Onward... to Stanford!

Not sure I've mentioned this on my blog before, but I recently got hired to be the Assistant Director at the iD Tech Gaming Academy at Stanford. Although the company isn't really affiliated with the school itself, I'm still excited that I'll be working at one of the most prestigious schools in the country. This will be my third summer with iD Tech and I can't wait for all of the exciting challenges that I'll face in my first true management position. On top of that, I'm beyond stoked to be heading to one of my favorite places in the country - the San Francisco Bay area. I'm sure I'll have lots of interesting adventures to talk about once I return from the West Coast.

As such, I'll probably be pretty quiet on this blog for the next few months. I've suspended all freelance work until September and I likely won't have much free time to draw or model during the summer. I should still be somewhat active on Twitter though, so feel free to follow me on there.

Before I leave, I do have a couple pieces of art to share. Finally got some time to do a few personal drawings of The Nays. I also made more progress on my Haca Fairstalk project. I wasn't able to completely finish it by summer like I originally hoped, but I guess it just gives me something to look forward to when I return.

 

This is my character Murou. He's really into MMOs and The Nays actually first met him inside a virtual world. Pretty quick drawing but it was fun to play around with the glow of the computer screen.

Another one of my characters from The Nays, this is Meushi. She's an archaeologist who studies ancient Tag World technology.

Lastly, we've got a scene of Spicco and his adopted "son." This was based on an old drawing that my sister did when we were young, so it was fun to revisit that. Overall it was a good experience to start drawing for myself again. None of these were super detailed but it helped to get my creative juices flowing again.



I also had the chance to model Haca's weapon for my Unreal animation project. I modeled the spear in Maya and used Substance Painter to add in all of those texture details. I plan to animate the cloth using APEX cloth physics so it should flap around during animations.

I've been loving Substance Painter a lot lately, so I also decided to give Substance Designer a whirl. This was the result of an in-depth tutorial I followed. I really like the way the puddles turned out in between the rocks. Amazingly is is all completely procedurally generated so any aspect of the material can be tweaked and adjusted with sliders.

This is the crazy graph network that I set up to create that material. There are so many little aspects that go into a design like this, so it took a few hours to get it all in place. It's really nice though because it works similar to the UE4 material editor and you can produce amazing shaders without having to type a single line of code.

That's about all I have to show this time around. I'll be sure to keep you up to date on all of my crazy West Coast adventures in the coming months. Until then... Adios!