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.

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...

LLC

Gears are turning. For the first time it feels like something could actually "happen" in terms of my videogame career. I don't want to say this is will be a sure-fire success (because chances are it will not be) but I will say that things are looking up.

 

My programmer friend Matt and I are going through with the creation an LLC to house the production of some games we've wanted to make. We currently have one game in the works and are in negotiations to develop another game related app.  Neither of which I can really speak about indepthly at this moment, but since everything is moving so quickly, I don't think it'll be long before I start posting updates relating to the two. The above render are characters from our first game! Exciting :)

The Game.minder Expo is this coming Saturday (March 16th) up in Cleveland. Matt and I will be there, walking the floor, talking with people, and learning everything we can about starting an independent game studio. A lot of the Cleveland Game Developers will be there and as of right now, admission is free, so go check it out. It should be a fun event!

A couple other things I've worked on recently include a 3D rendering of a baseball bat grip known as the BatJack. You can go to their official website and check out the video on their homepage. The video is a little long winded and my animation only shows up for a couple seconds at the 3:30 mark, but all in all it was a cool project. The Bat Jack is a nifty little invention that improves the grip on a bat. It really works too!

I also designed the logo for a local bowling team which you can see below. They are the Coconut Monkeys! That was a pretty fun project as well. This logo is actually going to be embroidered on their shirts. I'm hoping the embroidery comes out well so I can get a picture of the final shirts and post it on here.