FMP: current ideas and thoughts

For my final major project I want to build an environment. Specifically a decaying city similar to the likes of what has been depicted in I am Legend or Crysis 3. I have not set myself on a particular location and think developing one from scratch will give me more flexibility than working from somewhere that already exists. This is what I am looking for.  (none of these images are mine, they are collages of existing media that I do not own myself, just to clarify).

 

I quickly developed some top view maps, just to understand scale and how I could potentially block things out. 

Here is a 3D whitebox of what I could pull off, of course after getting feedback on this by the tutors I realised that the scale was far too large for the time scale I have. Bearing this in mind I will probably build around one third of what is shown below. Also there is no vertical areas so interior will be implemented. Also focal points are almost non existent so that also has to be assessed and developed.

Project Two: Vehicle

 

For this 4 week project I was given 10k tri's for the vehicle, and 1 x 1024 as texture budget. I chose to work on an existing car instead of developing a concept as I thought this may prove to be a challenge to squeeze into this small budget. The goal of this brief as set to us by Codemasters with there custom shader's was to fake real time in 3ds max and getting the most out of our textures. 

I did some quick colour's and variations in bumpers, and then completed the vehicle within the 10k budget. 

 

After that, I worked on a highpoly for the normal maps, the bake worked well for some areas but I ended up painting the door line normals manually as the bake was quite pixelated in this area. 

Below was the environment I made for the setting, it was done in a day and is only diffuse maps with lighting. 

After this project I think i realized just how much I hate shaders. I honestly found myself working as a technical artist and fixing so many problems, bugs and glitches that it actually took away time I could have spent on the environment and other design elements. Though because of this it was a good learning experience of issues that could very easily occur in industry.

Paintings!

In Between the uni work I found time to do these quick paintings, just for practice if nothing else

Project One: Rooftop

For the first project for my third year I worked on a rooftop that I designed, built in 3ds max and put together in UDK. I textured everything in Photoshop and Crazybump for my normal maps. Here are my moodboards I made, my design direction took me towards a night scene with a football pitch or two incorporated into the architecture of a rooftop.

I then started to develop various pitch designs, patterns and colour's a flat green would be way too boring!

Some thumbnails were made soon after for scale, lighting and a better understanding of design. I chose 3 that caught my eye best and developed them further into 3d concepts.

These next renders show a more final, developed level. I started fleshing it out and adding various small assets.

After putting everything together in UDK the final outcome varied slightly. I did not have the texture budget to add the advertising boards into the level but apart from that, everything else came out quite well. the texture budget was 4 x 1024 and the tri budget was 20k; the duration was 4 weeks. 

I learned tons about UDK, scale and quick asset creating during this project, one thing I did miss was the surrounding buildings which I may add over the Christmas break, as for now, I'm calling it finished.

The Summer

As this is my first post on here I guess a quick introduction is in order. Today, I am an artist in my final year at De Montfort University studying Game Art Design and I just completed the first project of the year. But before that lets go back to the summer.

Through this period I gave deep thought into what I really wanted to do with my life and what direction I wanted to take in terms of working the games industry. When I first joined it all was all about concept art, 2d paintings and design. As the years progressed 3D has taken my interest just as much so I found myself torn between the two. I would enjoy working as an environment/hard surface artist considering 3D but will leave doors open for my 2d work and try get in as much painting practice as I can. So lets begin! Here is some of what I did in the summer.