Here's an update on the Bugbear monster I've been working on in 3d. I'm at a point where I believe the modeling is mostly done, and it's at 6871 tris. That's a bit higher than I wanted, but I'm pretty happy with how it came out. I've done some basic rigging/jointing tests and I was pretty surprised with how well it was working. Some of the difficulties I found were trying to strike a balance between an overall graphic shape, and how much anatomical detail to put in. I'm going to attempt to do the fur the same way it was handled on the Colossi in Shadow of the Colossus; multiple layers of painted fur with alpha channels; so that will require a good amount of work on texture painting.

Just something I did in a figure drawing class tonight that I was pretty happy with. There are some areas that can use some work, but since this is my first figure class in a few years it feels good to be getting back into it and improving from where I left off.

Happy Halloween!

I've been making an effort to learn Flash a bit better the last two months or so; I'm taking a class in it, which keeps me busy and gives me things to try new stuff out on. As a kid I really enjoyed making Haunted Houses with the doors and windows that would open, and I thought I'd work that into a sort of Halloween card. Just in case it's not clear, click the flashing orange stuff.
Happy Halloween!

Bugbear design

I've been wanting to design a "monstrous"-type creature in 3d for awhile; and when I started kicking around ideas one of my first thoughts was the old D&D staple, the bugbear. Looking around on the web I wasn't too impressed with some of the other designs that have been produced for this creature. I did a few pages of rough sketches for head designs last year; and one always stood out as creepy and somewhat goblin-ish, which was a right step in the direction I wanted to go. I pulled it out again recently; and started making some tweaks on the design, and after making some silhouette shapes, I put the two together and managed to pull out the final concept. I'm pretty happy with it, and I think it'll look great once it's fully realized in 3d.

Refined Stowaway Thumbnail

I posted a very early version of this sketch a while back; and I was never very happy with how the composition worked. I put it aside for awhile, and over the last month or so I've been really trying to re-work it to tell the exact story I wanted. I finally feel like I've got the composition about as strong as it can be, so I've started going in and working in a little more as far as the major shapes and what's going on.

They're gonna put it down on the Vegas Strip

A few months ago I tested for an artist position at a company. They gave me the theme Little Green Men and I made a couple images that I submitted to them. I used this project to sink my teeth a little bit further into Illustrator, the first image I sketched out the main character, the Men in Black character, and the Ufo Alien in pencil, scanned it, then inked the linework and did the text graphic in Illustrator. I then exported it to Photoshop for coloring.


The second image I was a bit looser with the original idea and sketch. It's not as strong of a piece, I think, but I did like that I was able to knock out a second idea, even if it wasn't as fully developed, to show a bit more range. I used the same process, changed up the inking style in Illustrator a little bit but again, did the coloring in Photoshop. I had spent a lot of time on the text graphic, and was pretty happy with how it came out, so I used it for both images.



Ultimately it didn't lead anywhere, and while I probably wouldn't call these portfolio pieces they allowed me to practice and play with some new techniques. I didn't sign any paperwork or NDA, so there shouldn't be any problem, I think, with posting these up for everyone to see.

I'm gonna tell you about an accident, and I don't wanna hear "act of God"!

Here's a quick glimpse of something I'm working on. A much larger post is in the works, but I wanted to throw up a quick WIP/tease.

When Pirates Attack

Last spring I took a class in game design and I ended up developing a small prototype/proof of concept. I linked some of the character designs earlier, and I figured I might as well put up some screenshots and a link to the actual demo if anyone were interested in checking it out. It's an attempt at a 2d side scrolling action game, similar to Devil May Cry but with nowhere near as indepth of a combat system. I mostly wanted to focus on fun characters and actions.






While I did a lot of the work, I had some help from some other members of the class who helped with getting some of the artwork into the game (Ben Lamboy), music (Nick Gingarella and Tyler Boyd) and enemy coding (Nick again).

If you'd like to give it a shot, you can download it here. There's a simple tutorial to get you started with moving around. For the menu, just use the arrow keys and enter.

Recent 3d Work: Yoshi Dragoon

Here's some recent 3d work that I started because of a challenge on gameartisans.org to model a game character cosplaying/dressed as another. So my idea was Yoshi from the Super Mario Bros. games dressed as the dragon from Panzer Dragoon. Limit was 3000 polys and one 512x512 texture sheet. Right now it stands at 2934 with all of the armor pieces, and wings. The texture is rather rough at the moment, but given the design of the original character I'm not sure how much more detailed I want to go with it. I'm going to attempt doing a normal map also to add some more detail for the armor, as it's not something I've tried before and want to finally tackle.





And my original concept sketch:

I don't want no war going down tonight

I've been playing around a bit with the Unity3d engine, a cross platform 3d game engine that people have used to develop for PC, Mac, Iphone, the Wii, and even the web. So last week I spent some time trying to mock up the basics of a 2d shooter (control, firing, explosions). Here's what I've got so far:




It's pretty rough at this point, but I'm going to work on getting 3d work into it instead of just using primitives. The engine itself isn't too difficult to work with, but it takes a little getting used to. And that's what I'm after, familiarity and proficiency.

And already, it's June.

Haven't posted here in a while, but Matt was on me to do something more finished, and this is what came out of it today. I'm not incredibly happy with it, but for reasons that are hard for me to express. Mainly because as soon as I start tying down a sketch into a more finished drawing, in my eyes, it just dies. So if anyone has any thoughts on this, or how to work around/through it, I'd really appreciate hearing them.

Yar...here be some action poses

Been doing a lot of drawing lately, and here's a character I've been working on for a game project. Also, I've been trying to get some new stuff done for my portfolio (Game Developer Conference coming up later this week), so this is all going on the model sheet that I'm working on. Starting to get a real feel for cleaning stuff up quickly in Photoshop with my tablet, but it probably has helped a lot that I've become really familiar with drawing the character.

Cockpit sketch

I...live....again. Here's something I did the other day while I decided I was sick of just doing the usual warm up sketches that I've been kind of stuck in a rut doing lately. There's a couple things I don't like about it, might try doing a couple tweaks to the overall gesture to try to loosen him up. Also there's this thing I have about drawing tightly confined spaces, that I never know how far "into" the drawing to set the camera. This is probably more to do with me not planning out any sort of composition, and just coming up with this drawing that has no real action or story to it.