Inspired by Roberto Roch I decided to do some sculpt doodles to get me warmed up in the mornings. It's procrastination maybe, but it is still on related characters for my comic.
This should help me draw the werewolf better when I get to that point in the story.
Blender internal render and vertex painted dynamic topology sculpt in blender.
I did this fairly quickly, and actually as an after thought did threw some fur on it. I am surprised with the result from just throwing particle settings together.
Blender just gets better and better.
Now I am thinking I'd like to start from scratch and make a good base with a body that I could rig and animate later.
Because I've always meant to, I will be putting up more work from previous employers and other personal projects I've worked on in the past.
I felt that I needed to better show that I am capable of animating. Although it is something that I will be endeavouring to improve on over the course of my career. Which means I will eventually make that short film with Lampy and his story, and hopefully improve my skills greatly during that time. Or maybe I'll land a contract soon that will help me put the skills to better use and hone them there. Where ever that ends up being.
For now though, I am posting the animations I created for the Sterling app Puff, the Magic Dragon, while I worked at Padworx Studios.
While I worked at Padworx, my title was Senior Artist, which meant I was a lot of things. But my primary tasks were focused on 3d work, and that included everything that makes 3d happen. Modeling, uv's and texturing, rigging and animating, storyboards, environments and more.
This video shows some of the animated scenes - basic viewport captures - of the work that I did on this app. I did all the rigging, and I was the lead animator on the project. Which meant that I animated a large number of the scenes by myself, while giving direction on others. Later though, when everyone was pulled away to work on other apps, I had to fine tune and finish all the scenes.
I tried to finesse everything as much as possible within the small time frame we had been given.
Mostly, I am happy with the way it all turned out.
The limitations imposed by mobile devices on the number of bones that can be assigned to vertices, and the small number of polygons allowed per scene made it somewhat difficult, but fortunately blender is very forgiving and allowed me to edit meshes without losing skinning data.
The work was entirely done in blender. Even much of the texturing work - which I didn't include here - was done in blender too.
Padworx Studios contracted me to create the intro video for the app they were building for Tourism Australia, which has recently been released. There's Nothing Like Australia App
I was pretty happy with how my work turned out and thought I would share it here.
It was rendered and composited in Blender, using a mix of both the internal renderer and the already amazing Cycles render engine being developed by the foundation.
Obviously, it was a pretty easy thing to rig, but I found that animating paper in 3d can be a tad more trying than flipping pages in the real world.
I'm glad I wasn't required to animate 100 pages. I think I would have developed a neuroses.
I needed to get videos of games that I've worked on posted here, I guess as a way to show off something of what I have done in the past. Though maybe it was out of nostalgia.
After delving through some of the games that I have worked on, I'm feel that I am shaking my head that some of them actually ended up being made at all.
Not so much that they were poorly done, they were pretty current in technology and implementation. More that the content is so questionable, and we knew it at the time. But, what the publisher wants, the publisher gets.
Thank you for the indie revolution!
More recent titles first, down to the oldest.
Sideway New York
Unfortunately, neither I nor anybody else I know - besides the upper creatives - were given credit on this game. I played the demo on the PS3, and didn't see anyone I worked with in the grunt departments of the art/programming teams listed there. I worked on this game back in 2009 when it was being developed for XBLA while I was at Fuel Industries, before large lay offs occurred. It really didn't change all that much from the version I worked on. The environments look to have been reused and that includes all the props we made, but the texturing of the models is completely different. Originally while I was on the project, the look of the 3D environment was more realistic to contrast with the Graffiti. That appears to have been taken away.
Disrespectoids
This was a fairly large project, that involved quite a bit of character modelling with another artist who was my lead at the time. While the characters were simple enough, surprisingly the toony aspects provided quite a few annoyances when translated into 3D. The same models were used for the cinematics as in game, because the ingame stuff was all pre-rendered on sprite sheets.
Microsoft Tinker, Swipeout Battle Racing, Tetsurai
Overall, these were some enjoyable titles to work on. I'm not sure Tetsurai has actually really been made playable yet. Other smaller adver games for web browsers were made while simultaneously working on these projects.
This is one of those smaller adver games. Viking Quest. It was fun, just your basic hack and slash like Gauntlet. I modelled props and the enemy minions.
Land of the Dead: Road to Fiddler's Green
I think that this must be the most popular game I've ever worked on. There appears to be a lot of fan love on youtube for it. I left before the game was officially finished. But It had been a fun experience at the time. Especially the protoype - Day of the Zombie - that lead to this whole movie tie.
Pariah
This didn't perform well at all I don't think. I worked on the cinematics for a few months on this one.
Marine Heavy Gunner Vietnam
There is so much going on in this game that is politically incorrect. And the majority of the team questioned how we ended up working on something like this. But this is what happens when you are mercenaries for hire. There were some good times had while making this game though.
Desert Thunder
This was my first real true game making experience, and again I questioned what I had gotten myself into. The team was great, but the content of the game questionable. We began working on this not that long after the events in New York on September 11th. It appealed to a certain group at the time.
I've been meaning to get work I've done for companies in the past posted here to the blog. Unfortunately, when my work is done on a project, it usually has a few other channels to go through, so it's not ready to be shown when I want to post it, and then I forget about it. Today however was a good reason to post teaser videos of the apps that I worked on while at Padworx Studios.
I was very happy with how my work turned out in the Puff app. There were quite a few limitations on the meshes and skeletons that were later exported into the engine, but I think in the end it worked out well, even with those limitations.
I was a Senior Artist while at Padworx, but mainly that meant that I was the Lead 3D artist and Lead Animator.
All 3D and all animations were done in Blender, which proved to be incredibly versatile and forgiving.
The engine used for this app was Unity, and all 3D and animations were created with Blender. Unity itself is a great engine for artists to work with. It may not be open source but it is affordable.
So I've recently felt that I needed to give the comic some time to simmer.
If you fool with something too long - as I am wont to do - you can seriously mess twist and warp a good idea into a bad one.
When working on personal projects I have this nasty habit of over tweaking ridiculous details that bring nothing to the table to improve the work in front of me. Later, when I am starting to get pressed for time, I rush things and find myself disappointed with the end result.
I do not intend to do the same thing with any of my projects in the future. I will take the time - sure - to do it right. But, from now on, I will write things down, make well laid plans and ensure that the end product is hopefully good to someone else other than me.
So anyways, I have been fooling with Sculpting in Blender again. In the future, I will be getting into a few animated projects that I think will have quite a few models and objects that make use of sculpting. So I plan on using some of my time every once and I while to dedicate to focusing on a few areas in 3D that need practise. Maybe even fool with some film here and there.
Proportionately, these heads aren't very accurate - no reference was used - and they could use some even finer details, which I might add later. Never mind the ears, I almost ignored doing them, focusing instead on the faces. Mainly, these quick sculpts are meant to make me more familiar with all the sculpt tools that are now available in Blender.
Currently I am only skimming the surface of the tools, making use of the default settings mainly, but eventually I hope that I have a formula that works well with me that I can use effectively to create great looking models.
In the last few releases, Blender has really improved in the areas of sculpting. Some great features have been added in to the program, and some others just down the pipeline. With Google Summer of Code soon to start it will be interesting to see what else gets added to an already fantastic program.
I'm in the process of once again switching directions.
The comic is on hold. But not indefinitely. As I've gotten again familiar with the science of rigging a character and familiarizing myself with Blender's animation tools I've become more interested in turning the comic into an animated work.
That being said I still want to work on it in comic form. It's something that I just NEED to do.
The story needs to be improved anyways.
So for now, it's all about Lampy and his encounter with this big dumb schmuck.
This is a fairly quick background painting, for my toony short. The buildings are almost placeholder because I may want more details as I zoom in.
I'm trying to figure out what process I'll be going through in order to complete my short. I am also trying to figure out how I will be working on things in the future. It looks as though a good mix of 3d and 2d is a great way to work on things when you work alone.
