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." :)

A Quick Update on Slow Progress

I've spent the last few weekends mixing together more ancient aircraft to make combat vehicles for my teams, this time the red team will have pieced together the main body and wings of a WW1 German AEG G4, and the jet engines of a WW2 German Horten Ho 229. Looking back I tend to use a lot of older German designs to influence my own and I think it's just because they were really good at building interesting shapes and really pushing the design limits to get new properties in their planes.
With all that said, here's a silhouette test I threw together:

I so far have UV'ed the checkers texture onto the plane and then duplicated the body pieces over, but I think I'm ready to start rocking a rusty red paint job on there for the low tech's to head into battle.

Stay tuned and I'll have that up before too long.

High Tech Medium Plane

You may have noticed I skipped a bit of time again, this time my excuse is that I was building a sculpey maquette. I may or may not show that on this blog at some point, so for now just be happy with a new update from the game project!

I managed to build the High Tech team's medium rocket:

There's the traditional model/texture view you've grown accustomed to from my blog, but here is a viewer from Sketchfab for the 3D render view.

    High Tech Medium Plane
    by jason.n.hutchins
    on Sketchfab

I realized, before I uploaded this model to Sketchfab, I hadn't ever uploaded the previous vehicles for anyone to view in 3D on Sketchfab. So I took care of that as well as you can see below:

    High Tech Light Plane
    by jason.n.hutchins
    on Sketchfab

    Low Tech Light Plane
    by jason.n.hutchins
    on Sketchfab

Thanks for viewing, and as always stay tuned for more updates!

Brain Power

I ended up working this one a couple times, like I mentioned earlier, but I think I finally found the form I wanted. This rocket is half the height of the other rockets, but 10 times as smart .. with brain power of course. That's how it works right? Adding a brain to anything will make it smarter?

    Smart Rocket
    by jason.n.hutchins
    on Sketchfab

Hopefully the new Sketchfab 3d previewer will work out for this blog, but just in case I'm still going to be uploading the old 2d shots of the items.

This should be the last of the rocket weapons, now back to the vehicles! I have a bunch of sketches from the previous years I wasn't able to spend a lot of time on this so I'll still be working through those to see what I can make work. The next items should be the medium fighters for both low and high tech teams.

Stay tuned!

edit [12apr2015]: I started back up on the vehicles, this time on the medium high tech and have included a silhouette test of the block-out below.

Heavy Bandwidth Page

It might take several moments before the seven render windows fully load in your browser.

I've been working on a smart rocket and have run into the part where the 2D sketches didn't really work in 3D so I'm still experimenting with what shape and design I want for this weapon. In the meantime, for an update, I found this really neat site to share my work in 3D as it's meant to be viewed .. and not as a render on a 2D panel. So here are my current rocket models as viewable from the sketchfab.com site. Also I apologize for the page being so heavy due to all the models being on one page at the same time.  In other news: Unity 5 and Unreal Engine 4 just released as free downloads with what I'm sure is a lot of fine print when you decide to charge for your games, I decided to go with the marketing strategy for Unity since it's more of a straightforward pricing package and not a percentage based on what month it is, how much I sold, and when .. which is how the Unreal Engine has been packaged.

Lava Rocket by jason.n.hutchins on Sketchfab

Ice Rocket by jason.n.hutchins on Sketchfab

Power Rocket by jason.n.hutchins on Sketchfab

Remote Rocket by jason.n.hutchins on Sketchfab

Chainsaw Rocket by jason.n.hutchins on Sketchfab

Tesla Rocket by jason.n.hutchins on Sketchfab

Ricochet Rocket by jason.n.hutchins on Sketchfab

Ricochet Rocket

This one I did a few extra sketches on so the build went rather quickly, the idea is that the rocket will hit the enemy and have a small explosion which will release the two naval mines attached to it to bounce out and explode with whatever it hits. So I guess this weapon would be best used for attacking a stationary target like a base or something.

I added a chalk-like sketch on the side of the mines as decoration, I've seen a lot of people do that in the military. They'll draw on the bombs intended for their enemies with their enemies names on it. So this is a little nod to that environment.

The next rocket is supposed to be the final one for this game, and it should be smarter than the rest of them. Then after that one I can get back to creating the rest of the vehicles to flesh out the "character classes".

Thanks for looking and stay tuned!

Tesla Rocket

It's a new year, but I'm still working on the same game. For this build I wanted to make a weapon that would electrify the vehicles it impacted, after digging around for a while I decided the coolest way to do that would be a plasma ball that would electrically explode when it hits its targets. So I present the Tesla Rocket:

I really like the silhouette of the rocket and the arched metal around the glass dome, but wasn't too happy with the way the plasma ball cards came out. I guess it'll do though. This should leave two more weapons to build before I can continue to work on vehicles and environments again.

Thanks for looking at my work, and stay tuned for more updates. :)

Edit:
Here's the block-out sneak peek for the next rocket:

It's sitting at just over 800 triangles which isn't too bad considering all of the small details on this one, we'll see how it turns out once I start in on the uv's and texture.

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!

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.

The Last of 2013

This is really just a post to get a final one out before the end of the year, I started working on a nuke bomb-rocket thing while waiting for a critique from my night "job", and am a little over half through with the texture - nothing good enough to post though. So for now I present you with a tease:

Who wouldn't want a nuclear bomb .. ah .. rocket? I'll update when I finish the texture, see you then!

Lava Lamp

I've been working on a fire type of rocket, and based on my concepts the lava lamp style rocket was the most popular - so that's what I rolled with.

The concept I had drawn, had small tubes filled with lava or something glowy, so the lava lamp wasn't too far fetched from that idea. It was much more expensive, but much more interesting.

Next item will be a slow moving power-type rocket!

Breaking the Ice

I realized just today that I hadn't posted this yet, I had "finished" it this past week after several critiques and wanted to show it off. So here it is: the ice rocket! Just in case you didn't know what you were firing I added a label, though that's really just for show in a menu or something. I doubt it will be visible within game-play.

This entry will make five items now that are modeled and textured with at least a diffuse[not counting the shield, I want to go back over that again].

[click the links below to view the related post]
low tech: turret
low tech: light plane  [scroll to the bottom]

high tech: turret
high tech: light plane

I just received a list of work for my internship, so I'll be heading back into the depths of that for a while. Hopefully I'll soon be able to show some of what we've been doing at L7, I hate that my blog has empty spots in it during the months I'm on the project.
At any rate, stay tuned and I'll keep you posted as to what I'm up to!

Do You ... Rocketpunk?

This month was filled with concepting and building the red team's rocket turret, to clarify I don't have a lot of time outside of my day job, but what I do spend is my afternoons after work. This is what I came up with:

I started with my sketch that I had done while at my day job, and then I would come home and block it out in maya and began to play with texture patterns that might look good for that shape and theme.

The red team is going to be the "low tech" team, so I wanted this to feel like re-purposed technology muscled together for something new. In this case: the rocket turret! So the cog will turn as powered by the boxes on either side of it, when it stops with a rocket facing upwards in the holster the rocket will fire to defend the base. So the metal plates are old and rusty, and have all been riveted together simply to .. work.

Just last night, while looking up reference, I noticed the genre my game objects seem to be finding themselves is rocketpunk. Who knew? Moving forward I'll be taking advantage of this.

Next I'll start on the rockets I've been concepting, stay tuned and I'll keep you posted!

Self Defense

Finally was able to make a large turn-in for my internship, and though I've been working extra hours at my day job I've managed to find time to return to my "weekend project". Here's my current status of the texture on the previously created geometry and uv's.

In keeping with the blue team's theme of sleek and modern/futuristic tech, this rocket turret can quickly fire rockets to defend the blue team's bases from red team's attacks. There's a small power cable in the back not captured in this render. I feel that the poly count isn't too bad for a rounded object, and the lower cost of the blue team's vehicles might make up for the higher cost of their equipment.
Next I'll start on the low tech turret.


Stay tuned and I'll keep you posted!

Surviving the Apocolypse ...

It's been a busy month of apartment hunting and building stuff in maya, but not so much for my internship. A little problem came up where I was informed I had been working in the wrong scene this whole time ... I guess that was something that should have come up when I asked what file I should be working in and I was told to use that one. Oops? So while waiting to be told what to do about all of that, I worked on a little something for the game ... but before I could complete it I was started back up on the movie project. So here's what I have so far:

It might not make much sense without seeing it in context to what it is or how big it is .. or what it's made of ... you'll see more of it when I get another pause from the film project. :)

No new public news from the film project, but it's always exciting to see things coming together and coming to life piece by piece .. or frame by frame ... and I can only hope some of the behind the scenes stuff will eventually see the light of day.

Stay tuned and I'll keep you posted!

HFIL - Texture Time 3

This month came and went fast, but I managed to find time to really look at some textures as well as add some variety textures for blend mapping in the environment once it makes it to the game engine .. though as I don't have the game engine I don't really know how all of this will look until the group I'm with can get me started in the engine.

First though, let me show you what I did while waiting for critiques. This is a "little" side project I have been working on in my free time. I made one of the vehicles already as posted a few months ago, so this is vehicle two. Don't have official names or anything yet, but I like the look of it.

Here's a quick sample of the new grass and a little area of fallen rocks/blood water for the HFIL environment.

I wasn't happy with the grass, so I looked around and found a new technique .. let's render some grass cards! I simply made some blades of grass as shown below.

 Then I duplicated the cards out across a plane and rendered it at high quality and even lighting, took that to photoshop to make it repeatable and ended up with this:

 Once I had the cards in place, I could replace the grass blades texture and simply re-render and get an entirely different section of grass.

 Then I wanted to break up the dirt texture with some pebble .. rock .. things, so I found a photo of some nice pebbles and made it repeatable. Then I selected by color all the pebbles and masked them out, keeping the dirt stuff in between them. Then I made my own painted rocky pebble texture and that's what you see here:

Moving along with rocks, I wanted to try my hand at another rock texture for the large cliff surface. I'm not happy with how different the colors turned out from the other rock texture, but I think the rough heavy grooves will go good with the other texture.

Still working with rocks, but now back to the grassy areas, I wanted to add some rocks kind of poking out of the grass. So I found a nice photo of some rocks doing exactly that, and used their shapes and then filled it in with my own rocks. The flat color you see is just to help get rid of the white line in the transparency.

In other news, my one year anniversary for graduating from Full Sail University was the 1st of July ... it's been a year and 311 applications and still I can't get anyone to pay any attention to me long enough to hire me. The pay off never came, and now I'm stuck footing the bill on a paycheck that isn't adequate to pay it. Fun times ....
Stay tuned and I'll consider not giving up completely.

The Year of the Dragon

Working at AlliedBarton is okay, though it leaves a lot to be desired as far as pursuing my chosen career path. Pretty much everyone I interact with doesn't even know how to spell it, but I have a feeling it'll be like that until I can get work at a game studio.
So here's this month's projects! I received another art test from Gameloft, this time in Canada, I got some work done on my first Fender Bender style vehicle, and I did a 2D background image for a friend working on a side scrolling game.

I was surprised when Gameloft in Canada contacted me with the same art test as their sister studio in New Orleans. But I gave it a shot anyways, and learned a whole bunch more stuff about 3ds Max. I used the same assets I'd already created, only tweaking them to fit more along the lines of mobile gaming. Then I even added a few simple bits here and there to help the scene close up a bit better. I never did manage to find time to show convincing rain like I am able to do in UDK, and I'm guessing that's one of the bigger things they take points off for. But it's all good, I didn't really want to move to Canada anyways. :)
Here's the render shot and video I submitted:

This is what 3300 triangles will buy you.

I tried to keep it around the same poly count and texture limits as our game, and to just have fun with it. I've labeled this one as the low-tech light plane, hopefully I'll get together a high-tech light plane before the end of February.

I was able to keep it down to the poly count limit we had for Fender Bender.

 
Since the game is still in concept phasing a lot could change, but I was really happy with the way the sky/background turned out.

I liked the way the heavy atmosphere looks, but it's still just a concept.

Stay tuned, and I'll keep working.