Recognition Game

Recognition Game Assets

EGD320 – Game Production II
Spring 2010 – Second Semester, junior year.

Producer: Heather Conover
Designer: Drew Ostojich
Designer: Ray Ortgiesen
Designer: Heather Conover
Artist: Jerry Bimbo
Artist: Me


Yet another fun class. The whole goal for that semester was to create a game using any engine we wanted. Our group consisted of really great designers and artists, and it showed because our game concept got green lighted. We decided to use the Unreal Development kit for an engine because it was going to be a first person game. Our game takes place on an abandoned facility on the moon, where you as the character have to figure out what is going on and at the same time figuring our puzzles that use gravity manipulation. My role on the team was to Animate and create a few assets. Jerry created a very nice character that he handed off to me to animate. I also created and animated the gravity gun, a sliding door, a gravity pad, and a few textured and other small assets.

There was actually a little bit of conflict when the designers didn’t think we could get done what we said we could get done. Thankfully they were able to talk us out of our out-of-scope thinking process and we all got together to give each asset a priority. We would then create an asset based on the level of importance it had on our game. I learned a lot from the class, specifically what I can get done while trying to balance the pointless required classes we need to take in college. There was actually a lot more that I could have gotten done for my team, but there was a lot of mistakes I made when modeling my assets which wasted a lot of time.

The picture above is nothing compared to what the game actually looks like. I threw the grav pads and door in a simple room and the gun isn’t even being held by the player, it’s just floating in the room. I would have gotten a shot of the game, but I couldn’t set up our game because the files are a bit wonky on my computer. Rest assured, the game looks really snazzy and we have a working build for UDK, and the designers are currently working on creating an EXE version of it to put up on ModDB.com.

Face Sculpt

Face Sculpt
EGD315 – 3D Modeling II: Assignment three.
Spring 2010 – Second Semester, junior year.

Again, another really fun project. We had to create a humanoid head to better increase our skills at forming primary, secondary, and tertiary forms of the face. We also had to go and color it in with Zbrush’s polypaint using a very common way of painting a face in Zbrush. After trying to gather ideas of what I wanted to do, I found a picture of the Creature from the Black Lagoon and decided to do a half fish/half human face. The most difficult part of the face was trying to figure out how to make the nose look aquatic-like without it looking boring. Unfortunately I failed at that and it looks like it belongs to a baboon. Surprisingly it turned out better than I thought it would, and I really enjoyed making him look threatening with his shark teeth.

Armor Bust

Armor Bust
EGD315 – 3D Modeling II: Assignment two.
Spring 2010 – Second Semester, junior year.

This project was pretty exciting. We had to create just the upper armor for a human type character. Our professor stressed the fact that things had to make sense, like using straps and fasteners to hold up the armor instead of just placing things on the body. I thought I’d be smart and create a gladiator since I knew the armor and fasteners would make sense. Let’s also not forget the fact that gladiators are awesome. Mostly everything was started in Autodesk Maya as a very simple form, and then brought into Zbrush. I used a body reference from a medical book to use as a reference for my figure. For the armor I tried to make it as historically accurate as I could, and added a few things here and there to make it look more appealing. I based my armor style off of a mixture of the Samnite, Thracian, and Murmillo types of Roman Gladiators.
We then had to color them in using Zbrush’s polypaint which was really fun.

Snail

Snail
EGD315 – 3D Modeling II: Assignment one.
Spring 2010 – Second Semester, junior year.

This class dealt mostly with Pixologic’s Zbrush. The first assignment was to start becoming more comfortable with digital sculpting. We had to create a snail, which would help us understand how to sculpt different types of surfaces (like a bumpy hard shell, and a slimy smooth slug) without having to actually change the material or put color on it. The teacher didn’t care what type of snail we did, but insisted we look into the Giant African Land snail because of its cone-shaped shell. I wasn’t sure if I could pull off a type of shell like that, so I decided to create the common round one with the helix spiral. Turns out that it was still difficult to do, and I even had to re-do the shell because I accidentally used a sphere instead of a Poly sphere (the poles made bad geometry). It was a learning experience though, and the second shell was faster to do because I had already had a method down to create a somewhat good helix shape with the bumpy lines on the shell. We eventually had to re-topologize it with a maximum of 2000 triangles and generate an ambient occlusion and normal map so it could be used as a low poly game character.

Back in Burlington

Most of the Montreal students came back to Vermont for the Spring Semester. I would have loved to stay up in Montreal, but lack of money and lack of art classes for the semester in the Montreal campus prevented me from doing so.

Victorian House

Victorian House
EGD380A – Advanced Seminar in Art & Animation.
Fall 2009 – First Semester, junior year
Montreal Campus

This is pretty much a big disappointment for me. I really don’t know what I was thinking. This class was an advanced seminar in environmental art. The whole semester was just one project. Stupidly, I f@#Ked up and didn’t really think about what I was doing. The assignment was to basically make an interior or just something complex (one of my classmates pulled off creating a Warhammer 40K Thunderhawk, it was sick). I decided I wanted to create an interior of a Victorian house, and add in some elements of steampunk into it. I really wanted to create the house in VHE (Valve Hammer Editor) instead of the Unreal engine because I hadn't yet wrapped my head around how powerful Unreal is, and also I was very familiar with VHE. To make a long and stupid story short, I spent too much time doing things that didn’t matter, wasn’t using an engine our teacher was a specialist in, and didn’t manage my time wisely. The good news is that just like every class I took in Montreal Campus, I learned a crap load of stuff that I probably never would have found out if I was back at the Vermont Campus. The bad news is that was the first time I got a D as a grade. Ever.

I still got the credit though (through the screen high five?).

Protector of the Sacred Artifact

Protector of the Sacred Artifact
EGD245 – Foundations of Concept Painting: Final Assignment.
Fall 2009 – First Semester, junior year
Montreal Campus

I’ll admit, I’m not very good at concept artwork, but I thought I’d add this to let you know that the school doesn’t just offer 3D classes for people in the Art & Animation major. There are also other classes we’ve taken like Flash, concept drawing, and Concept painting. This journal is intended for mostly the 3D work that I’ve done at Champlain College, and in the future any 3D related projects I’ll be working on. But then again this blog is mine, right? So it might change.
Anyway, this class was pretty awesome even though my drawing skill isn’t. However, I did finally learn a few concept painting techniques in Photoshop that I never knew before. For your own safety, I won’t post the pictures I did in class, but I will post our final project. The assignment was to create a guardian of a sacred object, and have an Egyptian theme to it. I actually had to create a scene in Maya and draw over it because I couldn’t get the perspective right. This is definitely something that won’t throw you off your seat in amazingness, but it’s a big improvement for my photoshop painting skills.

Dynamic Character Animation Sequence

Dynamic Character Animation Sequence
EGD335 - 3D Animation: Assignment three.
Fall 2009 – First Semester, junior year
Montreal Campus

This was the most entertaining animation project I’ve done so far. This project was to use everything we’ve learned to create a 10 second animation of a bipedal character that can pick up and drop an object. The character also had to do 5 different actions. I tried very hard to set up my character to get as much control over it as I could. I used a combination of tutorials my Art & Animation advisor created, as well as the Learning Autodesk Maya 2008 The Modeling & Animation Handbook to help me with rigging my character. I wanted my animation to be very fast paced, and have minimal pause times. Whenever I animated my character I’d think to myself “What would Jackie Chan do?” My original animation had a few hiccups in it, where the character would do some very unnatural movements that looked really weird if you watched it a few times. Excluding the jumping over the table, either my roommates or I would act out certain positions. I’d also look on youtube for freerunners or parkour traceurs to get a better understanding of the limits of movement the human body is capable of. I came into a big problem about 3/4ths of the way into animating the project, which was Gimbal Lock. Thankfully I was aware of what Gimbal lock was before I encountered it since fellow students in the past had problems with it in previous assignments. Thankfully I was able to fix it for some things on the character, but unfortunately for something like the boomerang I wasn’t able to.

The difference between this video and the one i submitted is that this video has an increased resolution and a different lighting setup. Also rendered using Mental ray.

Walk, Run, Jump!

Walk, Run, Jump!
EGD335 - 3D Animation: Assignment two.
Fall 2009 – First Semester, junior year
Montreal Campus

This assignment was to create and animate a figure that had a large center of mass compared to the rest of its body. Just think of Mike Wazowski, the one-eyed green guy from Pixar’s Monsters, Inc. I just created a skull with basic robotic-like arms and legs, but the main part of the assignment was to animate him walking, running, and jumping. We used The Animator’s Survival Kit by Richard Williams as a guide when creating our cycles. This book is filled with 2D animation techniques, but it applies very nicely to 3D animation as well. This project actually started making me enjoy animation just a little more. Maybe it was because when things went wrong I was able to find a solution or easy work around, or it was the sense of making a biped character come alive. Whatever it was, the project was pretty fun. We had no limit on joints, and I don’t even think we had a limit on time since it was just a cycle. We had to render out the walk, run, and jump cycle in a front, side, and 3/4ths view.

The difference between this video and the one i submitted is that this video has an increased resolution and a different lighting setup. Also rendered using Mental ray.

Obstacle Course

EGD335 - 3D Animation: Assignment one.
Fall 2009 – First Semester, junior year
Montreal Campus

I wasn’t too excited about this project. I already knew we were going to be limited in the amount of joints we could use, and wasn’t looking forward to it. This assignment was to create an obstacle course for an object that only had one point of contact to the ground. This is pretty much the same as the assignment I did using the fire extinguisher, but our animated object needed to hop and move around things. We were required to make it do a certain number of actions, at 30 frames per second for at least 18 seconds. I didn’t feel like doing something like the fire extinguisher because it had very limited moving parts, so I went with something more complex. Pixar did such a nice job when they animated Luxo jr. because he (or she?) was able to use the weight of its head to assist it in moving around. I wanted to do the same thing and tried to mimic a small robotic arm (kind of like the arms that you see in automobile assembly lines). After figuring out how to make a nice skeleton for him only using 5 joints, I noticed I could take advantage of his claw for some nice secondary animation. The animation was supposed to be longer, but I started getting annoyed because my hierarchy of joints and controls wasn’t allowing me to do what I wanted the claw to do. I found this out during the middle of animating it and didn’t feel like going back to fix it, but I sucked it up and animated him the best I could.

Montréal

Champlain College has a satellite campus located in Montreal, Quebec. The reason for this is that Montreal has a couple game studios up there, and Champlain knew it would be beneficial to the Electronic Game Development students as well as other business and Graphic Art students. We were fortunate to dorm at UQAM's International building, which allowed us to interact with other students from culturally different backgrounds. It was a little difficult though, since we weren't sure if the person standing next to us in the elevator or in the laundry room actually knew English. Luckily we eventually meet a lot of nice people in the building.

The other cool thing about the Montreal campus was that our teachers were from the industry. It was great to hear the teachers telling us all these little tips and tricks to better our art skills and what the industry is looking for. Game related or not, the amount of things I learned while up in Montreal was enormous.

I'd do anything to get a job up there, Montreal is friggin' awesome.

Crawler

Crawler
EGD235 - 3D modeling: Assignment three.
Spring 2009 – Second Semester, sophomore year

This final project was something we could choose to make with everything we’ve learned during our time as an Art and Animation student. I really wanted to create a cool looking walker/mech/spider type machine. What you see is actually nothing like my original concept. You know when you picture something in your head that you really think is cool, and you think “I can get that done in no time! It’ll be wicked easy!” Well apparently that doesn’t apply with me, and I completely ignored scope and had to change a few things here and there in order to complete the project. Actually, I didn’t even complete this project in time. I was able to model and UV unwrap everything for the deadline, and textured it slightly. During presentations the next day my teacher noticed the lack of a quality texture and was kind enough to give me a couple days to finish the texture and get it to him before grades had to be turned in.

Environmental Game Asset

Environmental Game Asset
EGD235 - 3D modeling: Assignment two.
Spring 2009 – Second Semester, sophomore year

This assignment was pretty cool, and really tested our artistic abilities. This assignment challenged us to re-create an Unreal Tournament 3 modular asset. We had to find two modular assets in unreal, like a wall and a wall with a door. We had to study the model and its wireframe in Unreal, and then re-model its basic shape in maya. The teacher really wanted us to put a different texture on the model, so it wouldn’t match exactly, and I thought it would be cool to make an Art Deco styled asset (was thinking about Bioshock at the time). Unfortunately for me, I didn’t take advantage of Xnormal. For some stupid reason, I assumed Xnormal was meant for organic styled models, I don’t know why. Also, you’ll notice that the texture looks like crap. Again, out of my stupidity I decided not to use royalty free textures, like the ones on CGTextures.com. I used my own and edited the crap out of them in photoshop. The yellow-orange color is supposed to be gold. I should have studied the models in unreal that had a gold material applied to them and see if I could duplicate it in mine, I’m sure it would have made my project a tad bit better.

Re-Topo

Re-topo
EGD235 - 3D modeling: Assignment one.
Spring 2009 – Second Semester, sophomore year

This was fun; this was the first time we got to mess around in Pixologic’s Zbrush. We didn’t do any sculpting, but messed with the re-topologizing feature Zbrush has. We used Zbrush’s DemoHead as a high poly model, and re-topologized it trying to get it under our target triangle count. I don’t have the original paper, so I can’t think of the max count, but my grade sheet says I got under that amount with 1,192 triangles. It was an interesting project, trying to figure out how to get the polygons to follow the form of the head and not have messy geometry. After we created a low polygon version of the head, we were then shown the UV unwrapping program called RoadKill. This allowed us to easily unwrap our head model and clearly see any stretched or compressed UV coordinates. Once we were happy with that, our teacher gave us a nice high resolution front, side, and top view of a human face to use as a texture. Everyone had different ways of creating the texture. My way was to just edit the face in photoshop on my UV texture as a reference. Then I went into Zbrush and fixed the seam in the back of the head using Projection Master and ZApplink. As you can see by the freaky looking stare he’s giving, I didn’t really pay attention to the eye placement. I tried as much as I could to change the low poly model’s eye lids without the texture getting too distorted.

Robo Roy

Robo Roy
EGD215 - Introduction to 3D modeling: Assignment four.
Fall 2008 – First Semester, sophomore year

For our final projects, we were to create something using everything we learned during the semester. It had to be animated at 30 frames per second and play for at least 15 seconds. It also had to be textured with a diffuse, normal, and secular with all textures not going above 1024x1024. The only difference between this and the other projects was that we actually had to render our animation, and then go into Adobe After Effects to create a QuickTime Movie. Since I’m a really stupid person and didn’t manage my time in a wise way, my project was animated in less than 4 hours the night before it was due (That night I could sense Walt Disney’s ghost trying to kick me in the nuts for that). I was reminded that again when I showed it to the class and my teacher said in a confused tone “It doesn’t make sense.” It makes me cringe that I actually have to explain what he’s trying to do (and cringe every time I watch it), since all animations should clearly tell the viewer what’s going on. Basically, the robot wakes up noticing that his leg is no longer attached to his body, however he can’t reach it. He then pounds his fist on the ground in anger and gives up. I could already understand what was going on when working on the project because I could view it from all angles in Maya, but the poor camera placement screwed it up for the rendered scene.

The only difference between this video and the one i submitted is that this one has a bigger resolution and was rendered using mental ray.

Fire Extinguisher

Fire Extinguisher
EGD215 - Introduction to 3D modeling: Assignment three.
Fall 2008 First Semester, sophomore year

This assignment centered on animation. We were required to make a model that would only have one point of contact with the ground when moving (Pretty much like a pogo stick or someone in a sack race.). It also had to interact with something in some way. We were restricted to only using five joints which I didnt really enjoy, but I was able to pull it off only using five. I dont have the assignment sheet for this either, but I think the specs said the animation had to be at least 10 seconds long, running at 30 frames per second.

This video isn't the original one i handed in, it was graded from the perspective viewport in Maya.

Crate and Barrel

Crate and Barrel
EGD215 - Introduction to 3D modeling: Assignment two.
Fall 2008 – First Semester, sophomore year
This assignment required us to create a barrel and crate. The barrel had to be less than 250 triangles and the crate less than 120 triangles. Both the barrel and the crate had to share the same 1024x1024 diffuse, normal, and secular texture map. Unfortunately for us, we weren’t aware of the technique of building a high poly model and a low poly model to bring into a program that would create a normal map and an ambient occlusion map of the high poly model on the low poly model. The barrel and crate’s normal map was created using Nvidia’s Normal map Filter for Photoshop. Also, all sides of the crate had to have legible text on it.

Just like the other shots, I added a background, lights, and rendered it in mental ray for this shot. The assignment didn't require us to render it out, it was graded from within Maya.

Headphones

Headphones
EGD215 - Introduction to 3D modeling: Assignment one.
Fall 2008 – First Semester, sophomore year
For this assignment we had to create a complex object . I went with my headphones (I think it’s called the SONY MDR-V150 Studio Monitor Series Headphones). I can’t remember what the triangle count was (I can’t find the assignment sheet), but it was probably around the 4000 to 6000 mark. I got confused and actually smoothed this one out so what you see is actually 23,680 Triangles.

In this revised image, I added a background, some lights, and rendered it in mental ray.

Leon

Leon
EGD215 - Introduction to 3D modeling: Learning Autodesk Maya 2008.
Fall 2008 – First Semester, sophomore year

This is the Leon character model (his body at least) that we created from the Learning Autodesk Maya 2008 The Modeling & Animation Handbook. They actually based this character off of the Leon from Laika Entertainment’s Moongirl. This basically taught us the gist of modeling a character, and how to model something off of a reference image. Later on, we went and unwrapped the body we made and unwrapped the pre-made head to texture it.

There was five minutes left in class but we finished what we needed to do, so I made a pumpkin and put it on his neck.

Getting Started

Wow, I wanted to start adding things to this like two months ago, my bad. There's also something i should mention. I'm not a writer and I pretty much suck at it. So this journal might be filled with a crap ton of grammatical errors and wording that sounds confusing. Enjoy!

Anyway, here's the first assignment we were given:

Getting Started
EGD215 - Introduction to 3D modeling: Maya Help Tutorial.
Fall 2008 – First Semester, sophomore year
A temple we created from a Maya tutorial in order to understand how to use the program. I can’t say this is the first thing I created in a 3D art program. Before this I took a CAD class in high school, messed around a lot in Valve Hammer Editor for Half-Life and later for HL2, and even got a Noesis DVD to help me understand Softimage XSI before I started school.

This picture actually isn't the original, i added lights, a background, and rendered it using mental ray. Doesn't hurt to make something simple more presentable does it?

Hey, first post!

Hey, first post! WOO!

Anyway, I should probably start by explaining the reason for this blog. It's really meant for me to keep track of all the artwork I've created since my second year at Champlain College in Burlington, Vermont. I say second instead of first because during the time of my enrollment the program didn't offer 3D Art classes freshman year (it's changed now).

The program teaches us how to model and animate in Autodesk Maya, Sculpting in Zbrush, the pipeline of getting assets in engine (like Unreal), and a bunch of other nifty stuff.

I'm a little curious to see my progression of 3D art skill, and really my art skill in general.

By the way, my name's Evan. Right now I'm a Junior (on winter break) about to start my second semester.