Thursday, May 1, 2014

The Month that Time Forgot

Well, I guess I fell a day short of making an April post. It's been an interesting month and I've got a lot of new stuff to talk about. A few weeks ago, I traveled to my first ever PAX East. It was an amazing convention that even managed to make GDC feel empty. Got to attend some cool panels, meet some totally awesome indie developers in the expo hall, and tour a city I've never been to before. If there's one thing I noticed about Boston it's that its people sure love being there. It felt very patriotic and respectful towards this country's history. Of all the places I've been, I'd say Boston best represented the true "American city." Anyways, I'm getting off topic. PAX East was fantastic and I'm hoping to attend one of the other locations some time in the near future.



I've also been hard at work with the team at NotRobot on our upcoming mobile title Wave Crash. I've mainly been working on the UI / HUD, and things are starting to really come together. We will be entering beta any day now, so keep your eyes on the official website: Not Robot  In addition to that, I've also worked on a couple of different projects to keep my skills sharp.


I finally finished my Chinatown painting from San Francisco. I ended up putting a lot more detail into this than I originally expected. I spent so many consecutive hours on this that my hand started to cramp up by the time I was finished! Overall though, I'm pretty happy with the results.


I wish I had saved a copy before I detailed the pole on the left, but this still gives you a pretty good idea of my process. Blocked in everything from the start, and then focused on detailing individual sections one at a time. And finally at the end, I added in some of the top layer stuff like poles and hanging objects.


Also been working on my texturing skills a bit. I love painting textures by hand, but I know there is also a demand for super realistic textures that you can't really get by painting. So I decided to take inspiration from the amazing artists at Naughty Dog (like Genesis Prado) and try my hand at creating textures in ZBrush. For this texture I started with an individual brick object and placed a bunch of them in a pattern. Exported a whole bunch of different channels and did some combining in Photoshop. I really like the way it came out and I'm eager to try this method again!


Since I've pretty much made up my mind that environment art is my strong suit, I created this in my endless pursuit of adding more art to my portfolio. A lot of really good hard surface modelers seem to create these pristine living rooms with modern looking furniture. So I decided it would be fun to make one myself. I experimented with using VRay and its Sun&Sky system to get the rendering on this. This is just a simple living room shot, but right now I'm actually in the process of modeling out the entire house for my new demo reel. Hopefully I should have that done for the next post.


This is just a quick little drawing I did when I was in the mood for something a bit cartoony. This is Cimc and Fuzzy, characters that my sister and I created a long time ago.


And last but not least, this is a concept piece of a small mobile game I've been making in my free time. It's just a short parody game poking fun at some common themes in social gaming. The goal is for me to finish the entire game in a few weeks and get my feet wet in the Google Play store before releasing some of my bigger projects there. The working title is 'The RAM That Feeds' and it's about 40% done at this point. Look forward to an update on it in the near future.

And with that, this pretty much sums up my month of April. Like I said, it's been a pretty crazy month but I've still managed to get quite a bit of art done. Got some exciting things on the horizon, so stay tuned. 
Until then... Adios!