Improvement Month

Well, so much for posting on a regular basis. It's already been over a month since my first post! I kept thinking "Hey, I should post something... but I don't have enough new stuff to talk about." Well, I took care of that concern. This has been the most productive month I've had all year! I have so much new stuff to post that I think I might split it into 2 different posts.

A few weeks ago, I officially bought a new webhost. I had been using a free one for a long time, and it seemed to do the job alright. What I didn't know however was that because of the free host, my website had apparently been littered with obnoxious advertisements! (I have adblock so I had no idea) If you visited my website in the past and got bombarded with a flashing "Your virus scanning program is out of date" message, I apologize profusely (also shame on you for not telling me that my site was a giant billboard). Anyways, part of the new webhost process meant re-uploading everything. And as I was going through the files in my images folder, I had a revelation that I'm sure most fellow artists can relate to - I hate a lot of my old artwork! Some of the old stuff still had some potential, so I set out on a quest to fix up all of the art I was dissatisfied with. So for this first post, I'll be focusing on "improvement."

Comparison images are always fun, so let's look at some of the new pictures side by side with their old versions.

I learned a couple of new rendering techniques, so I decided to fix some old environments to give them a better mood. This was the spaceship bar from our senior project, Aliens in Eden.

This is an office in my UDK game, Corporate Ladder. Why I originally posted a UDK screenshot instead of an actual render, I have no idea. Still might need to fix the lighting a bit on this, but I think the room looks a lot better now.

This is the public bathroom in the same UDK game. I made the textures way back then but never got around to creating any of the actual assets. And now for my favorite...

I'm really proud of this one! I initially thought I'd make some quick, 15-minute tweaks and ended up spending a good 6 hours on this. Here's an image with the two of them overlayed on top of each other:

Crazy how much my digital painting skills have improved in the past year. Well I think that's a long enough second post. I've got a lot of new stuff I've been working on too, so hopefully I'll be able to share that very soon. Until next time!