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...

Female Armor - Part 3

This past week we had a huge open house at work. Needless to say, I didn't get a lot of work done on this character. I really don't know if I'm going to be able to finish her by the end of the month like I intended, and I don't really want to rush her because I want this model to be better than my last.

I did however manage to get a base sculpt for her body done. I'm currently going to retop it and then work on the armor pieces which will be done hard-surface in Max. I'm then going to throw everything back into Zbrush in order to add all of the organic details on the suit.

 My other goal on this model was to post its progress on a forum. I picked Game Artisans and have yet to receive any advice or criticism.

http://www.gameartisans.org/forums/showthread.php?p=374553#post374553

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.