Tau XV8 Crisis Battlesuit

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

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

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

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.

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.