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.

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::