Yes and I'm back once again, now Its time to get posting stuff and keep the improvement wheel rolling. I've been experimenting for a few days to learn how people create these realistic landscapes in UDK with the help of worldmachine. Most times I've tried earlier just ended with.. well a crash. With a fresher UDK on my computer it finally worked, so now I'm on it to make a good master material to help bring some fidelity to the environment more close on.

Graduated and back in the fray

Finally I've graduated, just waiting for that final approval from school and they'll send me my degree!

It's such a relief too, I was hoping I could juggle portfolio work along with the thesis writing, but life tends to give you other plans. But now it's done, and with that I've been working to get back in the art groove and job searching. As for game art I've now begun to work on environment art aimed at RTS games, so huts away!

First I began with the concepting of course, as in the spirit of the ANNO games, which I love, I thought the design should revolve around the plot in stages. Think a building which goes through stages from mud pile, camp, hut and so forth until it's a proper mansion in itself.

I also did some low poly blocking beforehand to explore a few options of buildings to make, I will probably do more if I decide to do more buildings, but for now I settled on the hut. 

Now this hut I've taken the farthest, it consists of 3 components with its own texture space. The building, the ground "anchor", and the doodahs (which means props I guess, seen it a lot in old game editors). The ide of splitting it up like that was to enable the doodahs to be reused in other building slots as well as giving the option of reposing the plot to give an alternate version of it. Stylewise I'm going for a handpainted style, the hut currently takes 400 tris, the ground 40 and the doodahs 415 triangles.

Going to continue working on it tomorrow, curious how big a village I could end up making :D

Oh, and if you're one of the 1-2 people coming by, do comment! Or critique! I appreciate both equally.

Medieval construction

Medieval architecture is kinda fun, these buildings were built to be sturdy even with the materials that were('nt) available. But they have that fun idea of settling, that is, they reshape themselves over time depending on their structural integrity and the ground it stands on.

No wonder they medieval cities were so tight, the buildings sure needed their neighbors to hold themselves standing! No but on a serious note though, its quite an important thing to consider, since a medieval building with all straight angles could seem a bit off, unless it just got built. But that's sorta what I've been working a bit with today, building modular pieces for buildings to use in UDK. Also for this I made a new wood texture, yesterday's one didn't quite fit the bill since it looked a bit too worn (that would probably work better as a scaffold piece).

I'm still debating how large modular pieces I should do, 256^2 ones or entire floor sections in varying sizes. Also I'll have to experiment in how to get the settling effect with modular pieces, but settling is easier within the wood bars at least. That's was all I got for today, tomorrow I'll see if I can tackle the roofing.

Back to the battlements

Yay, finally the theoretic part of my thesis is done. But now I finally can do what I've been longing for, the actual art. Now this project I'm starting work on will be a quasi-medieval/fantasy village or outpost. It's both for the continuation of my thesis work, and will be a nice addittion to my portfolio as assets gets finished.

(As for what this wall-resting construction could be, I guess a merchant stand or maybe some sort of stable.)

Now here we have todays work, at first it started with a sculpt and texturing of a wooden bar, it then evolved into some modular practice. The construction is made from the single model texture and with all the bits and pieces its at about 900 tris, something I think I'll be able to cut down quite a bit if I give it another round of optimizing. But todays biggest timesink I guess was figuring out UDK lightmaps, something I'll have to rework in that model since it could only apply a very basic variant of it.

Qin Shi Huang Soldier

Yesterday I finally finished up the work sample I was working on, It was quite a fun project to work on and as always a nice learning experience as well. I'm glad it also helped me get better at updating this blog a bit more regularly. Now though I'm back to my thesis writing and hopefully some time can be spent on my entry for the game artisan competition.

Lynx Viking + I got a combo going

Feels good to actually have been able to make something each day to put up on the blog. Think I'm going to keep it going, no reason to stop the combo! Nowadays I'm mainly busy with two things, my dissertation/thesis and jobs searching/work sampling. But feeling an upwards swing I think I'm actually going to take some more work on, feels good having stuff to do. So I saw that Game Artisans were holding a new competition, the last one was one of the first I managed to participate in and also complete, so now I'm thinking of joining the new one. Yesterday I sat up late and worked on this concept of a Lynx viking, will be interesting!

Tech Reaper

Did some late night doodling.