Merry Christmas

Merry Christmas everyone!

First Maya animation

I started studying Maya (3D animation software for those who don't know) last week. I have been working through many tutorial to get a grasp of how things work so I can use it to animate a book trailer for my latest book project (more on that later). Anywho, here is a link to a "Playblast" which is a shaded quick render of the animation I just finished. The first step of many. One of the hiccups, or mistakes is, the rotations of the planets around the Sun have ease as a default, causing the planets to slow down as they finish the animation, I didn't realize that 'til I rendered. (And yes I know there are more moons than I've got in my solar system. Expediency trumps accuracy in this case.) Another thing to know is no matter what I did to the render settings, the file was 100 meg. Giant file I know, sorry bout that. Let me know what you think. Don't be afraid to leave a comment.

"The Little Leaf" reviews

This morning I found a couple reviews for "The Little Leaf"

CurledUpKids.com

SuperMom.com

And one from last year that is new to me at TheRempels4

Action - Reaction

I just purchased some video converting, and editing software and wanted to try out the mixing abilities. So I took this old animation and added my bicycle horn honk to it. It was very easy, only took me a few minutes. The software is AVS, it's a very affordable alternative to Adobe products, and it's easy to use.

Bunnies

Here are a few of the bunnies I sketched for the nursery paintings. Most of these will not get used in the paintings. I really like the way they came out though, I think I'd like to do a bunny story or a series of bunny stories in the future. So they may get used for that. Anyway, I hope you enjoy these rough sketches.

Nursery Characters

Here are some more sketches of the characters that are going on the paintings in the nursery. The baby should be here in the next week. The paintings will not be done before then. Click the image to see a slideshow animation of the recent characters. Enjoy.

Sketches

Good morning everyone. Here are some sketches I scanned from my current sketchbook. In order of appearance: British People, Aqua-Bot, Hover-Bot, Yelly Guy, Brian Corey(eating licorice), B.O.B guy. Enjoy.

Books!

Hello! This week I've made some updates to my web site: ryanloghry.com. I swapped my old Design page for a new Books page, and then added a page for each book I finished, The Little Leaf, The Searcher, and The Daydreamer. So head on over and check it out.

The Daydreamer

Hello everyone! I've finished up the sequel to The Searcher, and held a successful contest over on FaceBook to title it. Braedie Tobias had the winning entry "The Daydreamer". Special thanks to Braedie, and also to my friend David Walters for all of his help, and of course my wife Angela.

Above is the cover for The Daydreamer. I'll be receiving my copies of the book to send out with my publisher and agent query letters in a couple weeks. I'll be sure to post a picture of that when they get here. Thank you all for your support, and I hope you will all enjoy the book when it's published. I'll keep you updated on how that is going as well. -- Ryan

Bird Hunt!

Some of you may remember the an online video game I did the graphics for a while back, "Bird Hunt". This was my first really big job using Adobe illustrator exclusively. I've used Illustrator a lot since then, and am much more comfortable with it, and their tools are a lot easier to use now. The game app is available on the Windows Phone 7, so if you've got one, please buy it for a mere $.99 in the market.