Still waiting...

 Just a quick update.  I'm moving ahead with my personal projects, trying to keep my mind busy while I wait :)

For the IOS game I am continuing with creating some art assets.  I have my cannons nearly in engine, with the high and low parts modeled just need to set up a stylised texture pipeline that I can use for future assets.

 Here is the High poly sculpt for the iron parts of the cannon complete with 4 different cannon ball types.

 

I tried out some of the new NPR rendering styles with the newest Zbrush! I love the look! and it was really easy too!! So cool to have a sketch look straight from a sculpt!! cant wait to play with this more!

 Here is the low poly cannon.  All ready to be rigged and textured and then put into Unreal.

 This is the final I submitted for Trans Texturing 4 class.  I learned so much in this class, including 2 new programs and a better understanding of Xgen! Still we only just covered Xgen in the last week so I haven't implemented the finished hair yet.  This character might crop up again in my next demoreel piece too which I will be starting soon!

 I've also been keeping up with some 3D printing. I designed my own lightsaber! which is certainly a life goal achieved! I printed the whole thing over a week with each piece taking about 5 hours to print :p but it all fit together perfectly and the head can be interchanged between the bladed look and simple cap look.

The Long Wait......

 These last few months have been a little difficult.  I have been and still am waiting for my work permit to be processed.  The waiting times are crazy long but I am hopeful that soon enough I will get a chance to finally join the Games Industry :D yay!
In the mean time to stay sane I have been doing lots of mini projects as well as taking my free class at Gnomon.  I opted into texturing and shading 4 which is a class specifically in using the finer points of Mari and Vray.  Two programs I am either very unfamiliar with or just plain rusty.  I wanted to take a class focused on the film track so I could get a glimpse into how the other students who focused on the rendering pipeline produce their beautiful projects.  Hopefully once I have completed this class I will have a notion of how I could push my work much further and then adapt that teaching into a games pipeline.

In the middle of the term I was asked to completed a couple of art tests but unfortunately I can't post any of the work I did online :(  Still I am very happy with what I was able to put together and it really made me appreciate everything I have learned at Gnomon and how far I have come in only 3 years!

I have also been testing out my 3D printer :D which has been a mix of maddening errors and finally some awesome successes!!  I had to replace a few parts and experiment with the process of converting a model from a Zbrush sculpt to a printable 3D format. Here is my first original piece! I wanted to create some ancient Chinese currency based on some really cool antique photos.  Most of the pieces I was trying to print had a lot of issues but this larger scale piece finally came out pretty well :D  I am going to try to print the smaller pieces after I finish my next project which I'll talk about on the next post.

 I also managed to finish my Stormcast Eternals army, looking forward to playing a few games with these guys in the future!

  I really like the look of this army, especially the general.  I usually collect the more evil, horde armies so its quite a change to move onto a small elite and benevolent order.  Still it's different to lay out the entire army, in their golden brilliance and have them only take up a small portion of my table instead of the whole thing :p

Lastly I have been developing an IOS game.  I have had a bunch of Games Design Documents sitting in my Google Drive since I started at the NFTS back in 2014. It actually feels really nice to dig up some of the old ideas and give one a try.  I have most of the Blueprinting all working now and after a few rough days of trying to figure out the rather complicated way of getting the game out of my computer I now have my greybox level on my phone!!!!! It probably sounds silly but it feels so cool to get that to work!! I am moving onto doing some of the art now :D  I hope I can get far enough with this over the next few months while I wait to get permission to work!

 Here is the first of many props for the game! more to come in the next post!