I'm totally procrastinating on texturing the undead warrior. Texturing has always been super difficult for me, and modeling just comes more naturally. Anyway since I've decided to create a scene rather than just model a single character, I went with the generic soldier from GH. These guys are just fodder in the game but they had tons of personalty. Especially in their animations.
The thing is these guys don't translate that well into 3d... It was even more difficult that the Undead Warrior to make him work in three dimensions.
I think I nailed it though! I was able to recycle a few elements from UW. Naimly the gauntlets, knee, and elbow pads.
Now I have to unwrap him and sculpt him out in zbrush.
Well it's been a little while since my last update! but I have been working off and on on my Guardian Heroes project which has expanded a bit to include a soldier as well. Mainly though I've been busy playing all of the amazing games that have come out over the last few months. And after quite a bounty of gifts yesterday I have even MORE to play now!
Anyway I spent a lot of time today sculpting the high res model of the Undead Hero. I'm mostly happy with how he turned out. I just need to do the diffuse texture and then rig and pose him to put him to bed
(edit I totally forgot I still have to sculpt his sword!)
Too bad Glenn Danzig is a DOUCHE!!! Anyway, I finished the skull! Man modeling skulls is HARD! I think I got it though, I tried my best to balance using real skull orthos and the image of the skull from the previous post. Now the tedium of unwraping this thing. Who knows how long that will take. But I'm looking forward to bringing this into zbrush. Also I never knew about the push modifier in Max but man! So cool! My buddy Phill Gonzalesturned me onto it. He said they use it a lot at Blizzard to achieve more heroic propotrions and I can see how it can help.
Did this quickly today to warm up. I saw one of my friends (and uber talented artist) Mike Fudge do this once in a time lapse video. I though it looked like fun. I didn't use reference (probably should have) but I just wanted to get the creative juices flowing. I started with just cylinder in zbrush and went from there.
More progress!!!! My buddy Sean gave me a great crit on Friday about how my previous iteration was looking very stiff. I new something was off with the model but I was having trouble pin-pointing it. I feel like it's now feeling more natural. He looks like he's ready to fuck shit up!
So all that's left on the modeling front is the skull. which is one the most fun things to create in any art form!
Then I have to unwrap this beast, the least fun part of 3d, then it's off to Z-brush for the high res sculpt. No quite at the finish line, but it's in sight!
All of this was done under the watchful eye of my art director Myu.
So on the side I've been working on a game concept (there have been a few posts about it) When I get bored of one project I switch to the other. I'm taking a small break from the Undead Hero this week to do some concept on the hero character for m game idea. I posted a concept two posts back but I wasn't sold on it. So this is what I have currently. I need to work on the mask and colors. but I think I'm gonna stick with this model.
So Guardian Heroes is one of my all-time favorite games. When it came out on the Sega Saturn in 1996 it totally just captured my imagination. From the huge sprites to the medieval setting sprinkled with just tinge of technology. It was colorful, and most of all it was fun! I have such fond memories of playing this game, I even tried to chart every route you could take (it had a choose your own adventure type of feature at the end of every level. I would do my homework while listening to the soundtrack (you could load up the Saturn cd player and load just the music).
Needless to say I love this game! Imagine my excitement and then disappointment when I found out it was being re-released.... only on XBLA (for now). I still have my Saturn and my copy of the game. But hooking up an out dated console is tedious at best. Anyway, In preparation for the game Sega released a bunch of concept art from the game. I immediately new I had to re-create one of the characters in 3d! My two favorite characters were Han (the typical warrior type) and the Undead Warrior. Which was an awesome NPC character that would fight with you through each level. He was a bad ass and could go berserk and just wipe out all the other enemies on the screen. I'll never forget when he first appears in the game.
He bursts out of his unmarked grave and lays waste to a robot that you can't defeat. Very cool stuff (especially for a 16 year old).
So now the hard/fun part. Translating a 2d sprite character into a 3d one. Lots of games have attempted this feat and some have really succeeded. Others just never look right. Armed with some very loose orthos I set out!
This is super helpful but it's not the tightest line work and proporstions fluxuate from image to image, and his armor is really simple (a nessicity for a 2d sprite).
So I had to figure out how much to update and how much to keep true to the original.
I still need to model out his arms (they're just cylinders right now) his toes, and fingers, and of course his skull. Oh yeah, also his Sword!!! The focus of the game! From there I'll take him into zbrush and add all sorts of awesome detail; armor rot and rust, decay, armor ornamentation, the works! This is I think a little over a weeks worth of work. The chest armor took the longest. It was really tough for some reason, and although you can't see it in this image too well, A spine is fucking hard to model!
Well that's it for now! Stay tuned for more. If you have an Xbox 360 I cannot recommend this game enough! It's only 10 bucks.
I realized I would never get around to texturing my Pelican Machine head model, so I did a quick rig and pose. Then I took it into zbrush and did some quick sculpting on the hands and suit. Finally, I rendered it out and played with some texture layering and color adjustments.
I'm pretty happy with how it turned out for a spontaneous afternoon project.
So I've been working on a game concept for a while now. It's slowly starting to coalesce and become something cool. But I want to make sure I do things right and actually finish it. Alas I am going to shelve it for a little while as I am going to work on another project that I am super excited about. I can't talk about it too much but if all goes well it might just be one of my crowning achievements as an artist....
In the meantime this is a concept I was working on for the main character of my game concept (called The Tower at the moment).
So it's been a while, I'm currently in the madness of moving to Austin Texas to start a new job at Retro Studios (which is owned by Nintendo). Why am I a starting a new job, well back in March Square-Enix decided to cancel the project I was working on; Codenamed Project Dropship. I won't go into the details of the decision behind it, but I was sad to see it happen. I had been on the project only a short time but I am extremely proud of the work I did, and the work of the team. We were pretty far along and I PERSONALLY think had it seen the light of day, it would have been something special.
While the entire dev team was let go (Square-Enix LA still functions as HR, Localization, Marketing, and QA) I am happy to say that majority of us have landed a great new studios.
Anyway over the past few days gaming website Silconera has posted a bunch of leaked information on the project. In these links you'll find screen shots, and videos.
I've had a few false starts with projects since my last. I have some good ideas but can't seem to get them off the ground. I was still wanting to be creative so I fired up zbrush and just messed around on one of my base head meshes.
The interior and exterior of this scene are 5000 polys each, all the textures are hand painted. This took a little over a week to complete, and I'm pretty happy with how it turned out. Given a larger polygon budget there are definite things I'd like to add, especially to the interior.
Wow 100 posts! Not bad, and this one is a dosey! It's no secret that I love Shadow of the Colossus, that game along with Ico have had such a huge influence on me artistically. I've wanted to create something in that style since I saw the first trailer way back in 2003
I STILL get chills watching it. No game since has instilled such a sense of wonder in me. Anyway, enough waxing poetic.
Rather than just recreate one of the many amazing Colossi from the game I decided to create my own. I named him "The Slave King" When I fist envisioned him I wanted to incorporate more of an environment into him. So I came up with a cloister that would be strapped to his back.
This is a project that I've been meaning to do for a few years now, and this is the initial concept from about 2008-2009 I think. So I changed a few things, Obviously I don't have the tech that team ico had to render the fur. So I couldn't cover his whole body. I decided to just use alpha planes and it worked well enough.
The biggest step for me was the textures. Texture painting has always been a bit of a struggle for me. I enjoy it but I never felt I could really do my models justice with my textures. But on this project with a huge shout out to my buddy Jeremy Huxley. He helped me with some zbrush know how on the texture front (see the post "Texture Tedium"). Anyway I feel that this was a huge step in my skill set and I feel WAY more confident creating textures now.
Anyway, here is the finished piece. Like any artwork there are tons of things I am not happy about, but all in all I'm very proud of this one. I hope it does the source material justice.
Some personal work, I wanted to do a futuristic scene. Something quite different from my personal work. Of course I wanted to complete it! Which meant textures. Something I shied away from on previous personal project. I started this on a Wednesday and finished it the following Tuesday. So less than a week to complete!
So I'm in the process of applying textures to my colossus model. I am pretty much creating all of my textures in zbrush with some photoshop adjustments. This is a relatively new technique to me (as of 3 months ago). So I'm getting better with each one.
I still have loads more to do. But I'm getting closer to finishing each day! I've been looking at Shadow of the Colossus A LOT, and I'm trying to replicate the symbols and patterns used in the game.
I'm juggling two projects at the moment. But I decided to really sink my teeth into my Shadow of the Colossus model. I've finished most of the modeling, I just have to make some vegetation cards and do some destruction detail. Then it's on to textures.
Today I worked on the the zbrush sculpt for the main body. Nothing too crazy just some muscle definition and texture. Oh and just for full disclosure I did use the base male from zbrush to sculpt over.
The other project I am working on needs some re-work I didn't like how the main character was turning out... I fell back on my comfort zone of muscular heroic proportions (it's ok for the colossus, he's carrying a castle on his back).
So I'm going to start over from scratch. The head scarf I like, but I got the idea from a concept I found on the web and I modeled from that..... I want to make something original, so I'm scraping it.
The last thing I worked on at Naughty Dog was the reveal trailer for the new game. A LOT of different people worked on this... concept, animation, effects, lighting, texture, props etc.
