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