All Outta Steam

It's the end of another year and as I look over my blog I find I never told the world about some of the things I'm willing to talk about. So here's to that:

I had continued development of Steam VR controller mods with the next Megaman buster:

The X-Buster

    X - Buster
    by jason.n.hutchins
    on Sketchfab

Since that one was basically just a re-skin I really wanted to try my hand at a more advanced model:

The TruForce Buster

    TruForce Buster
    by jason.n.hutchins
    on Sketchfab

Lastly I made small progress on a medium model:

Low Tech Medium Plane

This year has been crazy. I'm still doing the damn thing and holding the seams together by a thread, I only hope I've made all the right decisions along the way and that I can continue to make the right decisions to keep moving forward and follow the dream. After all, "Everybody gotta have a dream." :)

How is it March Already?

February kept me busy, and March is turning out the same way, so this is going to be my update for those two months. :)
I had a pretty sweet interview with LSI in Jacksonville, though we both went our separate ways due to conflicting art styles. Other than that I've been clocking in mega hours for AlliedBarton to try to pay the student loans and keep the other bills at bay for daily living.
I started working on the Home For Infinite Losers [HFIL or Hell] for the group that is working on a Dragon Ball Z game, I'm not really a fan of the series but I figured it would help me stay motivated if I had people pushing me in an art direction ... when I'd simply rather be sleeping before I go back to work. :p
I decided the most interesting part of HFIL was the blood fountain scene, these are the some of the pieces I put together for the environment and an overall shot:

There are these rock tower things all through HFIL in the animation.

A couple of basic park furniture pieces.

I sculpted up the side cliff wall in zbrush, then decimated it.

This is the hi-poly mesh, we'll see how the detail bakes onto the low.

A side view of the environment [the camera height makes it all look small]

I'll upload more next month, I hopefully want to get started on textures this coming week but that'll all depend on how my move to the new apartment goes and whether or not I have jury duty. Till next time!

Like Fish in a Barrel

After 250 something applications, the only company to actually want me was Allied Barton. Good thing I was able to refile for my D-License without having to take the whole class all over again. So while the job thing was getting started up I was able to find time for a weekend project. Yes, just one, but I'm happy to be able to do this stuff at all.

I had been playing a little bit of a beta test on the PS3, and that's where I got the idea for the weekend project. To make a sort of simple object over the course of several hours just to keep it plausible to work on what I love in the free time I have. The object was a small barrel of energy, so I took a few screen shots and began playing in Maya. All things considered I spent about 12 hours on this piece with all the distractions of the internet and my cell phone at home. Without those distractions I don't know how much time I would have spent on it. Here's how it turned out, and good luck guessing what game inspired me to build this.

I actually had a lot of fun with this barrel, and ended up adding it to my "top secret" project which I'll show details on if I get time to work on it. It's a rather large project so I doubt I'll be able to get very far with it. One thing at a time though right?

Advanced Game Characters [month 15]

That's right, this is the second post for AGC ... which means I failed it the last time I took it. Yay....

Project 1: a fan art piece ... I decided to go with Qbert.


Step 1: block out
Step 2: clean up the geometry
Step 3: add hair cards, then mirror the whole thing over and see if it works.
Step 4: bake the ambient occlusion, then paint the diffuse
This is what my diffuse looked like for this model, once again we did the texture at 256x512

Project 2: this month's theme was medieval fantasy.. designed around the ability to stay at an inn.

Once again we can use only zbrush, so I started with zspheres to create a skeleton type frameThen I moved on to blocking out the basic frame of the black smith.

Clean up the block out.
Turn it into a mesh for sculpting.Sculpt out a basic figure with large and medium details.

and apparently I added more details.Then you begin retopology ...

and it becomes messy ...
and messier ...
... but then I brought it into maya and the critiques I received were that he had a disproportionate body. So I resized his new lower topology and corrected any of the retopology mistakes I had made.
Once I re-sized everything, this is what I ended up with.I brought it back into zbrush and began to smooth and sculpt once again.

I re-sculpting the new body back out with details
Then I changed the face
With proper ambient occlusion, normal mapping, diffuse mapping and specular map, it turned into this.
A shot of the diffuse map.
My normal map.
Lastly, my specular map