Welcome to Desborough Designs!

Hello everyone, my name is Janelle Desborough, and I am a Game Art and Design student at The Art Institute of Pittsburgh. I’m within a year of graduating, so it’s high time that I start to get a foothold on how things are done in this industry. One of those things simply being getting used to showcasing my work through all stages of progress, both to display my skills as a 3D artist as well as to keep a history of my progress and development. Please feel free to offer any critique, ask any question, or just say hello. I want this to be a friendly blog that anyone from an industry professional to my own mother can feel comfortable visiting (hi mom!).

I should also forewarn the reader that I have a background in high school level journalism, and media in general. This means nothing, other than I like words. A lot. So feel free to skip my explanations (though I try to make things interesting) and go right to the pretty pictures.

I’m still exploring the depths of WordPress, so expect things to get moved around as I learn. I’ve actually had this account for awhile now, and have held off on using it for many reasons (read: excuses). Even my logo above is at some high level of iteration but not quite final. But hey, I’m still making art, and the shape of the blog can evolve around the content, so it’s time to start posting. As the before mentioned logo reads, I’m most interested in vehicle modeling. I also enjoy creating assets to populate game worlds, but to me, creating a 3D car is just plain fun. This interest in cars has only been going on for two years or so, and I have a strong wish to expand my knowledge both in modeling technique and in the tech of what makes a car work in the real world. The way I figure, you can’t draw a character without knowing proper anatomy; it stands to reason that you can’t create a believable vehicle without knowing it’s anatomy either.

So here’s an introduction to my latest project, involving the 2004 Subaru Impreza WRC. This is a multi-faceted project, which should end in a video with the car, a character, and an environment by the end of the school quarter. I will commonly speak in terms of our quarter system, for the summer term we have a total of 10 weeks, this being week 4. So I have roughly a month and a half until the final video will be finished. I’ll come back later and play catch up with the whole of the project, but there’s my progress on the Impreza.

I’ve been keeping track of how long it takes for me to finish this model, something I need to start doing for all of my work. So far I’ve spent 13 hours and 15 minutes on what I like to call the medium poly mesh, an additional 1 hour 50 minutes converting that into the low poly mesh for the video, and then another 1 hour 30 minutes for rigging. That still leaves unwrapping, texturing, and at least a “basic” high poly mesh to define tire detail and body seams (you can see the weak seams in the low poly mesh, they almost look like lighting artifacts without the normal mapping – yuck).

Later on I’ll introduce the premise for the video and the other pieces that go along with it, as well as other projects. Until then, thanks for visiting, and welcome to my journey!