Harry Truman

  

I jumped in on that SHOWDOWN competition over on the Art By Papercut forums. I'm pretty sure they're new because I've never heard of them prior to now, but the competition sounded kinda cool.  You can check out my thread here: http://www.artbypapercut.com/forum/index.php?topic=32.0 I've got a few ideas for my historical figure: Harry Truman.  I have until the end of November though, so I'm going to try and finish some of my other work for my demo reel before I devote all of my time to Mr. Truman.

Speaking of which, THIS CHARACTER WILL NEVER END! I continue work on this girls armor. 

I... I don't know if I will ever see the completion of this character...

I keep finding things wrong with it...

 

...but it must be FINISHED!!

Freelancing

I've been forced to take a break from the new demo reel, but it's for a good cause! I'm working with a talented concept artist on an independent game. He's asked me to create the character models for a project of his. I can't go into much detail of what it is, but it looks pretty exciting.

This is the first model I created:

Female Armor - Part 2 "head sculpting"

Made some progress on the girl's head. I'm getting some Natalie Portman vibes from it, but I swear I didn't use her for reference at all. Must have been subconscious, or else every woman on Earth looks a little bit like Nat P. Who knows!

I'm going to raise her forehead up a little more. Once her hair planes are on there, it should look a little better too. This week is going to be busy, but hopefully I can get the body blocked out. That's the next step.

Female Armor - Part 1

Got off to kind of a slow start with this new character. I wanted to have her concept done on the 1st so I could start modeling this past weekend, but I got caught up on the concept itself. I decided to go in more armored direction with her. Some discussions with my friends lead me to add more armor to her chest than originally intended, but it makes more sense to have her wear body armor than to have an open chest area that is fully unzipped.

The concept progressed further and now I've decided to go for a shorter hair style. Short hair is a challenge, but one I haven't tackled in a while, so I thought I'd go for it. I was also somewhat inspired by Emma Watson's current hair styles, so I'm using some current photos of her for reference.

 

The colors are still up for debate, but as of right now I am sticking to the yellow that I started with.

I managed to start modeling the head a little bit this evening. I look forward to really diving into this character and hopefully getting it close to complete by the end of this month.

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Boy & Dog

Finally finished these guys up. You can check them out in more detail here

 They both turned out pretty good. This is also the first time I've gotten Marmoset Toolbag to work out well for the final render. I plan on using it for the final shots of all my stuff from now on. The biggest problem I had with Marmoset in the past, I've found, is I've always forgotten to export my .obj meshes "with" their normals. Because of that, the models always showed up with unsightly seams that I couldn't get rid of. All I had to do was remember to check "normals" in the exporter and BAM, the models come in looking great!
Toolbag did crash numerous times however while trying to apply materials and stuff, but that's probably due to the size of materials I was using for this character (2048). I probably could have scaled those down to much smaller and it would have looked just as good.
Also! When working with Marmoset Toolbag, remember to flip your Green channel on your normal map. I learned that from working in Unity 3D and it's the same in Marmoset, so I'm assuming a lot of engines need that done as well. It's kind of a pain though because 3DS Max doesn't need the normals flipped so I basically have to created two separate maps.
This project is also the first time I've made one of those cool little turn table environment platforms for a character! I think it turned out alright. Making dead dandelions is hard though. They could have turned out better, but overall, I think it adds to the piece nicely! I plan on making one of these for all of my characters in the future.

And so starts the month of June! My goal of making a character a month is going pretty well, to my surprise. The boy and the dog took about a month (started on April 20th). The next project is the leather suited, spy girl! I mentioned in my last post that I'm planning to add some more armor type pieces to her suit. Here's some roughs I did the other day:

Steam Crunk

I finished my gun finally! I just got done adding it onto the site: HERE

That above render was rendered out in Marmoset Toolbag, which I finally got to work!! I'm so glad too because it looks really nice. Much better than inside 3Ds Max.

I'm moving on to other projects. I've got a few characters already started that need finishing. Namely the Vampire Bat Boy and the Vumpire which will fill out the more "cartoony" characters in my new reel. I started a model of Awesome Kong a while back and I'd really like to finish that because I want to attempt to use some physics on her hair braids and the leather straps hanging from her waist. We'll see if that actually happens though :D And I am determined to make a character that is depicted as "Steam-Crunk" which is basally like Steam-punk except it's with blinged out, gangster rappers. So, envision Lil Wayne with a steam powered grill! EH!?

I'm also currently working on a top secret game project with a friend. It's going through some changes at the moment but it was originally going to be a 2D, side-scrolling platformer possibly made in Flash. But now we're rethinking and we may attempt to do it all in 3D. Unity might be the ticket if we go that route. Either way, the idea is pretty cool and I think it will be pretty fun if it ever gets made. We're shooting for a free to play release so, that's something to look forward to I guess, but don't get your hopes up LOL

Machine Gun Projection

Here is the progress on my Mini-Beryl. I got the normal and the AO projected and I am currently cleaning those up before starting the texture. It's close to being done!!

The gun is a little over 1800 tris (900 polys)

King Tutlr

That is a picture of a new character I'm working on. I actually made that the other day after a couple hours of screwing around in Zbrush. I haven't had a chance to continue working on it, but it should be pretty cool when it's done. There are a lot of new ideas for stuff I want to model and things around me are starting to change which is giving me a boosted work ethic.

I've started making a LOT of prop models for Vteractive's Facebook game Questinations. They are all up on my website on the props page. We're breaking into the Easter stuff now so I have some eggs and baskets to make next. I also finally finished that mobile crane for Flaming Brain studios. Speaking of which, Flaming Brain has just redone their site and it's looking pretty snazzy, so check that out.

I'm going to spend the rest of this entry venting about the gaming news site Kotaku. Kotaku is a site that I love because it gives gaming news in a fun way. It "was" easy to read, very simple, and had people that are passionate about what they are writing about. But in recent months, the site has gone through a lot of changes. The visual changes to the site are very different, but that kind of thing I can get used to. What I'm a little upset with is the changing in the actual articles. I don't know if they have always been like this, or if I'm just getting older and starting to think about things more. I'm going to make mention of a couple in particular that bothered me.

The first comes from the writer Stephen Totilo and the article is called 'A Plea For Games To Grow Up". Stephen was at GDC this week and he walked into a presentation by David Cage (founder of the company Quantic Dream and creator of Heavy Rain among other games). Totilo explains how he started listening to Cage before dismissing the speech as "information he already knew" and so he moved on to another presentaion across the hall that interested him more. This is perfectly fine in my opinion. I probably would have done the same thing if another panel interested me more, but Totilo explains how he returned to Cage's presenation and found that it was a pretty moving speech. People were all abuzz on Twitter about how great it was, and so Totilo felt he had made the wrong choice by skipping out on the speech. He tries to make up for the fact that he missed it at the end of his Kotaku article, but honestly, there is no reason to, and I don't really care anyway. I understand that you are upset and a little embarassed that you missed the speech, but then why even add any of that to the article? Why not just report on what it was that Cage talked about and leave the rest out? Is that so hard? You shouldn't be so hard on yourself anyway, Totilo, because I think you were right in your original accusation: that the speech was all information you've heard before. I think you are just overcome by peer pressure.

Another article that I read just this morning is called "Why All The Call Of Duty Hate?" and it's written by Mike Fahey. This article takes the cake. The last one was just a little irriating, but this thing just angered me. Fahey talks about Call of Duty (CoD) and how people "hate" on it for no reason. He even goes as far to say that "In my honest opinion, I think these comments are because, well, they are horrible at the game." Fahey actually blames haters of the game because they "aren't good at it". Are you fucking kidding me? That is a response that a 14 year old would make. The fact of the matter is, everyone has their opinion, so Fahey can say whatever he wants, but belittling the people that play games, people who don't like the games that you like, and the readers of your own articles is a pretty shitty way to be a journalist.

People like Mike Fahey are the reason I don't like to play shooters. Not because I'm "not good at them". Not because they are or aren't "the same thing every time". Because assholes like Mike Fahey are fans of them and then spout off on professional web blogs about how shitty everyone else is because they don't like the same things he does. Grow up, ya big poop face.

And while I'm on the topic of poop-faces. Go to my friend Reuben's blog: http://reubnick.wordpress.com/
This kid is about 6 years younger than me, but he writes like a pro (and not really a poop-face). I only wish I could write blogs well as he does.

Maybe then someone would actually read this one........