New Website Launched!

To better facilitate my style of sharing work, I have opted to use more of a gallery type website rather than just a blog.  After having just about every medium I consume advertise it in some way or another, I've decided to try building that site with wix.com.  The new site does also contain a blog, but also features a gallery of pinned images and video links to my demo reel and short film.

This does of course mean that I intend this to be my last post with Blogger.  I thank them for their amazing tool and wish them all the best!

Check out the new webpage here: https://noelru2000.wixsite.com/octachorondigital

Type 15 Shuttlecraft WIP

Wow I've been gone a long time.  But I finally have something I'm working on that might be worth showing:

Having decided Maya was too expensive to pay for, even on a subscription basis, I've gone back to Blender.  Lately I've noticed that Blender's rendering capabilities had become much stronger than I had remembered from before my Maya days, so I've been trying to get myself to use them more.

My current project is to try to take ships from Star Trek and overhaul the detailing and materials to be as realistic as possible.  I want to see Star Trek have the feeling of really being in space in the same way that movies like 2001 A Space Odyssey, Gravity, and Interstellar have been given, but without sacrificing the fantastic technologies employed by Starfleet and other starship manufacturers of the Univserse.  It's also important to me that the overall silhouette of the ships are as unchanged as possible as they tend to be iconic, but I want to update some system details so they appear to work as described on screen or in technical writings about them.

I've started with literally the most basic design I could find, and that is the Type 15 Shuttlecraft from Star Trek: The Next Generation.  One obvious difference I've introduced is the RCS thruster housing inspired by those on Space X's dragon spacecraft.

CG Project Update

Just an update to last week's post.

 

I've added a number of things to the scout ship.  The most notable is probably the bridge cupola, inspired by the cupola on the International Space Station.  The bridge of this ship will be half-immersed in the ship's hull.  The cupola does not represent the full height of the bridge.

Another important addition is the weapon system - an antimatter plasma cannon on each side of the forward hull.  These cannons accelerate anti-hydrogen plasma with magnetic fields in a way similar to a particle accelerator to 50,000 metres per second.  The bursts are extremely tenuous so that the plasma doesn't disperse too quickly, and also because very little antimatter is needed to do serious damage, and as a result the plasma bursts are fairly dim.  To combat recoil, each cannon has a pair of RCS thrusters that fire simultaneously with the cannon, opposite the direction the cannon is firing.

The sphere is a placeholder for the reactor

I'm holding off on modelling the hull until I have all the external systems modeled.  This will be a while, as remaining systems involve truly fictional technologies, such as the warp drive, and various shield systems, and will therefore be harder to make look realistic.  I've started modelling the internal structure to give me an idea of how the hull will be laid out, and I've started planning out the RCS systems.

New CG Project

I have been employed as a character animator on Jake and the Neverland Pirates at Mercury Filmworks for nearly 8 months now.  During this time my energy has been focused on improving my skills in Toon Boom Harmony.  But never during this time have I forgotten to stay fluent in 3D with Autodesk Maya.  I've been keeping myself familiar with the interface with minor dabblings, but now I want to take on something more ambitious.  After seeing the movie Gravity and being stunned beyond belief by the detail and physical realism in a film that managed to majorly succeed at the box office, my own animation and modelling standards have skyrocketed.  Since then I've felt too intimidated by my own standards to start anything, but I've now decided to start anyway and work on my skills so that someday I may actually meet those standards.  This is that start:

Warning!  Science content ahead!

These are engines and a docking port for a scout ship I'm modelling.  I'm trying to reference real technologies and really think about how this ship will function.  The docking port is somewhat inspired by the one used by the Russian Soyuz spacecraft, employing a protruding probe to help the docking ports align during docking.  

The engines are modeled after magnetoplasmadynamic engines.  These engines would produce thrust by accelerating ionized gas using electromagnets.  The amount of thrust and specific impulse (fuel efficiency) for these engines is limited only by the amount of electrical current that can be sent into the electromagnet.  This ship will be powered by photovoltaic absorption of high energy photons created by antimatter annihilation in a reactor.  The amount of power produced by this reactor would be enough to provide the ship a delta v of several hundred thousand metres per second.  (Means it can go very far on a tank of gas)

Harmony Lip Sync: Final

Here is my final Toon Boom Harmony assignment:

College Done! Short Film and Demo Reel

The end of the semester has come, and my Short Film and Demo Reel are complete.

My film, "Attack of the Pirates"

My Demo Reel

Wayne Starr

My character for my film, Wayne Starr, in the Cockpit of his cargo ship.