Tricade

Now this is an oldie… My first experience with the Unreal Engine (or any game engine for that matter), done in July of 2010. Tricade went through a lot of redesign and rebuilds, and even switched from the newly released UDK to UT3 after we discovered a bug that would cause custom death match type maps to crash during LAN play. Even though it’s dated, it was one of my more memorable projects to work on.

This is a walkthrough of the level, as well as a few recorded clips that a fellow student collected on my behalf during our final playtesting session. It’s a treat to first be able to walk around something you’ve designed and built, and then to see others play in the same space!

Another project done around the same time was based on the concept of a Russian prison. We were asked to create both an interior and exterior space based on a few proffered options. These were created completely within 3ds Max at the time, but it was an optional plus to play around with recreating one of them in an engine as well. Most of the scene was unplayable due to my limited (read: nonexistent) knowledge of UDK scale and collision at the time, but I recently went back and reworked a few things. I also experimented with weather and atmospherics, which you can see below:

GUI Reboot – Heavenly Sword

Back when I had Interface Design around April 2011, one of our projects was to take an existing game and recreate a new HUD and menu system that fit the world. We then had to create and animate our new HUD overtop of actual video from the real game. I chose to work with Heavenly Sword.

The overall objective that I wanted to accomplish was to make the glyph meter (at the bottom) a bit more noticeable without getting in the way, and to replace the ring that told the player health and the status of “superstyle” abilities with something that still matched the game but was easier to read at a glance.

This was the complete menu system and new HUD, on top of an existing Heavenly Sword trailer. Be aware that the concept art, soundtrack, and video are all property of Ninja Theory – I am only responsible for the menu system and the replaced animated HUD. If you haven’t played the game, I highly recommend checking it out! Here’s a link to the official Heavenly Sword webpage.

Nikon D7000

And to go along with Daren and his updated textures, we also have a rebuilt camera for him! The original Nikon was a model I made as a prop in December 2010, and had been wanting to redo for a while. So I finally got to do just that for Pre-Portfolio, and it turned out to be a pretty good exercise in pouring a lot of high poly love into a relatively low poly model.

Daren Thatcher

Well here’s a familiar face! At the same time that I was creating textures for Natalia, I was also doing the same for Daren.

The low poly mesh is the same as before, but the textures are updated and a high poly mesh was created. The inclusion of a normal map (which was missing from the Rally Race animation) really helped.

The high poly sculpt in ZBrush, again with overlapping areas lopped off. The diffuse with created with the Polypainting tools.

A texture breakdown, featuring the unwrap from 3ds Max, the diffuse from Polypaint, the projected normal map, and colored specular.

Natalia

Things have been a little quiet around here, I apologize for that. For the past few months I was caught up in Pre-Portfolio, which is arguably one of the more busy and stressful classes we have to take. The bulk of the coursework is (ideally) revisiting all of our past projects and revising them for a final critique which then determines if we are ready to graduate or not. My review went well, so I am now in Portfolio, which still means little “new” work is being done in favor of spending 11 weeks putting together a branding package and a demo reel. But since I have so much work prepared and formatted from Pre-Portfolio, I thought that I would go ahead and dust this blog off and show some older work.

This is Natalia, a character I made in April 2011 for the purposes of animating. Back then she was only a mesh, so the textures are new from Pre-Port.

The new high poly sculpt from ZBrush. I also used ZBrush’s Polypaint to create the diffuse map. I haven’t done a whole lot of actual sculpting in ZBrush, and it’s something I’m looking forward to exploring more once things are a little less hectic. One thing that I’ve found works well for me is to only import parts of the mesh that I need, which is why poor Natalia is seen with only one hand, one eye, etc… I do this for anything that is overlapped in the unwrap, partly to prevent issues when baking the textures, and partly to have even more polygon real estate.

Finally, here is the original animation sequence that Natalia was made for. The objective was to have a character go through a three-part obstacle course that involved a run, a jump, and a climb. Since animation and characters are not my focus, I wanted to make it fun so that I could really put everything into it. So I tried to base each animation in the realm of parkour, and watched plenty of slow-motion footage to get started!