I haven’t managed to post in a week or so as I have been really busy. I scanned a bunch of stuff from some old sketchbooks last night so will be adding more 2D stuff soon! Here are 2 more drawings from my college (and pre-college) days, One is a rather technical drawing of the bathroom in a house I once rented in London and the other is a layout of a ship exterior done as part of a storyboard sequence for Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”. Originally paper and pencil, treated for presentation purposes here.
Laid out…
•August 19, 2011 • Leave a CommentThese were my first two layouts while studying Computer Animation and 3D Modelling at Ballyfermot College (now the ISA). The course leaned heavily on traditional principles of classical animation, so a large part of the coursework was drawing. I have been drawing since I could hold a crayon in my mouth but it was interesting to learn about best practice and professional techniques employed in major studios like Disney and Sullivan Bluth, who had a large studio in Dublin during the 80s and 90s. The layouts below are from separate college assignments and bear no relation to each other. The originals are pencil on animation paper, these have been treated for presentation.
Chaos Engines…
•August 13, 2011 • Leave a CommentAll of these images were promotional images/test renders from my time at Instinct Tech. We had done a bunch of Soviet propaganda style artwork that would have been used in the broader Dreadnought universe, it seemed fit in well with the fact the Dreadnought of the title was a Russian warship. We played with cyrillic fonts and reduced colour palettes , usually starting with a cel-shaded render of some of the game assets in Brazil RS, two of which are below.
The monster truck and locomotive were also 3D models rendered in a 2 colour cartoony style, these images were ideas for t-shirt print designs to promote the company at GDC back in 2003 or 2004. The idea was a play on the word “engine”, so the images comprised large vehicles that could only be run on a powerful engine. by a The remaining images are from the Prospector demo, the logo from some look development and the image of him reading was a pose test when I did a cover for Develop magazine focussing on middleware. I must have mocked up close to 20 covers, I’ll post the final print version in a future post.
Wake early…
•August 6, 2011 • Leave a CommentFrom Wikipedia : “Wake Island is a coral atoll in the North Pacific Ocean, located about two-thirds of the way from Honolulu 2,300 statute miles (3,700 km) west to Guam 1,510 statute miles (2,430 km) east. It is an unorganized, unincorporated territory of the United States, administered by the Office of Insular Affairs, U.S. Department of the Interior. Access to the island is restricted, and all current activities on the island are managed by the United States Air Force.” The gamers among you may know Wake Island from the Battlefield series of games, where it’s popularity as a multiplayer map has never waned. In the early days of developing Dogfighter, we needed a basic landscape map to test out flight controls and as hardened Battlefield fans, we chose Wake.
These images of Wake Island are renders from 3DSMax with heavy post work in Photoshop. They were modelled and textured from overhead photographs for a very early prototype of Dogfighter. The textures didn’t hold up well close up, but were fine for backgrounds for firefights between biplanes at high altitude. The elevation of the island was guessed, and the more rugged areas of high ground were elevated based on shadowing in the overhead source images. I generated a 4k normal map by hand to add roughness to the beach areas where the island met the sea and stitched together overhead photographs to fluff out detail. The images were rendered for promotional material, probably a game design document or pitch and were treated to look like old printed postcards and polaroids.
Spaaaaaaaaaaaaace….
•August 3, 2011 • Leave a CommentSome look development/promotional work for an early draft of an abandoned game pitch. The plot revolved around the terraforming of a remote and desolate planet. The monolithic structure in the background was a massive terraforming space ship that carried tens of thousands of crew. This planet would prove to be the catalyst for a ferocious war between competing terraforming corporations and an unseen indigenous threat…
The landscape was modelled to use in some skybox cubemaps so it was easy to drop in the ship model and belt out some renders. Modelled/rendered in 3DSMax (scanline) with post effects in Photoshop. The barren landscape was textured procedurally with Simbiont from Darktree. (Epic lens flare is from Video Post in Max 😉 )
Far right image is the same planet post terraformation. Landscape generated in Terragen and rendered in Brazil RS.
Chocks Away…
•July 29, 2011 • Leave a CommentThis is a seldom seen character from the game Dogfighter by Dark Water Studios, the “Allied Pilot.” Actually, he’s in every plane on the Allied team but when playing you never get to see any more than the back of his head. The high poly version of this character was modelled in 3DSMax and with further detailing in ZBrush by one of the most talented artists I know, Men Lu who is currently working for Media Molecule, creators of the awesome Little Big Planet on PS3. The low poly version, which I modelled and textured, ended up chopped off at the waist and even had the rig removed from what I remember, the planes became the stars of the show with the pilots just being there for detail. The oldie looking image was a mess around one friday afternoon 🙂
Drawn this way…
•July 26, 2011 • 6 CommentsA few freehand sketches from my college years, pencil and coloured pencil (Polychromos)
My sister bought me a bunch of these coloured pencils in Switzers (now Brown Thomas) about 15 years ago and I still have some of them, others are worn down to mere nibs!
Fully Loaded…
•July 21, 2011 • 2 CommentsMore guns! Top row is a high poly version of a Special Forces pump-action shotgun used to generate the normal maps and base textures for the player character’s weapon in Dreadnought. The “Heavy Merc” characters also carried these bad boys and combined with heavier body armour provided quite a challenge towards the game’s end, you can see one about to open fire below.
You can also see the same shotgun in the player character’s hands with an added fold-out stock on the top. This was added for cosmetic reasons, as the shotgun silhouette in first person mode wasn’t beefy enough to represent the additional power of the weapon. Wear and tear detailing was added to the diffuse and specular maps to make the shotgun feel more like an “old familiar” weapon that had triumphed in many gunfights, rather than a new firearm recently unboxed. These images are modelled and rendered in 3DSMax with the scanline renderer and DOF hacked in using Photoshop.
Bottom row is a sniper rifle I modelled in my spare time that I had hoped to shoehorn in somehow, it never got past high poly stage though. I think I have the 3dsmax files somewhere so I may go back and fashion a low poly version with textures, although there is little in the way of interesting detail apart from the stock, which attracted me to that particular weapon in the first place. These images were modelled in 3DSMax and rendered in Mental Ray with DOF and grading in Photoshop.
Winos throwing frisbees at the sun…
•July 18, 2011 • Leave a CommentBEERCANS! These images are from work done for a drinks company who were testing out consumer reaction to the shapes of new beer bottles. I modelled, textured and rendered the bottles before they were prototyped, these images were for proof of concept that the final images could be detailed enough to print and close to photoreal. You wouldn’t believe how complex it can be to get stuff like this signed off, one of the bottles needed to have beer in it which meant proper IOR for the glass and beer and colours that had to match exact Pantone swatches exactly! Tough when you have a 3D scene with reflections/refractions/highlights/shadows trying to get everything to play nice with swatches from a marketing bible.
The pint glass image is from a poster I did for a local fella in Donegal who was promoting his website and a town festival. It was done in a day and rendered using V-Ray on a Pentium 4 laptop, which took up most of the time as the image was for an A4 print at 300 dpi.
Quick shot…
•July 13, 2011 • Leave a CommentQuick post – some real-time renders of weaponry from Dreadnought in the Instinct Engine The MP5 style machine gun was used as one of the FPS character switchable weapons and had a cool scope that refracted the scene in real-time, the pistol (with laser sight, silencer and flashlight attachment) was cut due to time constraints.
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