Raining Doom Upon Our Doomed Enemies!

It's been a while, but with me spending my work days in Presagis Creator I hardly feel like working in low poly 3d in Maya when I come home. So between working on the car, house chores, and simply trying to relax, I've been sneaking a few hours here and there on sunday mornings having fun with my rocket punk themed game I've been dreaming about for some time.

Since the point of a new post is to show new work, I present to you Remote Rocket .. or RC Rocket .. still not sure.

The point of the rocket is to be much larger than the others and to only be able to carry one at a time, once fired the players camera will ideally follow the rocket as the player will be able to control the rocket to remotely rain down some doom upon his doomed enemies. Once fired the wings and extra thruster will extend from the main housing allowing for extra control and distance while still keeping a large area of the main housing for explosives. The metal loops on the top are where the rocket would be held under the vehicle just before it was launched .. I want this item to be so big other players can see it and try to attack the player before it can be launched.

The next weapon will be a little more electrically themed, the concepts are pretty much nailed down I just have to start blocking it out and seeing how it turns out in the 3d space. But I'm sure it'll be next year before I post that one.

[edit] - I found some time to start blocking out the concept based on my drawings and some random google searches. The body will be similar to the fire/lava rocket in that it's mostly glass, but this one will have a gold/brass colored metal braces along the sides to add some support and rocket punk style. The hardest part I think will be getting the look of the plasma ball in the middle, but that's how you learn right? :)

As always: thanks for looking in on me, and do stay tuned!

What's In the Box?

The next item for the internship, and thus with permission my blog, is this jewelry box. This item was modeled by one of the other artists, while the uv's and textures were my own creation with a touch of slight retopology.

The theme for this object is an heirloom type of jewelry box that was passed down a few generations, and that may have survived the elements for more than a few years before being recovered. I treated the lid as the focal point of this object, though I doubt in the actual video anyone will ever see it I'm still very proud of the way it turned out.

I used six different wood textures to get the look I wanted in the diffuse texture, while the metal is only two with a lot of help from 3 other textures in the specular channel. The design on the lid was partially designed with the character's name in mind as well as something simple and elegant. The text is Lucida Calligraphy font faded out with grunge brushes to look like faded paint. The same fade was used on the wavy lines on the sides of the box with the faded red coloring to add a bit of breakup without being too distracting from the lid.

Possibly more to come, stay tuned!


[Edited 10sep2014 to show the textures and wireframe]

This Little Piggy ....

Normally for my internship I can't post what I've been working on because it would tell too much of the story, and we're just not ready to talk about that yet. This month, however, I was able to finish up this little guy and as he doesn't really have much to do with anything I was told I could post him online. So here he is: the vampire piggy ... bank!

He was a bit of a team effort: one of the other artists modeled the base mesh, I took it and ran with it from there. I modified the shape of the mesh, created the legs, changed out the ears, uv'ed and then textured him, I also received a lot of critiques for cuteness/theme from the other artists on the team.

I've only posted his diffuse texture, but he also has a slight specular map. As it's animation the rest will be handled in render. I just figured he was too cute to keep quiet and is a big change from a lot of the other stuff I've been posting.

I was originally going for a cutesy plush pig that might feel like he might actually try to suck your blood at any moment, but the rest of the team felt like it looked like a ceramic pig that was painted to look like a plush pig. Either one is fine, it's just interesting to see how different your work is interpreted at times. :)

Thanks for watching!

[edited 10sep2014 to show the textures and wireframe]

Chainsaw Rocket!

This past month has been another light month on my internship, I've touched up a few things and did file maintenance on the server, so I took full advantage of my nights as well as the extra hours I've had to work at my day job filling in for my personnel taking vacation time off during nights and weekends and I'm stuck covering it. I present to you my version of the chainsaw rocket:

I seem to have a love affair with using Stihl branded tools for reference images, as I also used them for reference during the Fender Bender game "healing item" pickup [duct tape and wrench], so I decided this time to keep the color scheme used on their chainsaws so that it didn't look too extremely unrealistic. I also decided to change the chainsaw teeth to something a little more cartoony/unrealistic to match the overall theme of the game. I decided to leave out the original concept art I had sketched out because of the overall quality of it was much lower than my normal sketches. If anything comes up I'll include it separately, but for now I'd rather simply leave it off the blog page.

Thanks for staying tuned and I'll update you when I finish the next piece!

When the Fat Man Sings

I had a bit of extra time due to my work schedule and filling in for people, and I realized I had never updated my finished power rocket. So here it is:

I modeled and textured the Mark 3 "Fat Man" bomb after photos I'd found online, and then exaggerated it to fit in with the theme of the rocket booster on the bottom. This "heavy" rocket will be the slow non-maneuverable, but extremely power one hit wonder of any pilot's arsenal.

Here's a preview of what I'm currently working on:

I've turned in a large chunk of textures/uv'ed models for my internship, so I'm awaiting further review before moving on to the next area .. and got busy with something else that doesn't make any sense.

New Year: New Modeling Programs

Several months ago I was contacted by a friend to help him work on a game project, and much like the last time I helped out with a friend's game project: nothing happened. Since this was more of an art test instead of an object to be used in the game I'm posting it to show that I'm learning new modeling programs!

So here we have a soda can, yep a soda can. It's meant to be in a game that's a bit odd/scary so I thought that a disgusting and odd flavor was in order. Blender was a bit of a pain in the butt to learn, and now that Maya has a pro-lite version out for $800 I'm thinking about buying it.

For this next one I wanted to play with modeling and uv'ing in 3ds Max, as I'd never done it before. I thought it would be cool since about 90% of the simulation/game industry wants people with 3ds max experience ... which brings to question why it's not taught as a part of the Full Sail Game Art program. I learned a lot about modeling with cubes, cylinders, and toroids, as well as overall modeling/uv'ing tools. It was much simpler to work in max than it was in blender - but they were both extremely different from maya.


This one is an old school fire extinguisher, I know it's not textured but I only wanted to learn 3ds max and not spend more time in photoshop.

I understand none of these models are exactly amazing or even very pretty, but this is where I'm starting in learning these programs and hopefully I'll get better/faster as I progress. :)