Pass

Hooray, 3rd Class honours. (i think i barely passed) got 40 marks for each module, thought i was gonna have to retake the first semester as it was really rubbish, but i guess my final project worked out after all. : )

Stuff i've being doin recently

In between trying to find a job (any job oh god i need money) and waiting for my rent to run out i have been doing this stuff. Here's a few W.I.P shots from a little project I'm doing, i decided to build up on some of my previous sketches and design a few characters along with a vehicle that i could put together in a max scene to go in a my portfolio maybe.

Final sketch is a little off, but i was able to visualize the characters better if i sketched em out first, i decided to expand on the tank crew idea and make some cool 3d models and all that.

I don't usually like to post photoshop work until its completed but who cares seriously i just wanted to show of my cool neck scarf thingy. (even though its going to be obscured by a bunch of army man generic gear) also i suck at painting faces and the colours are probably all wrong.


I made a face, I'm going for a low poly approach, originally i was gonna try PSP spec and i still might be able to if i can get rid of enough triangles in the face and keep the rest of the body low poly too. currently its about a 1000 triangles which is way off.

Oh and good luck to everyone in game art 06 with they're future endeavors.

Awesome Artwork thats not mine

People being painted on so they blend in with backgrounds

Check it out, the human interaction ones are my favourites.

Sketchbook stuff

Thought i'd post some of my sketches (taken with camera), they are in no particular order.

more screenshots

preview picture

I dunno if anyone reads my blog but im gonna show some progress anyway, i like crit but i dont mind if people dont have an opinion or whatever.

still need to do some minor stuff but it will be presentable by monday, or tuesday or whatever day we have to show these.
There was lots of stuff i wanted to try but didnt get to, i've been rushing just to finish the assets and terrain, the map is still using like 2 hl2 textures and an overlay (concrete, road, and a drain decal.), ill try to get round to replacing them but i still need to Uv/texture some models.
I managed to get the 3d sky working but im not sure how to make the textures look any better.

some stuff

quick post

thought i'd post a model page of that wooden keep, also texture page.

W.I.P

Got lots left to do!, need more assets and textures but im gonna get the shape down first.


also i am working on another map for the source engine (pvk2mod), heres a small preview picture of it, ill explain the map and post the concepts and stuff when i have more done.

The keep is one model and the turret bits break off when throwing axes are chucked at it, this is just a small section of the map, the sea will reach the edge of the skyline in the final version, its supposed to have objectives and stuff to complete but im gooing to worry about that after i finish the layout and assets.

playing with blendtextures

Hooray it works, i can blend between these three textures on a displacement brush. Next i am going to have the texture assign small models that populate them automatically, you can also set different types of models to the middle of the blend were both textures are present. Hopefully it will render alpha grass on the grass part, small rocks in the middle and nothing were the mud is.

In engine model.

took me a while to sort the normal map out, it was displaying all wrong because i didnt import the texture correctly,

this is in engine, the windows are showing fully transparent when i defined them to be semi transparent im not sure why.

just had a quick break at home, now back to work

i have a version in the engine and everything i just need to sort out collision models they used to work but now they are all fiddly and annoying and you get verts really far away from the base model in the collision mesh for no reason.
When i was home i took even more pictures of the area and i have a good idea where everything is, im going to plonk this in hammer so i get an immediate sense of scale then build the terrain around it, i dont expect the terrain building to take very long, its just making decent blend textures that have working detail shapes rendered on top wich is a bit more tricky. im hoping to use a new feature in source that lets the auto generated alpha grass stuff sway in the wind and move when you walk through it.

towarr

hallway samurai

yay

hdr stuffs work now :D, ill probly double the resolution when im done with the modelling as its a bit blurry, i used 512px for each side cus thats what valve use for most skyboxes.

Skyboxing

Finally sorted out the 2d skybox, i couldn't get the nice hdr stuffs working because the program that converts .pfm files into valves texture format is broken and i just get the same error message,

Still needs to be edited in some places but its much better than my earlier try where the horizon was too low and everything looked wierd.

This is how it looks in game, wich isn't saying much because there isnt anything in the level to compare it against, basically anything that looks pretty close to the player in the skybox will be either parts of the level boundry or as a 3d skybox, your only going to see the really distant objects, apart from one spot shown in this screenshot where you can see much more of the background where the hill gets much steeper.

This is the panoramic i took and blended together, (cept much smaller) no tripod and bad photography made this a bit of a chore.

Robodog, Walk

is that it.

After working on this for 2 days i managed to get about this far into the environment project, I thought i could get a bit more progress done but the wooden decking took longer to UV map/texture than i thought. Oh well lets see what happens tomorrow :L

Goddam trials.

Presentations on friday! im not looking forward to it as my environment project is barely started. (had a bunch of issues, notice my first peice of work was posted in november eugh,) Anyway i got just over 2 days to try and get something presentable for it, i took reference photos over christmas of my garden. I was gonna do the scrapyard one but the turkish/polish people wouldn't let me take pictures that week (i dunno why, maybe they dont want me modelling their precious smashed up punto's.) The project is pretty easy, i can probably get some sort of decent assets in the time i have left, i don't know about decent lighting and stuff because the max viewport isn't the best platform for environments. If only "shaderfx" didnt cost like 250 dollars and i'd be sound.
Also my mudbox trial expired and i can't find a keygen/crack for it, we probably should be provided with this sort of stuff, ill ask about it when i i'm at uni but i won't bank on getting a copy.
ALSO my crazybump trial expired, i didnt even know it was a trial i thought it was free! but no it costs $300 for a pro copy! i can't even afford the student version wich is still $70, its a shame that i can't use it anymore i tried cracking it but that didn't work, ive been using xnormal instead so not all is lost.