Portfolios – Ryan Lintott

Old English Wordhord App

Ryan Lintott — Wed, 19 Jan 2022 21:13:53 +0000

Project Type: iOS App
Role: Designer, Developer
Client: Old English Wordhord
Completed: 2021

word-hord, n.n: a word-hoard, a store of words.

The Old English Wordhord is not a dictionary — it’s a museum exhibition in your pocket that you can digest in bite-size chunks. Every day a new Old English word appears in the app along with its description, written and audio pronunciation, and often images of medieval manuscripts.

The content for the app is written by the creator of the Old English Wordhord (and my wife) Hana Videen. She has been tweeting an Old English word since 2013 and the entire back-catalog is available in the app. Users can browse by category and also save their favourites. The word of the day can also be seen right on the Home Screen in the form of a widget.

This was the first mobile app I developed in SwiftUI and after the launch I released some of its components as open source Swift packages (Links to related projects below)

Related Projects:

LookingGlassUI
OEVoice

External Links:

Taikoo Place

Ryan Lintott — Tue, 07 May 2019 19:12:21 +0000

Project Type: Interactive Show Suite
Role: Pitch Development / Technical Director
Company: Squint/Opera
Client: Swire Properties
Completed: 2016

Taikoo Place is hub of 9 interconnected office towers in Hong Kong. In 2014, Swire Properties hired MET Studio to design The Taikoo Brand Experience Centre, a high-end interactive show suite to present their new development. Squint/Opera was brought on board to create films, animations, and interactive content for the space including:

Swire Brand Film – A 4k CGI animation played on an 8-screen video wall.
Taikoo Place Interactive – A Unity 3d interactive presentation on the same 8-screen video wall
Taikoo Place Film – An 8k film on a curved 220-degree 48-screen video wall.
Immersive Office Scene – A CGI view from inside an empty floorplate presented on the same 48-screen video wall.
Virtual Window – A simulated augmented reality window.
Swire Portfolio Interactive – A portfolio presentation app running on an iPad controlling a presentation screen.
Mobile Presentation App – An app to control all of the content as well as the lighting, audio and doors in the show suite.

The result was a series of unique narrative or interactive experiences, telling a story of Taikoo Place and Swire Properties that’s being curated by a presenter on the fly.

As one of the company directors and CTO at Squint/Opera, I worked on the pitch and then as the technical director for this project. For the interactive elements I led the UX design and creative direction. I also helped manage the on-site installation.

External Links:

Messy Goes To Okido: Music Maker

Ryan Lintott — Wed, 21 Dec 2016 20:37:42 +0000

Project Type: Mobile Game
Role: Game Designer / Unity Developer
Company: Doodle Productions
Completed: 2016

“Zim, Zam, and Zoom have built a new machine to allow Messy and the gang to make their very own music. As a strange side effect, every time they change their tune, the world around them changes along with it. Somehow Messy’s Music Maker has the ability to remix OKIDO itself!” My goal when designing this game was to make an interactive experience that rewarded creative exploration. With 7 characters, 16 instruments and 3 different play styles for each that can be remixed in sequence there are over 11 billion combinations to discover! The backgrounds also change along with the music so many hidden objects and characters can be revealed with special combinations. The target audience is kids aged 3-8 but it really can be enjoyed by all ages. Instead of collecting stars or going for a high score, kids are motivated by curiosity. How does the music maker work? How can they find all the instruments and hidden combos? There are no tutorials or guides as there is no right or wrong way to play with the music maker. Each player will find their own interesting path. With only a small team, my role as game designer stretched to include several responsibilities. At times I would be managing production as well as working in Unity alongside the developers and 3D artists to build prototypes, layout the scenes, test and tweak animations, assemble and update assets and test gameplay. I also worked with the music and sound designers to select the sound effects, the 4 main songs and match the various loops to the instruments and visuals. The game is free on iTunes so if you have an iPad or iPhone please go check it out and let me know what you think!

Related Projects:

Messy Goes to Okido: Season 1

External Links:

Messy Goes to Okido: Music Maker on the App Store

Squint Standards

Ryan Lintott — Wed, 10 Aug 2016 20:51:55 +0000

Project Type: Productivity Systems
Role: Founder / Director / Pipeline Developer
Company: Squint/Opera
Year: 2007-2016

Squint Standards are an evolving ecosystem of tools and scripts that automated repetitive production processes and provided documentation for standard workflows. What began as a set of standards for the 3D team quickly grew into a structure everyone at the company used to manage tools and workflows. These standards were used to direct the collective knowledge of the company into a structure that allowed for quick access in the future. Squint Standards were never set in stone. Teams would meet regularly to discuss current workflows and update the standards whenever a better way was discovered. From 2007-2014 I was the only pipeline developer but by 2015 a team of 2 developers was formed to take on pipeline management.

Accessibility and deployment of standards was just as important as the standards themselves. Sharing the workflows in editable google docs ensured the latest version was always visible while scripts and plugins were updated automatically in the background to keep all systems in sync.

Related Projects:

Squint Teams

Ryan Lintott — Tue, 05 Jan 2016 15:07:49 +0000

Project Type: HR System
Role: Founder / Director
Company: Squint/Opera
Year: 2014-2016

I created Squint Teams as a structured way to improve “how we do what we do”. It was also a way of facilitating communication by grouping around common interests and giving everyone a voice as the company grew from 50 to 120+ people. Any staff member could join any team (3D artists would sometimes join the comp and edit teams as well as the 3d team, producers joined the UX team and so on). Team leaders would run monthly meetings and everyone on the team would participate in adding and working on R&D tasks to improve how things were done. I designed the guidelines, documents and sheets that gave structure to the program and personally mentored the various team leads as they took on their new roles.

Messy Goes To Okido – Series 1

Ryan Lintott — Sun, 03 Jan 2016 14:52:21 +0000

Play Video

Project Type: Kids’ TV Animation
Role: Technical Supervisor / Pipeline Development / IT Support
Company: Doodle Productions
Completed: 2016

In 2010-11 I was the technical director and one of the 3D artists for the Okido trailer that brought Messy Monster to life in 3D. The BBC loved the pitch and a few years later Messy Goes to Okido, the first TV series taken on by the studio, went into full production. I played a key role in designing the production process and planning for the expansion that would more than double the size of the studio. Throughout the production I supported the technical director and managed the IT and pipeline teams that were shared between Squint/Opera and Doodle Productions. I also contributed to pipeline development and built IT systems to ensure various processes and shared resources ran efficiently for both teams.

Related Projects:

External Links:

Squint/Opera 3D Pipeline

Ryan Lintott — Tue, 25 Aug 2015 21:36:13 +0000

Project Type: 3D Pipeline
Role: 3D Pipeline Developer
Company: Squint/Opera
Year: 2007-2015

Squint/Opera started in 2002 as an architectural film company focusing primarily on film with some 2D graphic animation. It wasn’t until 2005 that Squint began producing 3D animations in-house.

When I joined in 2007 the 3D team was still quite small (only 2-3 people) and everyone worked in their own way. I worked with the team to develop an efficient 3D pipeline, optimized for the production of architectural visualization animations. I started by defining Squint Standards for 3D files, render settings, modelling processes and folder structures. I then began to customize the 3DS Max interface adding many scripts from ScriptSpot and then starting to build my own. Within a year we had a basic but efficient 3D pipeline and were able to produce larger, more complex 3D animations in far less time.

The new standards also allowed 3D staff to switch jobs and exchange files without having to re-learn a new structure each time. Over the following years the pipeline continued to improve incrementally by adding more scripts, tweaking render settings. The 3D Team would meet on a monthly basis to discuss ways to improve the pipeline. This would later be the inspiration to launch Squint Teams to allow many teams across the company to work in a similar way to improve their processes.

The change I developed that had the most impact on pipeline speed was the new render submission process. By splitting animated and non-animated objects into their own render pass we were able to reduce our render settings and massively decrease render times. This was only possible after finding an efficient way to light and then re-combine the two passes to make them look seamless. Once established, automating this process with maxscript became the first feature I built for the new Render Bomb.

In 2014-2015 I worked with the Technical Director to adapt and improve the multi-pass process for use on Messy Goes To Okido

Custom Scripts:

Render Bomb (render submission)
Mesh Fixer (fixing imported models)
Material Cleaner (cleaning non-standard materials)
Pointcache People (building animation libraries)
Update Squint Standards (auto-updating scripts, plugins and UI)

Related Projects:

Render Bomb

Ryan Lintott — Tue, 25 Aug 2015 15:34:57 +0000

Project Type: Pipeline System
Role: Founder / Pipeline Developer
Company: Squint/Opera
Year: 2009-2015

The Render Bomb is a 3DS Max tool built to improve the speed and reliability of render submissions. The script replaced a manual submission process that took many steps per job and had a significant chance of user error. While developing Squint/Opera’s 3D Pipeline, a part of the Squint Standards, I was able to automate many steps in the process. In the following years features were added to submit multi-pass jobs for lights, animation layers and stereoscopic cameras, all of which would have been hugely impractical without automation.

Features:

Automated multi-job submission for GI, baked/animated passes, lightpasses, stereoscopic passes and multi-camera renders.
Automatic file/folder creation and naming, quick-select frame size and file type, error-checking
Automatic job pools and priorities based on project folder locations.
Render submission to a Backburner, Qube and Deadline without having to work with additional submission windows.

In 2014 I hired another developer to add features to the bomb for the production of Messy Goes To Okido. In 2015 I hired Voy as the new head of the Pipeline team, passing over control of the Render Bomb. He worked closely with me the 3D team to add further features you can see documented on his website here.

Related Projects:

External Links:

Voy – Render Bomb

WCMC Discovery Wall

Ryan Lintott — Sun, 18 Aug 2013 16:42:35 +0000

Project Type: Digital Installation
Role: Pitch Development / Designer / 3D Prototyping
Company: Squint/Opera
Client: Wiell Cornell Medical College
Completed: 2013

A wall-sized digital art piece created from thousands of tiny screens and lenses was designed by Squint/Opera for the $650m Belfer Research Building, part of Weill Cornell Medical College (WCMC) in Manhattan. The shimmering and animated foyer installation celebrates the college’s research work.

The large-scale digital installation (approx 4.6m x 2.7m) comprises 2800 mini screens set in a grid pattern behind a panel of thousands of circular acrylic discs – a reference to the lenses used in medical research. The dual layer construction makes it possible to read the wall from a distance as a single image, while up close each screen gives information about medical discoveries and other news from WCMC’s website. The installation is programmed so that the images and stories change constantly.

To bring the concept to life, every aspect of the hardware was designed from scratch. I was part of the small design team working with the producer, the hardware consultants (Hirsch & Mann) and other designers to develop the initial pitch. We went through many design iterations and I experimented using virtual 3d models to test various lens and screen combinations throughout the process. I also developed a pipeline to produce bespoke image and video content for the wall.

The project has won the CODAworx design award for best educational installation and was a Media Architecture Biennale future prototypes award finalist.

External Links:

Al Maryah Island App

Ryan Lintott — Sat, 10 Aug 2013 18:04:28 +0000

Project Type: App / Interactive Installation
Role: Director / Producer / Technical Director / UX
Company: Squint/Opera
Client: Mubadala
Year Completed: 2013

The app describes every aspect of Al Maryah Island, a massive new district in Abu Dhabi. A 3D map with hotspots allows users to explore many aspects of the project from transportation and phasing to the specific functions of various buildings. The interface was designed to be flexible with a moving menu bar so that users could increase the size of the map window or image window as desired. Flexible navigation allows users to click on specific hotspots on the map or simply swipe through images with the map adjusting accordingly. The app runs on an iPad sitting in front of a large screen that mirrors the content allowing for presentations to larger groups.

My role involved developing and pitching a new app and installation concept for Al Maryah Island’s marketing campaign. I designed the app and worked closely with the client to ensure it presented the marketing content (mostly images, films and 3d models also created by Squint/Opera) effectively.