Darkstalkers Embrace the Dark

The concept sketch and subsequent costume variations of my entry for the Darkstalkers character design competition. Beauty shot comes tomorrow with some gesture sketchs for his moves and animations, hopefully a 3d model later in the week

I call him Captain Blacklock, he is a surly and scurvy spectral sealubber!

A few new models for you

So the assignment for this was to create a zombie fighting weapon created out of multiple household objects. I duct taped a can of chili onto the rear of a mag-lite, jammed some knives, screws and a scredriver through it and a spork up through the top :D

With a 512x512 texture budget and a restrictive 500 tris (I clocked in at 499) I think this came out very well

The teacher gave me some feedback. My normal map clearly wasn't working, and my spec maps didn't work very well at all. He also felt the spork wasn't obviously a spork (I disagree, but he's the boss).

Took off the spork, and replaced it with zombie kill count tally marks, fixed the spec, added some minor label wear details to the diffuse, and applied the normal. The results are much better, overall.

A hatchet! I think this came out well overall, with the exception of the leather straps at the handles. I am going to redo those and resubmit this, because they look really mediocre, but I figured this is still worth sharing.

I think the normal map on the blade came out well.

A bit of new work

If anybody knows the HTML to embed a vimeo or youtube video on blogger, please let me know. I'd like to share an animatic I worked on, and would rather not force people to follow outgoing links.

Regardless, here is the vimeo link: https://vimeo.com/52571493

Just a few models, there. Nothing fancy.

Additional Game Modeling

I modeled out my desk! It's a really simple desk with simple geometry. I did not connect the bars at the bottom because it would be out of the way of the player camera, really, and doesn't really do a whole lot while wasting tris.

A Mortal Kombat arcade cabinet. Higher tris than everything else in the scene, clocks in at maybe 1,200 with most of those being in the buttons and joysticks. I could trim it down if I had an art director that told me to, but as of right now this meets the criteria and doesn't push the tris too hard so I let it slide.

 

A lot of the art around the joysticks I did, trying to keep in the spirits of the original arcade cabinet but I didn't have to art, so I did my best and it came out pretty good if I do say so myself.

A room divider modeled after the bottom left ones, sort of merging the two. It's a very simple model, but I wanted this to speak with the textures and I think those came out very nice.

The diffuse map for that pac man chair has been revised, and now you can see some wear. Fixed the Spec map as well so we get some more believable reflections, but I still need to fix the absolutely insane bump map.

How much did you miss me?

So opening up here, this is really unrelated to anything I've been doing lately but I had a blast doing it, so I wanted to share. It's a riff on the original Godzilla movie poster, it's maybe two or three hours of work, including the bad Japanese translations.

Below are some sample sheets of some work I've been doing.

This Pac-Man chair was WAY too dark and has no wear on it. I've revised it and will upload new renders soon.

That is the blockout of the room I'm working on using these props. Some of these need to be a bit taller, mainly the coffee table and arcade cabinets.

Zbrush head

Here is the progress on my head sculpt. The shoulders are small because they won't be visible, they will be entirely hidden under the shirt geometry.
This is not yet at a finished state- I still have to do fine detailing and rework the ears and eyelids.
I'm pleased with the progress so far, though

Quick ZTool Update

An update to the ZTool for the boots seen in my previous model. The old ones looked like ugly rounded rain boots, and desperately needed to be fixed.
They look significantly better at this point. The laces will be an additional piece of geometry, since we don't have a poly limit for these.

Updated Works/ W.I.P

My sincerest apologies if anything here looks weird. Apparently they've changed blogger, and I don't understand or like the new layout. It's really... Blah. Reminds me of the new Xbox dashboard- a bunch of squares...

Revised the port town. Added some clouds for atmosphere, some greater contrast in the warm/cool colors.

Revised my horror foyer, mostly just improvements to texture quality (as in, there is now textures)

The front and back of a model I am currently working on. Started in Maya, then took it into ZBrush for some subdivision modeling. So far I'm happy with the results. I need to go back and revise the shirt a bit, and the shoes aren't quite finished. Head will be done by next week.

In case anybody reads this, I'm not sure why the models don't overlap when I append them into sub tools? The pivot point on all the pieces was at the origin in Maya. Bizarre.

The actual labels on this are not mine, I got them from google. This was my first experiment at lighting. Models were provided by teacher, paint labels by google. Like I said, all about the lighting for this one (though I did paint the stains and create the UVs and so forth)

Model Sheet/Fantasy Environment

A fantasy environment. My concept is that this dragon was slain in some sort of a war, and these airship batallions created sort of a port town in it's carcass. i used some photo texture for the sky and all the mountains, balanced the color a few times to try and increase the focal point by the landing strip.
A model sheet for my gun (which I think I had posted earlier?), containing the top, bottom, front, back and side views. I'm eager to model this! Hopefully I can find the time soon, school is intense!

Texture Work and Animation Principles

This is an example of my texturing skill. this is a VERY low poly game model, It's around 2000 tris. It has a specular map, a normal bump map and a standard diffuse map. Maybe the scratches on the side are a bit intense, but they help show off the specularity so I personally think they work. My instructor thought they were too intense, and I could see his point of view. Also notice that the dirty area at the base has much less specularity than other parts of the model.

The model has some edgest that could use some champfering, but it serves it's purpose well enough.



This is an animatic storyboard. Character model sheets, script and scratch track were provided for me by the instructor (I had nothing to do with any of them).



And here is a short animation of Dad lifting a stone.

Additional design works

Ok, so I wasn't actually going to upload this, as it's not a game art focused piece. What it IS, however, is an example of my ability to create characters to fit within the art style and design ethos that is not my own. As such, here is a self portrait in the style of Scooby-Doo (with the cast for comparison). I added some noise to achieve a grainy effect on myself.

A bit of illumination on the design process. At bottom we have three guns made from composited images appropriated from the internet. Those guns were each turned into brushes which were used to create the simple silhouettes at top.

After that, I sketched over some elements within that silhouette that stuck out to me, carved out some interesting edges.

After that, I took away elements that weren't working and refined ones that needed it. I applied value and texture, as well as some detail.

I just wanted to throw this one out there, but this is my first decent 3d model I made. I have provided a video turnaround of the model as a wireframe, grayscale and with texture maps applied. SINCE then I have learned better texturing and modeling techniques, bump mapping and lighting, but I still feel this is worth sharing. I will share a model that is a better example of texturing than modeling at a later date.

Industry Focused Work

Sorry for the long delay in updates. I'm now focusing my art on industry related designs and skills.
A concept painting of a creepy mansion foyer. Will see photo texture in a future revision, as well as some color (maybe)

A creature design. This was made using a random brush (made from a nudibranch photo) in random patterns, pulling a design out of the detail within the brush strokes. The result, to me, formed this. It is, conceptually, a mixture of sort of a nautilus, a crab and maybe some sort of parasite.

A loose concept with little preparation and research time. Research, sketch and value was maybe about three hours. I need to get faster at this! It's a time traveling goblin assassin. I tried to illustrate this through the Roman pauldron, native American chest guard, commando pants, kusarigama and technological gauntlet. It could have been better, but I'm not mad at it.

A character concept sketch with an alternate costume. Her design is sort of a tribute (in the left, alternate costume), to Jackie Chan in First Strike. The concept for me is that she's a badass ex-con mechanic fist fighter. I would like to develop the character further as I create more fighting game characters.

A loose concept sketch of a bipedal robot. It's maybe a bit too similar to Metal Gear Ray, and is obviously unfinished. May revisit and redesign it at a later date.

I'll try and update this more regularly with industry focused material. If you would like to see any NON game art and design related material, please visit http://fishbowlart.blogspot.com where I will post sketches, designs and thoughts. Future posts on this blog will likely be more concise than this one.