Undead Hero

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.

Waiting for the End of Time

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.

The Tower

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).

Droped Ship

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.

A little about the studio closure

A plethora of Dropship screenshots

Two videos of Dropship in action

While incredibly sad the project will never be playable to the public, I can console myself in that at least some if it can be seen....

Meshing around

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.

Tides of darkness

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.

Uncharted 3!

New Trailer for Uncharted 3! While I think the music was a terrible choice the game is really coming along nicely! You can see some of my work at 1:36




And here is what is being shown in the trailer