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.

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...

fighting the good fight

Man, I really haven't posted anything in a while. I thought I would write myself a little update so I can try and collect my thoughts.

First of all, I'm 24 years old now! Woo! I also have an apartment and ended up making negative 300 dollars last month due to all of these things called "bills" (a speeding ticket also didn't help too much)

But I digress: I want this blog to be about work that I've done, so here we go! Commence the dump:

First of all, I did some illustrations for a card game being shown off at a sort of anime convention in Pittsburgh:

This is actually the second year I've done cards for this (although I still haven't been paid for these...)

My friend's brother is beginning to develop a web show and wanted a cartoon depiction of himself to use in titles and whatnot. He asked me to draw that for him:

I'm still looking forward to seeing it animated in his video intro.

Just this weekend I wrapped up 2 side projects. One was a T-shirt idea that crossed Pokemon with the Wendy's fast food chain:

This was nice because it was my first attempt to seriously make something in Adobe Illustrator. It worked as a nice tutorial! I think I may use AI for future projects just so I can keep things super clean and crisp instead of struggling to make things look nice in Photoshop (all of that pixelation!!!) I also submitted this shirt to TeePublic https://teepublic.com/show/3920-mistys If you want to dish out $20 for it and tell 29 of your friends to do the same, I'd be extremely appreciative!!!!! :D :D :D

The other thing I finished was a little video my friends and I shot MONTHS ago. I had been putting it off but finally got around to capturing all of it and piecing things together:
It's not bad considering I edited it down to under 5 minutes from the 45 minutes of footage we shot.

That game I said I was working on in my last blog post has been put on hold. Despite saying "I'm going to finish this thing!".... I aint gonna finish it right now. Trying to build a 3D game for a mobile application seems to be a little over our heads at the moment. Instead, we are focusing on a simpler, 2D animated game that we can hopefully produce a little quicker. Not sure when that ball will get rolling, but I'm sure I'll post something about it when it finally takes off.

In the meantime, here I am! Still working my same job and wishing I was doing other things. Looking through all of my old blog posts, I noticed I had a good stream of new 3D work coming out on a regular basis. I hope to start having that kind of work again soon. I just need to not be so burnt out from wasting the majority of my days doing mindless tasks at work. Today was a bad mental day, but tomorrow I should be IN THE GAME.

I also want to start doing more comic work. I never finished this concept, but here is a sample of one project I really want to do:

It would be a reimagining of the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers story. It would be darker and grittier for a more mature audience and would chronical all of the events from the start of season 1 all the way to the death of Zordon in Space. This project would be a HUGE undertaking, but it would be a lot of fun to make AND fun to read when it's done (at least I think so). I am calling it Angel Grove.

I still want to also make my Budget League super hero comic series as well, but Angel Grove would probably gain a bit more traction just because it's Power Rangers (it's also already completely written since it's based on the TV show).

That's my update! I hope to post a bit more frequently. Hopefully with new things to show!

Peace!

-M@

Game Jam 2013

This past weekend I attended my first Global Game Jam up in Cleveland. There were a lot of really incredible and talented people up there who I really enjoyed meeting. I also loved seeing some awesome little games emerge from the amongst chaos. 

My one regret is that I wish I had introduced myself to “more” people because I only really talked to a small handful of individuals. If I attend next year’s event, my goal will be to work freelance style and help out a number of different teams instead of working solidly with one individual group. This way I can interact with more people and get more involved. 

In terms of my own game, I was rather disappointed with the outcome. I worked with two individuals who didn’t seem to really have their “eye on the prize” throughout the weekend. An overactive scope mixed with a lot of distractions lead to the game not being playable at all. The final product was nothing more than an animated intro cutscene (a shitty one, at that) followed by some broken gameplay that had no end. I give my teammate the benefit of the doubt however because he totaled his car on the way up to the Jam and was in the hospital for 2 weeks prior to the event. I’m absolutely certain these events factored into the group’s overall energy as we worked.

Personally, I felt like I accomplished a decent amount of work.  I modeled, unwrapped, rigged, and animated 2 entire characters as well as couple of other props. The models aren’t by any means “top notch”, but considering our time restrictions, I’m happy with what I ended up with.

I’m looking forward to getting back to work on my own projects where I will actually have a decent amount of time to make the art look good :)

Getting Shit Together

My computer is still not working. Intel is trying to tell me that the RAM I bought is not compatible with my CPU and that that is why it's not booting up. I'm not sure if I believe that or not, but we'll see what happens after I buy some new RAM.

I haven't been able to work on my 3D portfolio work either due to my current computer's failings. The graphics card has a fan that's going dead and it gets really loud when it's used intensively, so I've been keeping it pretty light and only doing 2D work in photoshop.

That's not to say I haven't been practicing my 3D however. I got thrown onto a project at work for a medical company that specializes in healing bed sores and other "non-healing" wounds. I modeled an old man who I am now carving large craters into. The reference images they gave me are horrifying and are making it hard to keep down my lunch, but modeling the actual details into this character are quite enjoyable, even if it's gross as shit.

In other, and more important, news: I am working on an IOS title with a co-worker of mine. I'll release more details about it later on, but for right now I just want to say that I'm excited. I am more confident than usual that this could turn into something successful and it's really changing my outlook on my entire career goal. My whole life I've been planning on getting good enough at my art that I could get a job at a big studio and work on some AAA game titles, but now I'm realizing that I can actually be the one laying my own path. I could literally make my own games and build up a small independent studio that creates whatever titles we want while making enough money to support ourselves! This option just feels... so much more free!

It's exhilarating to think about, and is also pretty damn scary, but it's the dream! I'm just not sure if it can really happen.

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:

Dog face

 It's been about a month since I started my venture towards a new demo reel. The boy character is pretty much done and the dog is coming along nicely. I'm trying to make the dog a little cartoony to match the boy, but he's coming off a little goofy looking at the moment. I've been tweaking his proportions for a few days now, but I've decided to move forward and see how he looks after I get some textures going. Next stop though is unwrapping!!  I plan to have the dog done by this weekend and hopefully get both of these characters rigged by next week. The 3 day weekend this week will definitely come in handy!!

Next month will start a new character. Originally it was going to be the Green Ranger, but I have since switched up the roster and this girl will be next in line:

My portfolio is in dire need of some sex appeal, however I've feeling her to be a bit bland as is. I was digging Scarlett Johansson's hair in the newest Avengers movie, so I'm planning on having this character adopt that style of hair. I'm also thinking of adding some large shoulder armor and other ridiculous things to make her silhouette more extreme. On the other hand, I could just bulk up her legs with more  stuff and keep her top half slender. More concepts will be needed for sure.

Cinco de MAYo

New demo reel is in the works. My gun from before will be a part (a prop for another character) but right now I'm finishing up this character:

He will be part of a 2 character set which will also include a dog (my first quadriped....) so I'm hoping that will work out well. My focus with these two is mostly animation. I want to have some nice facial expressions and fluid movement. This being my first venture into quadriped animation however, I'm not exactly sure how it's going to turn out.

All of my other projects have been side-lined for a bit. I realized a new demo reel is top priority since my current one is at least two years old.

FLCL vs AT

So I jumped off the Power Rangers painting for about a week so I could take a break. Here is what I have so far.

I'm still not liking the proportions of his human form. I think his arms might be too short. Idk! I'll figure it out!

What I've been working on instead is some fan art that pits Naota and Canti from FLCL against Finn and Jake from Adventure Time. This took a lot longer than I had expected (about a week) but it's done now and I can move on with some kind of accomplished feeling.

I've got a lot of projects I'm working on or starting to work on. I've got my videogame project (which will remain under wraps for the time being), there's my demo reel which I've decided to scrap all of my previous ideas and think up some all new stuff. It's like a breath of fresh air! I will be using my gun too, so I know I have at least once piece already finished.

I would also like to start to do a web comic. I've had this idea for a while now but there is just never enough time to put it together. I want to draw a comic cover for the first issue just so I can get my feet wet. It's called the Budget League! It's a group of odd super heroes. Kind of cliche, but it will be fun! There's also a web series I want to start with a friend of mine. It's a comedy series following around Kirby creator Masahiro Sakurai as he attempts to create the new Smash Brothers game for the WiiU.

How many of this projects will come to fruition? Hell if I know.

TeamCoco Flaming C

My Flaming C fan art from my last post made it into the Flaming C gallery in LA during this years ComicCon! Someone snapped a photo of it here http://www.comicsalliance.com/2011/07/24/conan-obrien-flaming-c-art-gallery-comic-con-san-diego/?a_dgi=aolshare_facebook

I can finally say I've been in a gallery (sans the one or two times from high school). This is cool though!

Anyway, I'm still building up the portfolio. I have a plan and have been scratching through it, making a little progress here and there. I'll post more stuff once I get it done. I'm also in the middle of a job change which will be extending my morning commute from 6 minutes to 20; and on 95 degree days like we've been having this summer, driving 20 minutes with no AC could be pretty unbearable. But I'll finally be making a fixed salary and have DENTAL!!! PRAISE THE LORD!

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........

Finally finished this thing

Ok, this is just a quick update. I finally finished this character. He's fully rigged and skinned. 6708 triangles with 100% hand painted textures.


So, now I can move on to more important models. Top priority now is to finish the mobile crane for Flaming Brain studios. I have the high poly mesh started and the low poly mesh is all unwrapped, so it shouldn't take too too long. After that, my portfolio needs props. I'm going to be making a lot of guns and probably some blades and shit too.

Also, after looking at my characters, I need a hot chick, and a big ugly monster. I technically have those already, but I need "good" ones. I also need some cartoony characters, but that stuff comes after props.

Let's see how much I can get done as fast as possible!

GO!