Portfolio EGD415 – Senior Portfolio: Art & Animation Spring 2011 – Second Semester, Senior Year.
The Senior Portfolio class is exactly what you’d expect it to be. This class helped everyone gather their past projects to tune up and make presentable for a portfolio.
It was also a class every student had to pass in order to graduate. The class requirements consisted of these: -A website to show off your work -A Demoreel to present at Senior Show -Business cards -A resume -A list of 20 or more potential employers.
My web development class paid off a lot, seeing as how I created my whole website from scratch. Here’s what it looks like: www.evanburrill.com
I’m pretty sure I handed in everything I should have, so I believe I should be graduating soon.
Senior Team Project II EGD410 – Senior Team Project II – Team Jealous Giraffe Spring 2011 – Second Semester, Senior Year. Position on the team: Artist
Like I had mentioned before, my original team didn’t get green lit and I had joined up with Team Jealous Giraffe to work on Carnero. The team was a lot bigger than Machina’s, and demanded a lot more work as well. The project had its ups and downs, but I was still able to get portfolio work out of it.
My role on the team was to pump out as many assets as I could, then hand them off to our lead artist to texture. This involved me doing 3 animated enemy robots and several environmental art assets.
Above is a trailer that Bryan and Keith created to be presented at our senior team show.
Maverick N-Strike Nerf gun Spring break Spring 2011, Month of March
I decided to stay in Vermont for spring break instead of going back home to see if I could churn out a good portfolio piece. Not the best way I wanted to spend spring break, but I got something of value out of it.
It was fun project, although it did get agitating. Some of the geometry on the gun is more complex that one would think. It was nice actually owning the gun though, seeing as how I could inspect it with my own eyes when my reference pictures failed me.
This was also a project where I edited a lot of info in the normal map. There were lots of small details in the gun that wouldn’t make sense doing in Maya, so I’d copy and paste certain areas of the normal map and edit them in other sections.
I wanted to see if I could create the gun in a week, but I really only got the high poly and low poly done during that milestone. Whenever I had free time, I’d work on unwrapping, baking, and texturing it to a presentable state. I also time tracked it so I could get a better understanding of how long it takes to model something like that. Hopefully this will allow me to give better time estimates to future employers.
Tau XV8 Crisis Battlesuit EGD380 – Advanced Seminar: Art & Animation Spring 2011 – Second Semester, Senior Year.
Like with the first Advanced Seminar class, we could create anything we wanted. I had a Tau Battlesuit figure from the Warhammer 40,000 tabletop game that I had an urge to model, and decided on that for my project.
Actually I had planned to create the pilot inside of it as well, unfortunately my lung collapsed twice within two months and it threw off my whole schedule. I had to re-adjust what should be due for our milestones, and decided the suit would be good enough.
I also modeled all of the weapons and accessories that come with the kit, just so I could customize different suits with unique weapon setups.
Senior Team Project CCC410 – CC: Game Development – Machina Fall 2010 – First Semester, Senior Year. Designer: Justin Loomis Producer: Justin Loomis Programmer: Willem Kupper Artist: Me
Just like the production classes, we form a team and create a game. The cool thing about this class is that it technically goes on for the whole year. The first semester centers on preproduction, the next semester centers on production. CORE was also able to implement itself into our class, which many people objected to, but it thankfully didn’t get too intrusive.
As for the game itself, we decided to use unity since our programmer was more comfortable with it. Since I was comfortable working with any engine as well, we rarely came into contact with major problems. Any problem we did come across we were able to resolve.
Our game is basically a top down shooter that would have had a unique Outer Space Victorian Steampunk aesthetic. I say would have only because I was concentrating more on churning out placeholder assets so Willem would have something to work with. I didn’t have time to really create Victorian themed assets because of the time spent on my Air Traffic Control room environment; however I did create quite a thorough art guide on what I wanted the art direction to go in.
As a team, we were able to create a working game that we were all pretty proud of. Unfortunately, our game didn’t make green light along with 9 other teams out of a total of 15. That means only 5 went forward. We were all pretty bummed out, but we’re happy with our new positions within the other teams. I’m now part of team Jealous Giraffe taking the position of artist for a UDK game.
Air Traffic Control Room EGD355 – Environmental Art: Assignment 2, Final Project Fall 2010 – First Semester, Senior Year.
This was the second and last project of this class. We had until the end of the semester to make the best environment we can using everything we’ve learned so far. Since I had already done a modern type environment (the courtyard), I wanted to go in a futuristic route. All I knew was that I wanted to create a cylindrical room with some sort of central computer unit.
Not really having a clue what I wanted to actually make it, I decided on creating an air-traffic control room. Instead of there being windows, there would be monitors scattered around the room.
After a few quick sketches, I blocked it out to get the general shape and room. Then I started working on the high poly assets. This was the first assignment where I created high quality high polygon models to bake on a low polygon models. It takes a hell of a long time to do this, but it pays off really well.
Also, I got into some trouble with lighting. Some of my curved meshes wouldn’t calculate light correctly. However I did get some pretty awesome help from some guy (or girl?) named obihb on the UDK forums. He was able to help me figure out how to fix my lighting by reversing my UV channels on my mesh. Not sure if it’s the right way to fix it, but hey, it works.
The project never got finished, but it will be since I’m aiming to have it as my main portfolio piece.
European Courtyard EGD355 – Environmental Art: Assignment 1 Fall 2010 – First Semester, Senior Year.
This project involved creating a small courtyard with both an outdoor space as well as a small interior space. We just had to create meshes with a basic color assigned to them, no textures were involved. I decided to go with a European Victorian style theme.
This assignment helped us to understand blocking something out in a level editor (UDK), export it into a 3d program (Maya), and import the more detailed meshes back into the level editor.
Due to unforeseen events, I was out of a Saturday, Sunday, and Monday – days that I have plenty of time to work on my 3D assignments. This caused me to not finish in time. I still really want to finish the project too; it would make a great portfolio piece.
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 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 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 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.
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.
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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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.
