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

Cultural Event.

I decided to use the day of Union action to get a piece of unfinished work from the start of the year, completed and up on this blog.

In September we were asked to go to a cultural event, make a piece of artwork as a response to it and present it to the class. So I chose to do a flash loop animation summing up District 9 after I went to see it.

Explicit Language NSFW - Beware!

As much as I loved the film. The protagonist really does lose the biscuit...ALOT.

Kevin Ryan

This is for.....Thierry?

So, shanbolic carry on with the world cup qualifier tonight. We all had a nice old complain and moan about what happened. So I decided to post this picture up here to ease my pain.

If you haven't figured it out, it's Luc Besson's Léon/The Professional which is my all time favourite film. Unlike my old favourites, Face/Off and Predator 2, which were somewhat ruined by acquired common sense on maturity.

The Image was done in primarily in photoshop. Being sketched first, scanned, and painted over with many many layers. However the cross-hair Léon and Mathilda are standing on was done in Illustrator to save time.

The following picture collage are all my reference images for this picture, followed by the original sketch for comparison.




Kevin Ryan

SGW Multimatch AR-15 + long boring status update.

So I have this issue with my illustrations in that I'm quite obcessive for details. I will draw all of these details on something regardless of if you actually see then in the final piece.
So here's what I finished today, I figured I'd post it before it gets covered with arms in the final picture.


Also, this website has the most amazing reference for firearms I've ever seen. Mainly because you can search by the film you may have seen it in. Handy for my current illustration, and is the reason why I know what gun it is I've illustrated.

Kevin Ryan

Lloyd

I probably should have posted this as part of my 4 part "getting started" thing from last week. Seeing as I feel that this is a taste of the work that will be showing up in this blog in future.



So, I started this film sometime around May and worked on it on and off for about 3 months over the summer as opposed to getting a proper job. My reasoning for it was that I managed to get into an animation degree course, but had no idea why. So I figured I'd just wing it, get a heap of tutorials and make an animation or 2 before I start this course.
I did a tutorial on "How to model and animate a Pinbox" on 3d total.com, which lead to what must have been a big train of thought, culminating with the idea for a film that "shouldn't be too long or take too long". Sadly both of these guidelines were neglected, which was a clear lesson as to why just winging it can be a bad idea.


Below you will find some storyboards which were put together when winging it wasn't working. As you can see, I have names for all the scenes, and I messed up the numbers on these about half way through. Oh dear.

Enjoy








Talk to ya.
Kevin Ryan

So here we go - Part 4 - Clint the Idiot

Nicely tying in with the previous post. Saturday the 19th. a week after Dano's 21st, was the party for my older brother's birthday. When I showed him my Fight Club Picture he said he really liked the style of it. So I decided to go with a similar style in a picture for his birthday. Using Photoshop instead of Illustrator however to achieve the result.

When I finished the picture for him, there were many little things I knew I could do to improve it. I just didn't have the time to do before his party.
It didn't matter as they still loved it, however I still had to make those tweaks before I put it online. Below you will see the proper final version.

Now to re-print this and replace the old version he has up on his wall!

The picture was drawn by hand, scanned and painted over in Photoshop, From big eejit acting the....eejit and going clockwise, the picture contains, Clint, Stevie, Maddie, Douglas(The Bearded Dragon) and Lucy.

Below you will find the the patio which was distorted and warped to the right shape in the picture, a small slip of brick that's distorted to fit in beside the door, and the original sketch. The original picture of the patio was 2480 x 9000, my poor pc had an awful time coping with it.

Cheers
Kevin Ryan

So here we go - Part 3 - Dano the majestic

Right, bit of back story to this. I have always wanted to learn to digital paint properly. Like I've coloured behind line-art before, then hidden the line-art layer and thought, with a bit more time and effort, you wouldn't even need the line art at all. Though I had never actually got the finger out and tried doing a digital painting from scratch. Then it turned out that I was heading to my mate Dano's 21st, leading me to think that it would be a great idea to set a challenge to digitally paint a portrait of him for his birthday. Below is the result.

I framed the finished picture and gave it to himself at the 21st. He was delighted and showed it to just about everybody there himself. The response was far greater then I anticipatd.

Once again, here's the sketch that I had started with.

Cheers
Kevin Ryan

So here we go - Part 2 - Jody is a Biscuit

So I figured that as part of these introductory posts, I should put up an illustration which was an on again off again, cancelled then re-started project of my summer.
The idea behind me doing this picture in the first place was that, at the time I was getting more so into illustrator. I figured, if I did artwork of all the local bands, it'd be a nice showcase of what I can do. The definition of a portfolio pretty much right? So I started with Jody Has A Hitlist, a crazy cool bunch of lads, some of which I go way back with. I'm quite proud of the result.

As I was saying, most of the work was done with Illustrator. However the crowd and the stuff they're throwing were drawn by hand, scanned and coloured in Photoshop. The big band name was illustrated at first, then brought into Max as a spline, extruded, textured, rendered and prettyed up in Photoshop. The big leads were done in 3D also, by abusing architectural Mental Ray materials and that lovely image mc-nice-maker, HDR ENVIRONMENT MAPS!


So to keep a trend going, below are all the sketches that contributed to the final look in this picture. There's one or two unscanned scraps not on here but me thinks they've been recycled by now. But ah well, these are the important pictures shopped together.

The extra two heads at the bottom group of heads in this sketch are my attempts at drawing the Keyboard player. The Remarkable thing is that despite of my failure at drawing him, they still look like two of my other friends, the middle of which "Reality Bites" for, which is an inside jo-AGE between our circle of friends. Then there's the chap to the far right, who's picture I screwed up 12 pages ago in my sketchbook when I drew caricatures of my Bebo top friends.

That is all, man I was thinking I was gonna keep this post brief......whoops.

Cheers

MrKryVin