So initially I didn’t bother much about submitting my entry to the contest at all but I wanted to move on and figured I had the time to round things up with some kind of presentation.

This project was more oriented around experimentation rather than just making something that looked good, attempting to find a minimalist style and the techniques to pull it off, avoiding any advanced shaders or the like.

Technical summary.
The scene is rendered in Unity.
The environment is lit by vertex colors which have been “painted” manually.
Vertex colors are also used to create the glow and shadow effects, using separate meshes for those.
I’m a total beginner at shader coding but I found this fine resource and managed to puzzle together some for the above mentioned effects.

Brief update on my escape project. Did some major optimization on the interior meshes and re-arranged its texture map accordingly. I’m narrowing down the scope of the presentation to just feature the storage hall as seen below as the time is better spent on getting the style right both artistically and technically.

I was going to use light maps for the scene but it didn’t turn out any good so I wen’t another route and tried doing the lighting with vertex coloring instead. So far I’m liking how it’s turning out.

Been quite busy the past two weeks with my Escape entry. Most of the time spent on designing and building the star-ship interior environment on which the two astronauts will blast their way through, desperate to find a vacant escape pod.

Got about two weeks left and I’m quite skeptical if I’ll be able to make what I have in mind. Either way, this experiment has taught me some things. It has got me to research several technical solutions, most of which I probably don’t have time to implement into this project but that doesn’t matter really. The usual reference hunt has proven fruitful as well, helping me make better design decisions.
The most valuable experience so far has been the difficulty of developing a style, particularly for something meant for a game where technical solutions has to be considered. Only just now do I feel that things are starting to come together, particularly in terms of form.

Here’s some view-port grabs from Blender. On a side note I decided to keep the fish monsters and ditch the insect-like things instead. The fishes humanoid structure simply makes them so much more fun to pose.
Technically I’m texturing the whole environment through a so called texture atlas, which is simply all the elements and parts put into one image. For some reason I felt this was the way I should do it. This has proven very costly on polygons as I need to have uv-splits everywhere to be able to puzzle the different elements together, so next thing on the to-do list is to optimize this solution.

Long story short, I ditched my previous project for the Escape Challenge and took off with something completely different, which I’ve been busy with the last 3 weeks.

The concept is simply; astronauts fighting for their survival on a spaceship overrun by Lovecraft inspired monsters, with the twist of clean-styled pixelated 3D graphics and exaggerated proportions. For the final presentation I’m aiming for a sequence of images following a pair of astronauts venturing through several rooms in the craft dealing with different obstacles, mainly the monsters.

Here’s the current progress of the astronaut. The first asset I modeled for this project.

First plan was to have humanoid fish monsters as the main enemy as I found them a bit funny but they will be replaced with another type of creature also inspired from the Cthulhu mythos which will make more sense for the setting.

Some early environment tests. In terms of lighting I haven’t set on any particular style or technique. Below I’ve just made some testing with traditional light mapping.

So far I’m quite excited over the project. The chosen style makes asset production pretty fast but has presented some interesting challenges as well.

So the sketchbook has been going a bit slow recently. I am still drawing but don’t really care to show the new additions right now.

But this post is about something else. A while ago Polycount started a new competition namely The Escape, where one is to make an interpretation of the word escape through building a 3D piece fit for game specifications.

Since it was a while ago I participated in anything I thought it was a good idea to give it a shot. Been mostly blocking things out so far. The concept is a metaphor, a person being tormented by emotional baggage represented as an abstract monstrosity.

I started with some drawings to define the idea. Don’t know how much they actually helped as the 3D version is already taking another direction in terms of style.

The current stage of the models. The monster will provide the greatest challenge technically. As I want a lot of definitions through optimized means I will need to build it with modular pieces and do some material trickery to make things blend together. If I get that far I’ll definitely demonstrate what I had in mind.

For the moment undecided of how I want the girls face to look. Those who know me personally might think it loosely resembles the female version of someone in particular.

Was a while I did any type of painting so I took the opportunity to figure out what I’m aiming for with my Space Marine project.

I usually don’t use 3D as a base but it fitted nicely for this occasion, since I already had the basic shapes figured out it would be quite a waste of time trying build them up again as the purpose of this image was to just refine the design.

Thought it was about time I posted some 3D-related work here.

Been spending the last month fleshing out what’ll be my take on the famous Space Marine (or Adeptus Astartes as I prefer to call them) from the Warhammer 40K universe.

Currently everything is pretty much at the block-out stage. In difference to previous projects I went ahead and created a rig for the character when I had the whole armor fleshed out. I found it very useful for testing and addressing practical issues of the design as well as start thinking about the final presentation which is quite important.

Most of my 3D experience lies with real-time rendered assets but for this project I’m aiming for something fit for film.

As hinted by the screen-shots I’m going to have the warrior standing in some powerful pose on a war-torn pedestal. The presentation will be renders from a couple of angles as well as a turntable-video.