Job(s)

I just wanted to let my friends, who may check my blog from time to time, know what I'm up to.

I signed on as a contractor to a start-up game company in Redwood City where I'll be responsible for concept design / modeling / level creation and other assorted photoshop work that will need to be done. I couldn't have imagined that my first job would be something this fun :D I'm really looking forward to being able to continue to increase my drawing/painting ability and get paid for it - and on top of that the game is already looking very cool! The company is working in 'stealth mode' so I'm not able to say much about it, or show work that I do, but from the looks of it it won't be long till I can post/link some fun stuff.

I also have another contract going that will be creating 3D assets for the casual game market (ex; iphones). This one hasn't begun yet but should shortly.

Wow I'm gonna be busy, and it's gonna be a lot of fun!! :D

---- Also, I haven't entirely forgotten about the ogre. I actually rendered out a turn table of him with a composited Ambient Occlusion turn table on top and it looks really great! The only problem is it is 88 megs and I don't know how to shrink it without losing much quality. If I ever figure that out I'll post it.

Progress and Learning

Continuing with the idea of having kittens in the scene, I decided that I wanted to have 3; one looking up to the ogre, one sleeping, and one playing with a butterfly. This update shows the placement and general posing that I'm going for. Things that are missing or unfinished, are the butterfly and the bedding the kitten is on won't be just a block - I'm just not sure what to make it yet.

Now for things that I've learned during this small step. For one, the smooth tool in Modo is amazing. It will average out so many issues that arise from posing meshes, I only wish I had used it more a while ago.

Also with the help of Christian and Mike I figured out how to make my renders look better. This image (above) is an ambient occlusion render with the white range turned way up to minimize the amount of dark values that appear in the scene. The purpose of this is to take this render, and composite it with a color render (below) using the multiply blend mode in Photoshop to really enhance the shadows of your scene. The result is the image at the top of this post. I will update more soon.

WIP movie

A WIP turn-around. The biggest issue with the model when I last posted, was that it was just an ogre-like figure. That is already cliche, so I need to work the scene to make it memorable otherwise it will probably be a wasted slot in my reel. I don't know if my direction is working, so any comments are helpful, but my idea is to add kittens to the scene to show that this big fat ogre is really a softie and that he is protecting them from some outside enemy (which I may need to hint at).



Well this turned out to be really low quality, but I'll leave it up for now. Heres an image as well.

That ground texture sure is hurting up close...