ZBrush tiling textures

There's been a definite lack of finished works to post to the blog lately. It's not that I've been lazy, but the last few months have really been about hunkering down and learn the technical nitty gritty of both Max and UDK. It's led to lots of fun and interesting experiments, but not a lot of beautiful results.


This weekend I was struck by the urge to jump back into ZBrush (after far, far too long) and finally learn how to sculpt seamless textures from scratch.

Rendered in UDK

Success! Today I think I finally nailed the process. This isn't a gorgeous material in it's own right (especially compared to Uncharted's materials, which I was what I was aiming for), but it's proof the process works and produces technically clean results without the need to touch up maps after the fact. It should be noted that absolutely no hand-painting went into this one- the diffuse is made up of masks and a photo, and the sculpt was made using a procedural rock I got from a maxscript. The whole thing could probably be reproduced in 30 minutes.

The Kingdom - lighting test

Trying to create a foggy streetlight effect in UDK. This is part of my ongoing project, The Kingdom.

The Librarian's Crypt

Well, that took forever. My entry for Blizzard's environment art contest, as well as the thing I've spent he better part of the last two months working on. It turned out quite well, all things considered. 

A few things to keep in mind next time I do a mini-environment (which I certainly shall):

-More contrast in value/ less contrast in color.

-Use saturated colors more sparingly.

-Keep a strong focal point. It's hard when you spend hours detailing everything in your scene, but ultimately some things have to take a backstage to others.

-This isn't spectacularly World-of-Warcraft-like, which usually means two dominant colors per scene. The color gradient comes slightly closer to Allods, which was no accident. I look at Allods art a lot for reference, personally I kinda prefer it to WoW.

Dust Lighthouse in UDK

So, I couldn't resist bringing my lighthouse into UDK, given how much I've learned about lightmass and postprocessing in the last few months. This is what it looks like in the default scene, no frills. I think I'm going to go in and play around a bit as soon as I finish some of my more pressing obligations...

Bone Axe

Been doing some small weapon studies any time I need a break from my current project. Here's one I did off a concept I painted in approx. 15 minutes.

I tried to make improvements to the design as I modeled. There's no excusing the scratches on the blade, though. Those things make no sense at all.

Play Dust!

It's well overdue by now, but here's the link to Dust's IGF page : http://www.igf.com/php-bin/entry2012.php?id=800

and the official page on Adventure Club's site: http://adventureclubgames.com/dust/.

This was clearly a big year for games with "dust" in the title, as there are no less than three in the student comp (including ours) and another two in the main comp. Our screenshot kept showing up on the wrong game games, but I think it's sorted out now.

I'm going to try to do an art mini-mortem on the game in the coming days.

Gaslight concepts

Today I bring you some of the concepts I did a couple months back, during my summer internship at Pixofactor. These were done for the game Gaslight, which was just released for iOS today (and android a few days ago)!  It's a Steampunk city-building game, check it out.


These were my fist attempt painting over 3d renders.While it feels a little like cheating, it's nice to take care of the form and lighting in Blender and focus on color and texture at the painting stage. It's also much, much faster than tying to draw and render things the old fashioned way, and allows me to quickly rearrange forms to find a silhouette I like. I'm thinking this is a good way to do quick concepts in the future.