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...

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.

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.

Female Armor - Part 1

Got off to kind of a slow start with this new character. I wanted to have her concept done on the 1st so I could start modeling this past weekend, but I got caught up on the concept itself. I decided to go in more armored direction with her. Some discussions with my friends lead me to add more armor to her chest than originally intended, but it makes more sense to have her wear body armor than to have an open chest area that is fully unzipped.

The concept progressed further and now I've decided to go for a shorter hair style. Short hair is a challenge, but one I haven't tackled in a while, so I thought I'd go for it. I was also somewhat inspired by Emma Watson's current hair styles, so I'm using some current photos of her for reference.

 

The colors are still up for debate, but as of right now I am sticking to the yellow that I started with.

I managed to start modeling the head a little bit this evening. I look forward to really diving into this character and hopefully getting it close to complete by the end of this month.

d

New Stuff

It's been a month. It was snowing 2 days ago and now it's 80 degrees.

I've been working on a comic a lot recently. I've been drawing comic books since I was in elementary school. I drew a lot of books in middle school and they got passed around my school getting generally good reviews. Once I got to high school I stopped. They are a lot of work and I was focusing more on traditional art. College was all 3D modeling and stuff. But I've been thinking about doing another comic for a while now. All of the planning has been building up and I finally found myself in a position where I can start roughing out the book. Here's a sample:
It's basically a super hero story (because that's what comics are suppose to be, right?). It's meant to be a comedy book, but the backstories are kind of dark so I'm not sure how it will turn out. My main inspirations for this are Watchmen and KickAss as well as some Scott Pilgrim. I'm hoping it doesn't turn out too cliche.

ALSO, the videogame project I've been working on with a couple fellow designers has hit a bump in the road. We've been coasting for a while and when we realized we've been planning our game for almost an entire year, we quit. LOL. Not really though. We are just taking a step back on that idea and focusing on something new in order to get our blood flowing. This new title is kind of a throw back to a game we made when we were in school, only this time we are going to overhaul it and make it badass as hell (and it will actually work!!) Here's the character I'm working on for it:

It's a work in progress of course. We got through the basic design phase of this quick, so we want to power through and try to get it done this year.

God help us all

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........