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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I realize I haven't posted much in a while, totally my fault. The webcomic has been keeping me busy, and is now available online at www.studentstuff.com, so check it out!
Tomorrow, however, I'm going to be starting at Jim Henson Studios doing motion capture animation cleanup for about a 2-month contract and it's going to keep me pretty busy. So before the posting blackout begins (yeah, I know, how can you have a blackout if you haven't been posting anything?), I figured I'd throw up a deluge of random sketches.
Ah, things have been pretty silent on the old blog front for awhile, and that's my fault. No excuse for it! Anyhow, here's some characters that I've done recently for a webcomic that I was hired to draw. It's for an upcoming webportal for college and high school students, and they wanted a webcomic to go along in a sort of Student Life section. I've done about 4 of the comics so far, and I think I've got a workflow down that works pretty well. Once the site is launched and the comics themselves are live, I'll give it a link here.
Always loved the idea of a group of kids getting together and building something awesome (Explorers from the 1980s was one of my favorite movies growing up, it's a shame they don't make movies for kids like they used to), and what kid never wanted to build a robot? Just kinda working/laying things out for now, there's still one more character I want to get in there. Should have a much tighter version in a couple days.
Here's the final textured model. Final count is 500 triangles for the body, and 124 for the drill and tank. Kinda playing around with rigging him so I might pose it up or do a couple animations. Overall I'm really happy with how it came out, this challenge was a lot of fun and got a lot of ideas flowing.
Over at the forums at Polycount.com, they have a low poly challenge running through Saturday to recreate a next (current) -gen game character using a max of 500 polys/tris. So I decided to try my hand at the Big Daddy from Bioshock. I've knocked it out pretty quickly, and should move on to texturing to hopefully get it done by the day the challenge wraps. Right now I'm at 497, and the tank and drill are counted under the additional 150 they're allowing for weapons and equipment to put me at 603 for the moment.
Knocked this out this afternoon and I thought I'd share it. Just working out the rough composition for a illustration I wanted to do, to get more into the practice of storytelling in a drawing. There are a couple things I'd like to change, mainly grouping the people up at the top manning the ropes. Will probably blow this up a good 2-3 times when I work on the final piece, as I should get into the practice of drawing BIGGER.
For those of you familiar with Gundam or Halo at all, here's an idea that I've been kicking around for a bit, and finally got around to executing a bit. A Char Custom Spartan Armor, a combination of the Armor from Halo and Char's Custom Zaku from Mobile Suit Gundam. This was a bit of a challenge in a couple ways, trying to mash the two together so that they are still recognizable to people familiar with either or both, and then just trying to come up with a style/pose that I liked. I have a couple almost completed sketches in other poses before I decided to stick with this one and ink it. Then, since I originally wanted to get this done for a friend's birthday I got as far on it as I could before midnight so I didn't send it to him too late. My inking ability still leaves a lot to be desired, so time that I could have spent on improving the coloring got eaten up a bit by me trying to clean up inks I wasn't happy with. Probably could use a floor/bg of some sort, now that I think about it.
Just felt like posting a couple little sketches I did tonight to break in a couple new pens I got. First we have the long-time favorite of mine, the Pilot Hi-Tec C. A very fine tip pen that I believe is only available through importers, like Kinokuniya Bookstores. I love doing little sketches with these. Secondly I was looking for a brush pen, but with a bit more control, and I ended up picking up something a bit different. It's a dual tipped (one on either end) Pilot pen, similar to a felt-tip, with one end black and the other a gray. I like it quite a bit so far, and I think it'll be great to use to put in splashes of gray for the little sketches I do with the Hi-Tec. I'm going to be traveling to Hawaii on Friday for some good friends' wedding, and I'm looking forward to all sorts of stuff to draw while I'm there!
Here's something I've been working on for an independently published video gaming magazine called The Gamer's Quarter. It's put out by some people I met back when InsertCredit.com had a forum that I used to visit. It was a great place for discussion on videogaming and the medium. TGQ grew out of that and I offered to submit a couple art pieces for their latest issue. This is based on one of the articles, and pokes a little bit of fun at the game Gears of War. The theme for it is "Even with all my macho posturing, you still don’t take me seriously."
Hey all, know I've been gone a while. I was looking for a job and then I found a job, and heaven knows I needed it. That contract ended, so I'm looking again. In the meantime, I am sorely need to get back to posting up some work, so, to start things off...
Kind of a tie-down of a design I've been kicking around trying to get right for awhile. I'm pretty happy where it is at the moment, and should really get on finishing it up, as well as some of the other characters that go along with her. So those should be coming up in a future post!
Wednesday, March 28, 2007
Just tying down the design a bit. Going for a real cartoony type of the character you typically see in Epic's games, such as Unreal Tournament or Gears of War. Cable is also a very big influence, so Tal gets 10 points for picking up on that. Even though Cable would totally get his ass handed to him by Moon Knight.
I grew up on too many cartoons in the 80s, too many comics and anime in the 90s, and videogames came somewhere inbetween then and now. I draw a lot but not as much as I should. I believe Gackt will save the world with the POWER OF ROCK AND ROLL.
