Wrestler Designs

Some updates on things I've been up to the past few months.

I won a Chikara wrestler-re design contest! Here's my favs:

You can see all of the entries and all of the judges comments here: http://www.bleedingcool.com/2014/06/13/winners-announced-for-re-create-a-wrestler-design-contest-from-chikara-project-rooftop/ This was so cool because I got to read the critiques from some of my personal heroes (Mike Quackenbush included)

Here are some detail shots of a character I recently made. I'm pretty proud of how it turned out:

I'm still working on the dinosaur character models for Easley-Dunn upcoming game:

I did some more art for one of my past professor's card game. He launched a kickstarter for it but it unfortunately didn't meet the goal. He's not quitting however, and I'm hoping it takes off eventually! Here's a piece I actually did of him specifically:

And then in my free time I'm working with a friend to design a few games that we hope to get finished and release in the near future. Here is some concept artwork:

And to top it all off, I got a new job! So I have to pack up and head 3 hours south to a new city. Exciting times!

Recently I've been updating my Tumblr more than anything. Follow me at http://mattmuzzy.tumblr.com/ I tend to post all of my new stuff there before I sit down to put it all into a blog post.

New Character Renders

I finished the snowball kid and took some new renders of the Bug Thugs. These were all captured from inside of Marmoset Toolbag 2.

 

 

I'm still working on coding my new website. These will be the first things I add once that is completed. However, with my job continuing to take up 60 hours of every week, finishing everything continues to be a challenge.

New Site Design

I haven't had a lot of time to work on the snowball kid, but I did do a few animations. The programmer I'm working with has imported these animations into his Unity scene and is currently getting the character to run around and toss snowballs and such. It's pretty awesome to see! I can't wait until we get a working prototype to the point where I can start showing it to people.

Over the past month or so I've been trying to finish up my Jason Frank model. Here are some pictures of [what I'm calling] the finished high poly mesh followed by my current progress with the textured low poly.

The biggest challenge with this (apart from getting his face to resemble the real person... (I've kind of given up in that regard)) is getting all of his tattoos correct. It took a while to ink the outlines to all of these things, but this is as far as I've gotten. I took some liberties with a portion of them; ad-libbing areas, as it were. Since this step of the texturing process, I have halted and proceeded on to rigging; leaving the rest of the texture work alone until I get the whole character posed and animated. Here's a screen-cap of my rigging so far:

I didn't know 3DS MAX bones could squash and stretch, essentially making working muscles! I found that out online and instantly through them into this model. I have only just started the skinning process so I'm still unaware of how well they are going to work. But my fingers are crossed.

The only other thing I've been working on is my new website design. I've had a number of people (most of them professionals) tell me that my current sight doesn't display my work as best as it could. Hopefully my new site will help make my stuff more appealing. This is my design so far:

 

 Above is the home page and then this will be the content pages.

I am trying to organize my work better (separating low poly characters from higher poly ones) and just making everything a lot more accessible. The only thing I have to do now is code it... We'll see how long that takes me.

I'm hoping to get this site finished soon so I can post all of the new models I have. Here are some renders of the new work I've either finished or am currently on working in my free time for Easley-Dunn Games:

This team of dinosaurs is going to be really cool. I'm excited to get back to work on them because I think they are going to end up looking really badass!

I've been rushing to get all of this done because my current job is making it increasingly difficult to have time to devote to this stuff. The sooner I can get my new site online, the faster I can start blasting out resumes to potential game industry employers.

If you are an employer or have a friend in the industry, feel free to pass my information along! It'd be very much appreciated.

3DS Max biped twist links inside of Unity 3D

For a while now I’ve had a problem using the 3DS Max biped inside of Unity. Specifically twist links and how they would always react badly when imported into the engine. While the rest of the rig would animate like normal, the twist links themselves would fly all over the place. The only solution I could ever find was to just not use twist links at all for my Unity projects.

Recently I found out how to fix this issue. If you rig your character with twist links and then go into Max’s Schematic View (up by the curve editor) you will find that the twist links, as they appear in the tree diagram, are not linked correctly. Somehow they are able to animate perfectly fine inside of Max, but once they are imported into Unity, the FBX reader looks at the links from the schematic view and animates the bones accordingly (which makes the twist bones fly all over). All you have to do is reorder the links in the schematic view. The hand links to the forearm twist which links to the forearm which links to the upper arm which links to the upper arm twist which links to the shoulder. After this is reordered, the animation continues to play fine in Max but now also works perfectly fine inside of Unity.

I found this info really exciting! I’m happy that I can start using twist links again because it was a real pain to work without them. Hopefully this can help someone that may be running into the same issue.

Snowballs and Pumpkins

I'm working on a game with a programmer from the office. I don't want to say too much about it except that it involves kids and snowball fighting. This is the first character I'm making for it. A few more character classes will follow as well as a bunch of props and environment pieces. There's a ton of work to do! I'll be posting more about it later.

This is the pumpkin I carved for Halloween this year! Last year I won the carving competition at work but this year my boss and I were the only two to enter so they just gave both of us gift cards. I was happy to get a gift card but I kind of wanted to reign victorious :( Oh well...

I finished the last of the 3 Bug Monsters for Easley-Dunn Games. I need to go back and tweak the first one however so that it matches the other two better in terms of texture quality.

Since then I have been given 3 Dinosaur Monsters to model! I'm super excited to work on these. They should also go a little smoother than the bugs because they are more organic. The Monster Football game is slated to become a Kickstarter here soon. I'll post more about it when the time comes.

This week was my sixth week of basically nothing to do at work. For about a month I worked on this roller coaster demo inside of Unity to use with the Oculus Rift, but I really got tired of it after a while and put it aside for the moment. I hope to finish it eventually, but I've been spending most of my time recently thinking about my portfolio and what I need to get done before I can start applying for new jobs. I believe it's time.

Speaking of portfolio work, I've been designing my new site! Scott Easley gave me some tips on how to organize my work to make it easier to find stuff. I will be taking advantage of his advice. I sketched a mock-up last night and am really liking the look. The color I've really been digging lately is purple, so I'm pretty sure the final color scheme will be white, black, and purple.

Finally, I ended up winning that Saints Row 4 contest! I don't know how, but it happened. Thanks to anyone that voted for our weapon. I got the [enormous] special edition bundle of the game in the mail a couple weeks ago. Most of this bundle I have to eventually hand over to Brad since the gun was his idea, but I got the game for free at least! Totally worth it.

Supposedly our gun design is going to be added into the game as DLC at some point in the future. I can't wait for that because I think it will be super fun to play with. We are expert game designers after all ::wink wink::

Bugs on Ice

 I am still working away at Jason Frank. This render is from a couple weeks ago because I haven't saved out a newer render in a while (notice the seam on his neck from where I re-attached the head lol.) This model is taking me quite a long time, I realize. I'm really trying to go for a super high poly detail in this model. All of my past models have been very... low res(?) I've never incorperated things like lip lines, crows feet, and skin pores before, so this is my attempt to bring all of that together for the first time. I want to go all the way with this model and so I'm taking my time to make it as perfect as I possibly can. My only hope is that after spending all of this time on the sculpt, the detail isn't lost when it transitions to a low poly form.

Most of my time recently has been devoted to Easley-Dunn Productions and their game Monster Football. For the past couple months I have been spending all of my free time (when I wasn't playing Grand Theft Auto 5) modeling the wicked team of bug monsters! The image above is of the coolest looking one so far.

 At work I was given the opportunity to come up with some booth concepts for our swamped design team. Although I think some of these ideas are really cool, I was told none of them work LOL. So I guess I'm not a very good designer. Oh well.

We also got an Oculus Rift at the office! It's pretty awesome. I have been working on a futuristic roller coaster ride in Unity. Even though roller coasters were one of the first things we made in school, I am still struggling to animate a car going around upside down loops! DAMN YOU! I'm starting to remember things though. It should be wild :D

The last bit of news is about a GameStop weapons challenge for Saints Row 4! I heard about it from a co-worder and teamed up with my good friend Brad (who could be considered a Saints Row fanatic) to come up with a cool gun idea. One of the many guns he thought up was one that uses magnets and polarization, which I thought would be a really fun weapon to use in game. So I drew it up and submitted it to the challenge. Low and behold, we were chosen as a finalist!! I filled out the paper work a couple days ago and we're now waiting until the 27th when the public voting starts. I'll probably be posting voting links all over social media when the day comes, so I hope anyone reading this can vote for the Polarizer!

I just wish (since the winning gun will suposedly become DLC) that I could actually model the gun myself; just because that would be awesome to have a weapon I made show up in a AAA title like Saints Row.

A guy can dream.

Octo-crawl

Here's some stuff I made at work. This is an octopus I started animating for one of our side projects: 

And these are a couple screen grabs of a sculpt I made in my free time:

It's a Rat Man. I might go back and add a little more to it; although realistically, I probably won't...