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

100th Post!

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.

Moar Textures!!!

Some straight up old school painted textures. Done in the World of Warcraft style.

New Stuff!

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!