Just throwing something up to show that I'm not dead. I'm looking forward to doing several of these material studies in order to improve my understanding of shaders.

UI continued.

More UI stuff, starting with a couple more icons and a few iterations on some of them.

 

And some switches, knobs, sliders, and buttons for an options menu. Skins included just for fun.

App Icons and my god-awful designs.

So these are the first four attempts I've made at designing miscellaneous app icons. They were made in the following order: awful blue building, weird little ninja, cringe-colors SRK logo, and machine eye thing. I'm... working on it.

First experiment... success?

Confirmed. These are fun.

UI/UX time

Well, it's been a long time. I've been blogging elsewhere, on a page not viewable by the public. I'll try to condense the past year into a blog post soon, but for now I'd rather discuss what I've been working on today and will be working on for the next few weeks (and hopefully much longer than that): UI design!

Here are a couple of works-in-progress:

 

 A "downloads" icon -- the number represents how many unopened/watched downloads this guy has.

 A couple of equipment icons, perhaps for an iPad game. I've always loved simple stuff like this.

I'm going to update this blog every few days from now until... early May. After that, no guarantees (but hopefully I'll continue doing so). Long story short, this has turned out to be pretty darn fun and satisfying to work on, so I'm pretty amped to get into this field.

-Will

So... we're done with that, I guess.

THAT was fun. Like... I mean... yeah. I don't quite know why but I was just thoroughly entertained the whole time. I'm beginning to think I might just be a fan hand-painting things. Anyway, here it is!

First low-poly character... still counts as a first, right?

More progress on my still-unnamed hoodoo doll. Texturing'll be tomorrow. Hopefully I'll get a majority of it done, if not all. Let's see if that practice with the swords helped at all!

-Will

(note: obviously this isn't how the UVs will be; it's just how I'm leaving them for tonight)

Second sword... took longer.

Reasons for this taking two days instead of one:
1) changed the design a few times
2) couldn't get colors right
3) computer blue-screened and corrupted the PSD (I'm lucky I managed to save the 1st sword)
4) I wasn't following a tutorial for this one
5) I was having a lot of fun with it, so I wanted to take my time

Reasons for lack of process:
1) forgot

Here it is, though:

 (design inspired by this unused blizzard concept)

Total polycount for both is probably... what, 950? Something in that neighborhood. And the texture's sitting at a nice 512x512. I'm pretty pleased with these, really. See you guys soon for more low-poly madness!

-Will

Surprisingly fun day of learning.

Tried out some low-poly swordin'. Not bad for a day's work / first time if I do say so myself. Sword itself isn't very big; I think it's just over 400. The texture is 512x512. I would've tried to make it a 256x256, but as you can see, I'm planning on putting both swords' textures on the same map (note: this is solely because these swords are practice for me -- were they in-game assets, I'd go with the separate maps).

Summer... time for some projects?

Well, the first thing I'm taking care of is a character I'd been interested in since mid-Game Design 3. Long story short: voodoo doll. Short story long: ask Fernando; he came up with the back stories. This'll be my first super-low-poly experiment, so I'm declaring right now that I'm going to keep this little guy under 1,000 tris and I'm going to try to stick to that. For textures, I'm shooting for a 512, but if I CAN get it down to a 256, then that'll be great, too. Time limit: hopefully under a week.

-Will

Back from Winter Break, and...

Long story short, I'm modeling, texturing, and animating a turret using design principals I've chosen from observing the shape language of the "Dead Space" franchise. Using their love of repeated segmentation and rounded shapes with sharp edges, and drawing inspiration from NASA's multi-axis G-force simulation chairs, I've managed to cobble together what I hope will be a successful portfolio piece in the future.

Below are some images from various stages of production.

If you'll notice the plane directly behind the turret (the smaller one, anyway), I've got Isaac's "Security Suit" RIG up for texture reference, as I imagine that this turret, were it to be in a Dead Space title, would be EarthGov property. That's all for now, but I'll be updating pretty soon with some big news!


--Take it easy, folks.

How to Slay Your Leviathan.

Hey guys, today I'll be showing you a little something I threw together this morning that took about four and a half hours from start to finish (I was going for four, but things got a little buggy towards the end). I learned more than I thought I would from this, mainly a lot about prefabs and how to appropriately use "relative to initial" movement tracks in matinee. Anyway, check it out!

Oh, also, this was for Game Design 3. I'm basically proving that I can make what we're pitching, which is a game about climbing up onto giant sky-things and killing them. Hurrah!

-Will

Next project: Brutal Jak & Daxter.

Howdy. Today, I'm gonna show y'all the first look at my next 3D project, which takes place in the Jak & Daxter universe, but seen in a style similar to that of Brutal Legend.
 --
Here we've got the production painting from my "Drawing for Animators" class, along with an overhead map and a rough storyboard for how I plan to handle the camera for the environment's presentation.

 And here, the rough blockout of it in UDK.

That's all for now, I'll be back soon!

-Will

Oh yeah, youtube can come too.

Almost forgot about this: it's on youtube as well.

 

-Will

Realistic Reveal: Assault on the Fire Nation Palace

Well folks, it's done. It might not seem like much to you loyal readers (approx. 1), but this... this took a lot out of me. After a whole month of desperately fighting to work this up to my standard of quality and trying to work in a team of four artists with radically different styles, it's finally, finally over. Here are some stills and progress shots!

And here we have the finals. Two and two, beauty shots n' contact sheets.

Picture dump over -- see you guys later for Fantastic Environment progress. Get pumped for Jak and Daxter meets Brutal Legend! In THREE DIMENSIONS! --Will

Update on the Avatar project.

So things are coming along pretty darn well, I suppose. It's weird, if I'd gotten to this point on the first project we'd had this semester, I'd have said "oh man, this looks great! I'm totally done." but OH. OH MY LORD. How wrong that is. However, I'm definitely almost at the point where everything that I want in the scene has been placed and I'll be able to focus on color balance, post processing, and random fine tunings. With more than a week until turn-in, I'm quite proud of that fact.

Let's draw an environ-- characters. I meant characters.

So... for this project we're working on in Game Design 3, we're building up a world from scratch based on a couple of objects. We got a few examples of otherwordly paraphernalia; a voodoo doll, some dia de los muertos skeletons, and a deck of tarot cards to name a few. Now I'll admit that I got a bit off-task at this stage, as I was supposed to be sketching out some form of environment, but instead I really got into the kinds of characters that would inhabit it. That said, here are a couple of designs for the races that would populate our crazy otherworld-world.

It's been a while... kind of forgot this place existed. Back to posting!

Alright, so, I'm just gonna pretend I never left and skip all of that recap nonsense. Here are some pictures from the realistic environment I'm currently working on, a re-imagining of the Fire Nation palace from Avatar: The Last Airbender. My particular setting is a courtyard in front of the throne room, and as you can see, there's recently been quite a disturbance -- an assault by the Earth Kingdom. This phase you're seeing here is the rough blockout of how the destruction is going to be set up. I'm still working on making rubble pieces, upturned soil, and splintering trees.

And for kicks, here's a close-up of the detail-lighting window I'm using to set up compositions -- you can more easily see the player path I'm trying to project in this one; I'm still trying to figure out the best way to make it read in the textured version.

Take care, -Will

Puzzle Rooms

Some level design documents that I've come up with for my team's summer project.