Video Game Artist

Some amazing maquettes of the Siren’s player characters done by master sculptor Julie Guthrie. These photos don’t do the sculpts justice; the detail and proportions are simply amazing.

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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.

Just got back to working on some environment stuff in the last two days. Got a ways to go before I finish the new scene but wanted to show some of what I’ve got so far.

Played with the lighting here and added some of the props to see how well they would take the scene lighting.

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Doing some experiments with overlay textures. The red roots and the hole in the wall are both flat quads sitting flush to the wall. The hole really started working well once I hooked up the parallax offset node.

And here is the wall diffuse texture. I gotta dial down that spec map.

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A close up of one of the wall pieces. Again, spec map needs work.

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A few of the  props I constructed today.

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These two images show another overlay with some geo thrown in to give it more presence.

And here is the prop in the scene. I’m still trying to figure out how to get the overlay to work over any surface with any lighting.

Been a busy beaver lately…so many projects, so little time. Having the studio shut down has given me some valuable time to brush up on my skills and try out some things that I’ve wanted to do. This Post is what I’ve been up to in the last two weeks:

These images show some modeling and texture tests I was doing in Unreal. I got a little frustrated when I realized that my video card was creating super blotchy Lightmaps due to video card bugs in dealing with DXT1 compression. I can hide the artifacts by playing with the gamma curves on my monitor but that doesn’t teach me anything! I still need to figure out how to get the most out of my spec and normal maps, they really don’t show that well with the lighting here.

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This was a super quick sketch (30 min.) for something I’d like to build next in Unreal. I put those lamp posts in to help me with scale but I’m not too happy with how they cut across the center of the image. And the fact that there should be another one in the foreground.

This next image was another quick sketch that was mostly a reaction to me not liking the direction that the first one was going. I’m also trying to learn how to use custom brushes more although I think maybe the ‘spines’ on the lower right are a little too much.

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Mudbox is so easy to use that I’ve found myself reluctant to force myself into getting comfortable with ZBrush’s crazy interface. Time to get over that.

These next three images are of a head that I quickly sculpted in ZBrush starting from a PolySphere. The coloration on the nose is still a bit broken; I wanted to achieve a necrotic look but ended up making the nose look out of place. Oh well, I learned what I wanted from this and it’s not inspired enough to warrant spending more time on.

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.

Here is a quick animation I did for AndNow way back in 1990!

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Underground Bumper

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Just a few examples of textures I’ve created.

Your basic everyday line drawing is something that I’ve always enjoyed.

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Here’s a couple of story board style drawing I did for a WWII shooter design doc.