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.

Prepare for silent running!

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.

Comic Character Lineup

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.

Robots, Pt. 1

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.

Big Daddy, final

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.

Low Poly Fun

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.

Stowaway

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.

3x Faster...

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.

Update: It's now part of the banner/top image up at www.destroytokyo.com

So long, 2007.

New pens, woo!

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!