spec map is only half finished at the moment. I expect it to look completely sexy by the time I finish the spec and bump map and infuse it with an AO. Though I am still only learning and have already realized many ways I could have improved my textures and UVs, I am actually quite proud of how well I organized my UV and texture sheets.

UVs I created in UV Layout

Texture sheet I created after many hours in Photoshop. I hope I get speedier

This may be one of my best models to date. Clocking in at only 10,000 triangles, it's a nice amount of detail for how light it is. I like it a lot and so it seems all the thought and work I put into it is beginning to pay off. It encourages to attempt some similar projects in the future.

It is based on the astrological clock in Prague because I like that clock quite a lot. In fact I am considering creating a sister clock to this one that features the bottom section of the Prague clock as its face, but that's an idea for another time. All of the Zodiac symbols are actually hidden in this model's geometry. Some are more obvious than others. I thought it was a neat idea to go along with the astrological theme portrayed on the Clock's face. In the small time travel story idea I envisioned surrounding this office scene, this clock would be 100% accurate at any point in history or the future making it invaluable to its owner to always recognize just what is going on in his current time situation. Yeah, the story hasn't really been fleshed out and I don't know if it ever will. Oh well.

Thanks to Emily Nobbs for creating the design for me:

Her DeviantArt profile can be found here:

http://the-concept-artist.deviantart.com/

Thanks for reading!

Kyler Greer

New Blog and latest Demo Reel

Here's to a brand new blog and the first post on it

I have never done this before so I'll have to get used to it as I go along; there's a lot more to this blog situation than I would have expected. Anyway, this blog will be used primarily to track my professional progress as a 3D Modeler and Environment Designer. As of right now I am halfway through my second year at CATO and am getting my affairs in order to burst out into the actual industry (and hopefully land some kind of job).

First off, I may as well share my latest Demo Reel as of January 2013. It is very rudimentary at the moment so I hope to fix it up tenfold in the next few months while pouring as much new content into it as I am able.

That room at the beginning of the reel is the main attraction and what I look forward to spending a lot of time on for the next month or two, so hopefully it'll start to look glorious. I will be following along and sharing much more of my work in the future as I produce it, so for now it is just a sample of what I've been working on up to this point.

Thanks for your time.
Kyler Greer