Questions? Feel free to contact me at the bottom of this website or email me at roger@rogerridley.com. Thanks!
Dear Website Visitor:
As with most artists, I discovered my love of art at a very young age. I loved watching National Geographic documentaries, and reading books on nature. I began drawing monkey’s, snakes, tigers, and many other creatures found in nature magazines. I also discovered a love for aviation. This in turn led to my joining the Air Force in December, 1997. Throughout elementary, middle, and high school I won many art contests. It was during these times that I developed a need to create things. This frustrated my father because his garage would be in ruins by the time he arrived home from a hard day of work. I experimented with clay, fiberglass, plastic models, and bike parts.
While I enjoyed these many hobbies, I did not clearly understand what I should do for the rest of my life. So, I joined the Air force and became an aircraft and missile mechanic. I was stationed in Great Falls, Montana where the winters were much too cold to go out and do anything. I became bored having to stay inside my dorm room and in 1998 for my 21st birthday, my parents bought me a 6500 Macintosh computer. I had a good friend loan me a program called “Infinite” which helped create 3D images and I was turned on to it instantly. I was excited because I could now build whatever I imagined. No longer would I need to destroy garages; my creations could all be designed in my own little pixel world. I then discovered my passion. After fulfilling my time with the Air Force, I applied for art school to continue to feed my soul.
Since I completed my 3D modeling degree at the Academy of Art University in San Francisco, I have had the opportunity to work at Disney’s, ImageMovers Digital where I learned about composition, color theory, anatomy, overall form, and understand what it means to work as a team in a production environment. Now as an ATD at Lucasfilm Animation I understand the technical as well as the artistic side of production.
Looking back on the adventure my need for creation has taken me on. I look forward to working on future projects.
-Roger Ridley
About this Blog //This is a list of what I've been up to lately, along with a few tools I have developed.
Mr. Tuttles is a character I came up with for my future kids book series. I will have more updates and characters for this project coming soon. Mr. Turtles was modeled in Zbrush and much of his props where modeled in Maya. Here is a sneak peek of his character.
The MORAV stands for Multi, Operational, Robotic, Attack, Vehicle. It’s idea and design came from Fon Davis, who has a whole comic book based on the world this thing comes from. I had a great time working on it and hope Fon gets the chance to use it in his T.V shows that are currently in production. Check out his website for more info on MORAV here. I did a model of an F-16 a while ago and thought it would be great for this guy to demolish it for the turntable (also helps for scale). I modeled everything for the most part in polygons using Maya and rendered in V-ray. I hope to get this guy into Mari soon for texturing.
I wanted to learn a texturing program called “Mari,” so I modeled a telescope and went to work. Overall I like the work flow of this software. Check out the turn table. I rendered using V-Ray.
;
This is a very simple script I wrote for Maya. It simply checks objects in the scene for N-gon geometry (polygons with more than 4 sides) or Triangles. Included is a Icon, readme.txt file (instructions for installing) and python file. Here is what the UI looks like. Enjoy!
;
Here’s a tool I wrote for Maya to create a color map of all the shells in the 0-1 space. This makes it easy in photoshop to tell wich shells belong to which objects as they have the same color. This tool should work with both Mac and Windows. Included is a movie to get a better idea of how to use this tool. Feel free to leave any feedback. Thanks.
Example of Map produced: Example of how to use tool:
;
Here is a little project done for some buddies of mine, Landis and Anna Fields! The theme was “Pregnant Alien”…She’s an alien fish. I concept modeled in Zbrush, retopoed in TopoGun, and did the final detailing and texturing in Mudbox. I then rendered using V-ray and touched up using Photoshop…..whew…..to many programs.
RECENT COMMENTS