Portfolio Site... FINALLY!

Lo and Behold—a portfolio site! It's been too long but it's finally up. Even more exciting, it is also setup for mobile devices. Essentially, it detects if you're on a mobile device and forwards you to a site laid out for mobile phones. Also, it's good for my iPhone users because they can't view my Flash website, but they will be able to view the mobile version.

Check out my portfolio site at KORYFENTON.COM

Here are some screen shots:

Mobile Site Screenshots:

Rockin' the Cornice

So, I've done a pretty terrible job this semester of updating my blog with my updates. So, after going to class and watching hours and hours and hours (yes, many hours) of tutorials, I finally feel like I'm starting to SCRATCH the surface of Maya... but only a scratch.
First, I drew out the shapes in Illustrator and then imported them into Maya as curves (shown in older posts)... unfortunately, I had no clue what I was doing and ditched that idea. I now know how to do it that way, but I did not used that method for this project. Instead, I reverted to good ol' box modeling. Here's what I came up with (click for larger image):

The shape was weird and I had a hard time building this without getting triangles... I literally rebuilt this about 20 times, and I still would have built it differently. Finally got it to work though.

Alright, so next I delved into the main body some more. I deleted the area where the glass would be, and the bottom where the back plate would be. I had to tweak this quite a bit to get everything just right.

Next, the band. The cool thing about the band is how I bended it. I just selected all of the duplicated links, grouped them (ctrl+g) and added the same bend deformer that I used on the links. It just took some tweaking to get it just right!

Finally getting to the end. At this point I've started messing with the mental ray shaders. I knew I wanted it very shiny like chrome but darker. ALL of the shaders are from the mental ray shaders built into maya--they are surprisingly rockin!

I was pretty happy with it the way it is now... but then I found out about image based lighting. First, what makes chrome look shiny? The objects around it. That's why the inside of the wrist band looks better than the outside--because things are being reflected. IBL gives the watch something to reflect. Here are my final renders and this is what the IBL did. Enjoy!

And a turntable animation!

Maya

I'm in a 3D modeling class this semester and this is my first attempt! There are still a lot of things wrong with it, but I'm pretty happy with how it turned out. Especially for a first go at it.

You Can't Choose Your Family

Quite the weekend with the in-laws. The drama, the laughing, the crying... the kids falling off of stools and smacking their heads on the corner of another stool (picture below)- Good times. I had a lot of fun with the fam but I loved the pictures below. My niece, Morgan, was entertaining us by running around in some huge glasses. I just happened to have my camera.


























































Here is Morgan after smacking her face against a stool. That crazy baby.



















I don't have many pictures of myself but my sister-in-law, Kate, wanted to take some pics of the fam with my camera and she snapped this one of me. I just doctored it up a little.

Winter? Hardly.

Alright, so it's not winter... it's almost fall, but I never posted this picture. Anyone familiar with Logan winters know about the inversions we have. In fact, I think we were ranked #1 for worst air quality in the entire USA last winter or the winter before. The upside: We can get cool pics during an inversion.

Vancouverage

I have some other pictures that I will update, but here's a landscape picture for now. Jane and I enjoyed our time in Vancouver but I have to say that I was a little disappointed with the architecture... Vancouver doesn't have a very diverse skyline. That's all I'll say.





Here's a picture from Victoria.










Some forest in Vancouver... I can't remember the name but this is by some famous suspension bridge.



















Here is a view from our ferry boat.
































I don't know why I found this interesting...



















SEATAC airport. I was waiting for my ride.

Yellowstone

So, I took this trip to Island Park/Yellowstone for a family reunion this summer. Here are couple pictures from that trip.

My Grandpa used to drive tour buses like this through Yellowstone. I tried so many times to get a picture without someone in the picture but it was impossible. I guess I shouldn't be too surprised because it was July 4th. I then edited the picture to look like an old Lomo photograph.













I spent quite awhile in Yellowstone and only ended up with this one picture that I actually liked. This is Morning Glory. I had to take a total of 12 pictures to end of with this HDR pic.











This was a little fishing pond close to our cabin in Island Park.





Here is my Grandpa. Him and I see nothing eye to eye when it comes to politics, but damnit, I have nothing but great love and respect for him.

Good Ol' Logan UT!

Here are some logos for a couple businesses here in Logan, UT.

Although I can't say anything about this first logo or the company itself, I can at least show the logo to you. This is for a startup company called McCole Co.



















The second logo is for a website hosting company called Geek Toast. I actually use them to host all of my sites. They rock! Check them out at http://www.geektoast.com

I CAN NOT take full credit for this logo. The owner had put together the Toast character, I just helped him polish it up. I DID, however, create the wordmark.

GeoBob/IDIAS

Here's a logo I created for my job at USU. Well, the division recently lost its funding so I just finished there. In short, GeoBob is a division of IDIAS that created apps for iPhone and Droid. Feel free to read more about them. I also designed the site!

http://geobob.usu.edu








Here's another version.

Holy Stick!

So, I'm not one of those artists to take pictures with my work, but I couldn't resist with this sculpture!

This was a joint effort by myself and Mike Jaggi, a fellow designer that happened to be in my class. He's a stud and I enjoyed working with him on this piece.

We built this piece in the early spring when everyone was throwing away their tree trimmings. Altogether, I personally spent about 12-15 hours. Very tedious but very fun. This piece made such an impression on the Landscape Architecture department head that he asked if he could re-locate the piece to a property in North Logan. He is using the piece to show how stick sculptures can be integrated with landscapes. He will be documenting it's aging process as well.







































Photo below courtesy of Sean Michael.