So it's been a few months since I last made a post, but that's because life has been really busy!

At the end of March I graduated from Full Sail University as the Valedictorian of my class.  It was an incredible honor to also be picked as the "Advanced Achiever" of my class, an award given to a single member of the graduating class voted to be the one most likely to succeed in their career.

About a week after graduating I got hired at Disney Junction Point Studios as an Environment artist to work on Epic Mickey 2.



I have since moved to Austin, Texas and have been very busy with the crunch hours at the studio.  I haven't really been able to tackle on any personal work simply due to the very long hours, but I have been doodling and doing what I can to keep my mind creative.

I might touch up and compile a bunch of these concept sketches in a single post in the near future.

Classes are wrapping up for me and I've been juggling time around quite a bit this past month.  I got to attend GDC and it was incredible to get to talk to so many artists and meet so many people in such a short amount of time.

I was inspired to start working from the moment I got back home.  So what I decided to do was to work on something that could be used on a game that is currently out.  I have played League of Legends since the start of their beta a few years ago.  Their art-style has always caught my eye so I decided to work on something to fit within their world.

The area around the Dragon enemy always felt a bit empty to me, so I decided to work on a little environment to house him.  I figured Roman-ish ruins would fit the theme so I started working by figuring out the perspective and laying out some blockout structures:

Blockout on left, League of Legends screenshot on right

After that I tried to see how things could work on the center area.  I've been keeping up with the use of paintovers to do this type of concepting and it's been incredibly handy.  Here is what I came up with after a bit of working:

Arena-like!

So once I had an idea of how to go about the center I then went back to Photoshop and did some more work trying to figure out how to go about the lighting and overall colors:


Once that was done I was able to go back into Maya and hammer out the assets.  After a couple days I moved on to UDK to set up my scene.  I'm still working on the overall scene, as well as the individual assets but here is where I am currently with it:

WIP inside UDK

And here is an unlit version of the same shot:



I've been putting a heavy focus on making sure things are always low-res and as low poly as possible especially since I've been aiming to have it be as true to the League of Legends specs as possible.  here is an atlas of all the textures currently used in my scene:

So with Final Project wrapped up I have found myself in the regular classroom environment once again.  I did this little scene in about a week's time off and on as things finished up with our game and I begun to have a bit more free time after class.

The whole scene kind of came into being after I made a little trashcan prop.  I wanted to present it in a nice way so I then made the light post!

Trashcan! And Mr. Post

After looking at it for literally 30 seconds I could already see the entire corner in my mind so I plopped down some quick lines and shapes and got right into work.

Rough shapes and test textures

Paintover and playing with distort/warp

Overall this was a very smooth going quick side project.  This time around I played with lighting in Marmoset by adding spot and volume lights to the scene that way.  Here are some renders of how it turned out:





Also another thing I focused a lot was having things look pretty solid completely unlit in Maya.  Here are some screenshots of how it looked like "naked" in Maya.



Lastly here is the atlas for the textures in the scene.  I think it's a whole lot of fun to push things as far as specs and resolution goes.  The two biggest textures are the sidewalk and the road, other than that everything else is smaller than a 512x512.

This past milestone we did awesome with Pirates Vs Pirates again.  As far as project and design goes, we added the two new enemy types into the game and they really fit right in without having to adjust almost anything of their design.  Overall we also tweaked the gameplay of the game and it simply continues to feel better and better with each iteration.

In the end having the split focus between the game project and our portfolio class didn't end up being all that terrible, although I will say that having the artists be physically absent for half the team meetings did cause some gaps in communication and at times I felt a bit disconnected.  It really wasn't anything that prevented me from performing, it just took a bit to get back in the swing of the project.

My first task this month was to create the enemy ship.  I wanted it to resemble the player's ship but also have a unique silhouette as it came straight at you.  The textures still need some tweaking but here is where I am at the moment:



I almost feel like I should add some more spikes, and for next month I will tweak this model for the Blue Sail (bomber) ships.

The silhouette of the cannon wasn't strong enough in it's first iteration, especially from the player perspective.  It was hard to see the cannon poking out of the ship so it got a major upgrade in it's size.  Here's the comparison of the two:

New silhouette of cannons

And lastly the player ship got some more love.  I wanted to add shadows and a metal grate to the texture to make the deck more interesting.  I had to tweak the way I did the beams that added elevation change because it was clipping through the player's feet.  Since we don't have any fancy tech to support steps I decided to put them into the texture instead of having the geometry create the difference.  I still need to go back and add some more damage to the floor, as well as bake in the shadows of the placed props (crates and whatnot)

New wheel!

Floor, now completely flat!

I'm very excited to be going into this last month of production.  There are a lot of little things I want to push in my models and textures, as well as enforce that extra level of polish for the other artist's assets.  As a team we aren't rushing to catch up to our deadlines and that couldn't be more perfect - we have the time to focus on making things extra awesome instead of having to cut corners due to time.  Overall it's going to be a very fun month!

Check out the gameplay of the video here!  Next month I'll have another gameplay video as well as a link to download the final version, so you too will be able to fully experience the awesomness of Pirates Vs Pirates!

So this past month was the "split focus test" and it turned out to not be so bad after all.  Having to work on Pirates Vs Pirates and a portfolio piece at the same time (with equal amounts of attention and love) proved to be hectic at times but in the end it turned out just fine.

For this last class we basically had the month to create a portfolio piece.  I've always wanted to try my hand at a hand-painted environment so I figured this would be a great time to have a go at it.  When I sat down to think about what I should do my mind went straight to a blacksmith/forge house.  I wanted to play with lots of vegetation so bamboo came to mind right away, the asian theme came right after that thought.  I began to look on flickr and began finding some really cool photos of pagoda/temples, and in a completely roundabout way I arrived at Blizzard's new Pandaria concept art.  Once I hit that vault of amazing art, inspiration began to flow and it wasn't long until I had a solid idea of what I wanted to do.

Here is how the final turn-in came out:






I've always really enjoyed seeing breakdowns of progress on artwork so this time around I made sure to take a screenshot of the scene every night.  One thing that I absolutely learned with this project is the value of paintovers.  There were times I would look at the scene and couldn't really see how I could push it further.  Taking a screenshot and bringing it to photoshop for a quick paintover was a crucial step to find new ways to lay things out.  Here are a couple of the ones I found most interesting:

Blockout - week 1

Paintover - week1

Maya screenshot - week 2

UDK screenshot -week 3

Paintover - week 3

UDK screenshot - week 4

UDK screenshot - final

Overall I'm pretty happy with how it turned out and I can't wait to start a new project!

So this past month was our first actual month of production.  It was refreshing to have the entire time dedicated to just producing, something we hadn't done for quite some time.

One of the things that I absolutely noticed is just how incredibly helpful it was to have all the pre-pro done ahead of time.  On the art side things were very smooth because all our tasks were already set up and we were able to focus entirely on the actual creation.  For the design our Design Document proved simply invaluable.

As we begun to piece things together I was amazed to see how smoothly the overall design of the game went.  Time and time again I am reminded of just how crucial communication is; it really takes a situation like this to prove just how difficult it can be.  The funny part is that it's not the conflicts that boggle my mind, but rather how different ideas can be even if we all started out at the same spot.

I was in charge of the majority of the art for the gameplay elements our game.  I started out working some more of the floor of the player ship and by the time I was done with it I was getting pretty tired of doing wood planks.  The way I went about the floor was to have a single  huge texture that has localized details for where the paths/damage from walking among other more subtle details.  These aren't present in the first pass of the texture but will be in the coming months as well as any lighting for the props.




 After that I started working on the outside of the player ship.  I ended up leaving this until about half way through the month because we weren't sure if the size of the ship would be optimal for gameplay.  This brings up a point that I noticed to be quite fun actually.  Having to "work around" gameplay and keep in mind certain constraints (camera collision, resolution) is a process in itself.  There were certain aspects of the ship that were pretty much set in stone because of the design of the game, and paying attention to those details ended up influencing much of the ship's design.


I played with the shapes of the ship for quite some time, once I was comfortable with the silhouette and other details I begun to chisel out the actual parts of the ship.  I used a few repeatable textures for any railing and elements that could benefit from the same texture being used over and over.  Overall I ended up with 2 textures for the unique front and back "chunks", two different beams, and the side wood of the hull.  Working with repeatables can be tricky but I also find it fun to push textures and use them in ways you normally wouldn't think of.

The last big asset I created was the cannon.  Going about this one was much easier than the boat because it was so contained, and in a way it was very comfortable and quick to create.  I took the concept art my team mate created and simply recreated it.  This asset was fun to make because of how mechanical the parts were.  I noticed that many games have static props and they always end up being boring and 'still'.  For the cannon I wanted to make sure it felt alive and when the player aims it around it actually looks like the First Mate is using it.  The first pass of this asset turned out like this:



Overall it was a very good month.  Having our core build being so strong allowed us to really push our game and have fun with it.  This next month the artists will be having a portfolio class along side of the game project so it will be interesting to see how well we handle having the split in focus.