Ok there is a lot to catch you up on. The last few weeks have been a bit hectic but have produced a lot. Mostly I have been focused on art work so that is a relief, but in addition to my work I have been producing a short film and banners for Forward Solutions. Forward Solutions is an entrepreneurial  company that mainly focuses on training items or tools for military personnel.

The most recent product is the BTM-1, a small simulation explosive that is meant to train military and law enforcement people in how to handle disarmament/avoidance of IED’s (Improvised Explosive Device).

Moving on to school and our game and art projects. Our most recent rapid prototype is a game driven to teaching engineering students Thermodynamics – one of the hardest theories to grasp from what the Engineering department states. Our game is a 3rd person exploration game. The premise is a you are trapped in a space station and you need to find a way to escape. You will use exploration, laws of thermodynamics, problem solving, and potential combat to work your way out. My part in this is of course all of the art. Initially I began with the though of doing a platformer, since this was a rapid prototype and older games like ‘Super Mario Bros’ and newer games like ‘Rayman Origins’ have the greatest appeal to people who don’t generally play video games. After drawing up several character designs my group changed the format to a more realistic setting. My new points of reference being ‘Metroid Prime’ and ‘Dead Space’. I don’t have any delusions that these games can be created so easily but it will be a fun challenge to try and tackle.

I have already modeled a corridor and a splitting hallway that can be repeated easily. At first I tried to do a very high res hallway and use a transfer map to created the detail on a lower poly model. The programmers are working with XNA and I remembered from my work in ‘Heroes of Hat’ that a shader needs to be written to handle bump/specular maps. To alleviate the weight of there shoulders I revamped my model to much more simple but still contain enough elements to hold the same feel as the style of games we are exceeding to. Unfortunately I don’t have the model at the computer I’m posting from so I’ll show you later. What I can show is some of my earlier character concepts.

For my game art class we have had a few assignments.

The FIRST of these is to take a standard alleyway model and apply a texture, normal map, and specular map to create the best product that you can. I used several existing tag png’s for the graffiti and created a tiled brick, cement, and street texture off of stock photos. I also used a Gobo to create the tree silhouette on the side of the building, and created the street poles and newspaper to add a little more to a mundane scene.

The SECOND was a series of drawing assignments. The first was to draw 3 pictures of your family doing an activity. The second was to do a few pages of weapons. Third was my own assignment to try and emulate a new style of characterization.

1st – I would show you the others but I tried to do them in pen and they aren’t my proudest of drawing moments =(

2nd

3rd – my next personal project will be to try and emulate the level design of the game ‘Rayman Origins’ which has some of the most incredible artwork, and color design.

The THIRD – is an on going assignment. The assignment is to create a building with normal/specular maps, under 3K tris, and a total of 1024×1024 texture size. The building choices are between the Wells Fargo building in Salt Lake, the Grand America, or the State Capitol Building. I chose the capitol since it seems like the most difficult and a good challenge. I finished the model, UVs, and first stage texture and normal map last night. The next step is to create a better texture for and normal map for the area with pillars. In the first run I simply created a texture in photoshop – but in this next run I will create a model that I can used to do a Transfer Map w/ambient occlusion, and normal map, to pull the best results out of my simple model.

Oh! and last but not least is the speed model challenge. In the beginning of every Game Art I class we receive an image from our professor. We then have the next 45 minutes to an hour to do our best to model (not texture) whats in the image. Here is todays work