Video Game Artist

This started out as an exercise to re-familiarize myself with building modular terrain. I did a lot of this kind of work on the PS2 but the persistent problem was in trying to build urban landscapes that felt organic which is now fairly easy to do with modern engines where the level topology doesn’t all have to be welded.

Once I started building I wanted to also see how well I could achieve a cell shaded look with the Crytek engine. What you see here is about 32 hours of work. The cool thing (for me at least) is that with just a few parts (plus some landmarks to help navigation) I could quickly build a huge town.

A random collection of my latest color sketches.

This little project started out with me just wanting to create a single small structure that really pushed the use of normal and spec maps.

Here is what I ended up with after two days. This is a screen grab from Maya using the default lights.  Oh and the green channel on the normal has not been inverted here. The textures were fun to paint but man, creating texture maps this way can turn into a real time-sink.

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Next I wanted to get this into Unreal but I didn’t want it just floating in an empty space  so I had this idea of how I could take the assets from the Windmill and create a little scene. This gave me the idea that maybe this little structure was in fact some alternate reality French Air Bus stop. This led me to creating a ‘few’ other props to support the concept. The zeppelin in the background was a total rush job and it shows! I like the idea of the zeppelin, just not how the design came out. The obvious lesson here is to have a good design in place before you start painting textures and pushing poly’s.

Some images from a children’s book that I’ve been on/off looking to get published

This was intended to be a super quick reintroduction into Unreal project for me. I started out with a rough sketch for what I wanted to build; something cute and not very complex.

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This is a simple Maya screen capture of what I was able to do the first day. I thought that the grass ‘fringe’ around the floating chunk of rock might work to soften that edge. The boulders and roots were just stuffed into the ground to break up the dirt mass.

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A close up of the grass fringe. I was already pretty dubious about this actually working in a game engine.

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Day 2. Got UDK installed and managed to pull over all of my assets. Even had a little time to add a sky sphere and four point lights.

That grass fringe is horrible.

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Day 3  – added a real sky texture and figured out how to use the foliage factory. Also added some lights.

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Day 4 – gotta pull the plug on this and move on with my life. Added spec and normal maps for everything, rebuild the dirt clod,  added lots of small details, rebuilt the windmill building (it was far too sloppy), rebuilt the ground,  and learned how to set up an alpha mask shader to vertex paint a blend between the rock and grass (ground) texture.

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Flowers are nice but the tan weed texture is too low-res.

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I like the dog house. The lighting could really use some work.

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I ruined the tree. Lesson learned; when doing foliage made out of quads stuffed together, don’t make the texture too uniform and make sure that the texture has a much smaller opacity to transparency ratio.