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!

Gnomon comes to an end... kinda

Ha so there has been quite a gap in posts this term :p  There has just been so much going on this term with Gnomon work, polishing old projects, trying to wrangle my game creation 4 project into a working game XD and balancing all that with my work at Dreamscape.  Still we all survived and created some really beautiful work! I can't wait to see the Gnomon graduate reel in January!

Check out my most up to date reel and projects on my Artstation and Vimeo


We had a few industry professionals from Activision visit around week 4 and even though the feedback I got was very positive I decided to shelf my current project and go back to polish my older stuff a little more.  The main feedback I had was that my reel showed more than enough content but it really could benefit from one last lighting and polish pass.  Also my radio prop from Nick's class was criticised as a little too low poly for a hero prop so I went back and re modeled and textured it.  I was actually pretty happy to be told to spend more polygons on that prop since I really enjoyed the project and being able to take it to a higher resolution finish was a lot of fun.

First up is Bitteryarrow castle interior.  This project has been off and on so many times I am starting to get really blind to how it changes and I have to go pull up old versions. I made a few lighting changes this time to balance out the moonlight and candle light since they felt like they were really competing in the mid ground.  I also updated the floor disc since it was becoming lost in the shadows.  I introduced some metal coating and increased the relief depth to give it more impact.  This was more challenging than I fist thought since the Ztool has completley corrupted now so I only had my baked textures to work from.  Still I managed to make it work in Painter and I am pretty happy with the result.  I also tweaked the candle and glass materials to better integrate them into the scene.  The glass was completely redone since the refraction effect was giving me some really weird results.  In the end I simply replaced the old glass with a few layers of additive grunge instead.  The effect works to give the glass an old and dusty feel which is what I was trying to do originally.  The added benefit is that there is no distracting refraction issues as the camera passes through the scene.

 

 

 Next up I took another pass at relighting my Bitteryarrow exterior shots.  Mostly I was just trying to introduce more light into the shots to show all the work that went into them.  I do still like the mood of the older shots but they looked radically different on each monitor that I tested them on.  I remember going to an interview and seeing my main exterior shot on an apple laptop and it was almost completely black :p The new lighting is a lot more reliable now thankfully!  I also added some splash effects to my boat close up.  This really punched up that shot but it was a nightmare trying to render out the sequence.  Each time I tried to get unreal to bake out the animation using sequencer the splash effects would work for around 30 frames then they would freeze and loose their attachment to the boat! None of the teachers I took this problem too could figure out what the issues was and we chalked it up to just how buggy the unreal sequencer is when running effects work.  In the end I had to use a screen capture software which was OK just much harder to color correct.

My Podracer scene also got a lighting and FX update.  It was really fun to go back to this scene after 2 terms of FX training and update the sparks, and plasma beam.  I didn't go too indepth with it since I was short on time but I feel that its a large improvement from the original sprite sheet I had for Texturing and Shading for games which feels like a very long time ago.  Also thankfully sequencer worked just fine for these effects!

 Here is my updated radio.  Since I changed the original topology so much and optimized the UV's I did have to completely re texture the prop which was a good move anyway since I feel like I got a lot more out of each of the maps this time.  I think this piece feels a little more mature than my last attempt and holds up to closer inspection a lot better too.

 

Lastly here is my Game Creation 4 final Aphelion I was in a little bit of a crisis in week 8 when most of the systems were in place but nothing was working quite right.  I was having AI issues, scoring issues etc but a little bit of help and a lot of mapping out of systems later and I wound up with a working game yay!!!  The art is all block in, the game is very simple and at the moment you can pretty much spam all your abilities and shooting so that needs a lot of refining but enough of the architecture exists now that I think with a bit of time me and my team can have a lot of fun with this! 


So I guess that will be it for a little while.  I will keep posting on this blog with any work I can share I am also going to take my free Gnomon class next term 'Texturing and Shading 4.'  I hope this class gives me a bit of an insight into how the Modeling and Texturing track do such beautiful work and maybe I can adapt that learning into the games pipeline.  I also have a large list of mini learning projects to burn through that I will be posting on here when I can.

Thanks for reading :)

Week 3_Work and School meet

I'm starting to form a balance with my new schedule.  Getting up at 7:00 to catch the bus to work is a gear change but it is getting me into the habit of getting up early (not my best time of day) and it is definitely getting easier.  Working at Dreamscape is so much fun! I cant talk much about what I am working on but the people are awesome, really welcoming and the work is intense but fun and thankfully all in my wheel house so far.
All my Gnomon classes seem to be on track ATM, I am combining Game Creation 4 and VFX for Games 2 as much as I can which is saving me a lot of time.  I am also progressing along with my final environment piece.  I am a little worried about not having quite enough time to finish up that project especially since I want to spend a week fixing up last terms projects just one last time for my final reel.

Game Creation 4 and VFX 2 have been super fun! I am putting together a Sci-Fi FPS defender game in Unreal, so I am trying to cater each homework to tackle an aspect of that game.  If I do manage to get it all done by week 10 it should look and play really well.  I have also recruited a class mate to help with some of the modeling and texturing since there is an lot to get done.  It's really nice to do a collaborative project and share some of the creative input.  I wish I could have done more of that at Gnomon but the homework rarely allowed for it unfortunately.
Anyway here are some grabs of my first few weeks of homework:

I am going with a modern, militaristic environment for my final piece for demoreel.  I wanted to cover all the bases and prove that I can work in the realms of: fantasy, sci fi and realism.  So far I am mostly working on the Jeep since it is so close to the camera, then I will move onto the base landscape and concrete bridges.  I won't be adding characters to this shot, since that is too much work for now but I hope the vehicles etc will sell the scale of the image.

The Beginning of the End

Wow OK its the end of break now and I took the whole 2 weeks off after that beast of a term!! Still I am so glad with everything I got done and I feel confident going into next term that I have the time to really put together a strong final reel :D
I had to drop the town exterior project I was planning mostly just to free up enough time to push the lighting on my other projects.  I underestimated the complexity and time it would take to fix a lot of the issues that cropped up but I feel that my 3 finished pieces are now ready for a few final polishing passes before I put them to rest.  Still I got a couple of Internship offers off my WIP reel so yay!!!!!!!!!!!!! I can't begin to explain how excited I am to join the workforce next term even if it is (for now) in a part time fashion. 

I  revisited my Podracer Final from Texturing and Shading for Games.  I polished up the environment a little, re-rigged the Podracer and put together a few camera passes to show off the model :) I am so much more confident lighting in Unreal now, I feel I can do a much better job of showing off the model compared to a couple of terms back when I first put this together.  I feel the bright and orange pallet of this piece nicely balances out the darker feel of the rest of my reel.

 I got some great help with pushing my Environment for Games piece both from my Tutor Anton and from my peers.  Thanks guys!! I added some vines, broken glass and more candles to make the room feel fuller and more intimate.  I also did a lot of work on the lighting for the piece to boost the colors and vibe. Check out the full animation on my WIP Reel

 In the end I pushed and pulled my environment final from last term so much it became a mess.  So I just opened up a new scene and, using the same assets, I built; what I feel, to be a much stronger shot.  It was surprisingly fun to just place assets and move around landscapes to add depth and intrigue to the scene.  I also polished up a lot of the texture work on both the castle and surrounding town.  Additionally I build a blueprint for the town buildings that allows you to change the building type and generate a random window alpha, which means once the buildings have been placed you can still change up the feel of the shapes with a lot of ease and the windows don't feel so obviously laid out like they used to.

 I settled on a logo and a business card too.  After all my experimenting with combining the 3 first letters of my name I just scrapped it all and tried a simpler idea that hints at my Architectural background.  I much prefer this logo to my previous attempts.  :)

For the Game Creation 3 final I rigged up my character, Cyrus, from earlier in the term.  I didn't have a lot of time to put together the animations for movement but I managed to do a first pass on everything.  I might go back and polish them up some day.  I did however learn how to set up dynamic bone chains in Unreal so Cyrus's jacket is animated dynamically in this scene, you can see a better example here: Game Creation 3 Final

 Lastly here is somewhat of an art dump for my stylised character final.  That class was such a treat this term when I was panicking with other projects.  I did enjoy the challenges of really finishing my environment projects with lighting rendering and optimizing, but when the clock is ticking to the big deadline there is something calming about coming home and just loosening up with some Zbrush.

 I don't know how I managed it but I guess that extra week after the WIP reel deadline really helped.  I had nothing but stylised character to work on and I was able to finish my sculpt, build the low poly model, texture, rig and animate it in time for the final.  Having said that it was right up to the wire! I was very glad to have my name place me in the middle of the list for presentations :p if I was higher I don't think I would have had the precious last few minutes to set up the Marmoset scene!

 

So tomorrow marks the beginning of the end of Gnomon! Even typing that now feels surreal, it's been a crazy ride and even through the bumpy parts I've loved every moment.
Good luck everyone see you on the other side.

Week 5 - Midterms

 OK Midterms have arrived! which doesn't mean much this term since most of my classes don't have any hard deadlines for week 5, but it still marks the half way point of the term!! eek!
So far everything is going according to plan, I have finished all the character and extra stuff for my scenes, I am currently rendering out the initial 2 shots I have completed and now I have started the block in for my final environment for the term! phew...

 Not much to look at right now but the block out is coming together.  I have the major key buildings worked out I just have a few more general details to figure the scale of, then I can bring in my buildings from the large scale scene as set extensions to really make the scene feel large.

We had a class cancellation for Stylised Character so I moved ahead with Jinx and I did a little work on my final piece.  I really love Johannes Helgeson's 2D work its a beautiful mix of stylised faces with slightly more realistic bodies.  I hope I can do the concept justice, we will see.

 I touched up the facial anatomy from last week and moved onto polypainting for my Midterm.  It's slowly coming together but I am really glad I chose to do 2 pieces this term since I have learned so much from this first piece which I can hopefully transfer to the final :)

Threw together a simple rig for Cyrus but I will be testing out some cool dynamic bones for the lower half of the jacket in the next few weeks for Game Creation 2! Still I have used the basic rig to get all the custom animations I need for my environment shots and once I have the decent skinned version I can start rendering out those shots too.

 I finished up the last few props for my main character namely his torch and flanged mace texture.
The torch was super fun! mostly because I really like the twisted wood branch shapes and trying to capture that in Zbrush was a fun challenge but the other reason is that I only had about 6-8 hours to get this whole piece done, from high poly sculpt to game rez with textures and fire effect! So the time constraint made me work quite fast!  I could certainly do a better job with more time but for the actual amount this prop will show up in the scene its more important to move onto my environment final.

 

 Finished the transforming mace texture.  I would love to put some kind of effect together for the fully awake form but I don't know if I will have time this term.  I may have recruited a VFX artist to take a stab at it too but we are all crazy busy this term so its still tentative.

Also got around to updating my Artstation with some of my recent projects including this piece (not posted as of the time of this post) though I am waiting to finish the other 3 character rigs for this term before I post them all as one project.  Still you can see how the rig and skinning hold up here: Ninja Animation

Tomorrow I a bunch of us are heading to Blizzard!! for a tour! yay! it will be really nice to have a little bit of a break and just hang out with friends away from the computers for a few hours.   Maybe even soak up a little inspiration :D