digital painting

Brushing up on my digital painting skills and made this character. Metal reflection isn't the dopest but I'm pretty happy with the way the piece turned out overall. The is my first attempt at digital painting.

more illustrator

I really like Illustrator. I've made a couple of different cool pieces. I finished my pig sheriff a little while ago and I really like the way it turned out. Here's something new I'm working on.

illustrator character

I've been trying to pick up Illustrator, Flash and 3DS Max. So many programs to learn, so little time. This is a little taste of what I'm working on in Illustrator. It's a pig sheriff I drew a while back. There's a lot of great Illustrator tutorials on this dudes youtube page.

https://www.youtube.com/user/JREAMdesign

I've learned a ton of 3DS Max with this dudes tutorials too.

https://www.youtube.com/course?list=ECA12BF2F8CC489A50&feature=plcp

Not done yet. 20 percent-ish. I'm liking Illustrator so far.

russian city

I've been working on some Russian city with Stalinist type architecture. I like how the snow is looking so far. I'm working on a tram car with a full interior and a bunch of other props to populate the scene.

lin fung temple environment

Trying to bust out another environment before graduation. In this project, I'm primarily trying to use a lot tiling textures textures in smart and efficient ways. I'm also thinking of using like a grand total of one 1024x1024 texture sheet for all assets. Maybe I'll change that though as I progress.

desert update

I've been working on finishing my desert environment so I can present it in my demo reel. I've made a lot of updates and changes to it in the past few weeks. I think I'm almost done with it now. I really do like the way it's turning out. One thing that's bothering me is that it's all yellows and oranges and brown. A nice complementary color like some sort blue or a deep red would really help the scene out and make it pop. I'm thinking of having a nice royal blue flag hanging on one of those pillar structures. I wonder if that would be historically accurate though...?

Also, I need more foliage models and textures. The ground needs to look more thick with bushes and grass and stuff.

website under construction

I'm working on an official fancy pants website for my portfolio work and portfolio class. Take a look.

http://jeffreybodden.wix.com/portfolio

Wix is a pretty dope website creator. I think I'm going to buy www.standardgamecompany.com and point it to my portfolio site. It's only like 9 bucks for a year.

uhh yeah dude

uhh yeah dude is a great podcast. Here are just some updates on the project I've been working on. More models and more textures. Different sky too.

I've been working on some sci fi environment for the past few weeks now. It was a project I had done for a class a long time ago. It was pretty simple back then. It was really blocky and it basically had some really uninteresting textured walls, some floor textures and 2 different types of crates. It was pretty bland and uninspired. It was super sparse too.

I always wanted to go back to it though and turn it into something nice. And here's how it's looking so far. It's got a ton of assets and it's a rather big environment but I'm close to finishing it. My idea behind it was to create a cartoony/stylized mmo type environment where everything is low poly or as optimized as it needs to be. I like the look of games like WoW, SW:TOR, Aion, the thousands of Korean mmos and all those other stylized games. I specifically think Star Wars: The Old Republic is one amazing looking game, both technically and artistically, and I wanted to replicate a style similar to that game.

pillar # 2

I made another pillar for this sci fi environment I'm working on. I like this one a lot more than the previous pillar I made. I think there's more subtle color variation in the metal which I think works well.

I made 90% of the normal map using this amazing program called ndo2. I guess you can describe it as sculpting program/add-on for photoshop. It's a pretty ingenious program. The other 10% was high poly modeling to give the object smooth corners.

This youtube tutorial pretty much goes through all the awesome stuff you can do with the program. I just found out about the program yesterday but it's no doubt going to speed up my work flow significantly.

hand painted pillar

I played a little of Star Wars: The Old Republic during the free trial last week and I was really impressed with its graphics. It's not hyper-realistic Crysis-like but I think it's really beautiful with colorful stylized graphics. I like how most things look pretty low poly but have really strong normals that pop. So I decided to try and make some models with a hand painted look and give them normals that push details. As I look at it now, I think the texture could use a bit more color in the metals

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zbrush work

I've been doing some sculpting the past few days. Here's what I have so far. I'm currently working on the diffuse. These assets are for my udk desert level.

An asset I've made for my game prototyping class. I've been working on an event that takes place in the kitchen so I pretty much live there now. Along with working on that event, I've been making assets to populate the kitchen with.

Just some painting

Dry brush water color

It's my birthday

And I'll do school work if I want to. Ugh, lame joke. It's my birthday and I'll make lame jokes if I want to. I'm in a class this quarter called Game Prototyping 2. We're making a horror theme first person game using Unreal called Ravenward. Last quarter I did a lot of designing and experimenting with UDK. This quarter I'm doing the same but I'm also creating some art assets as well. I rendered these 3 objects in Marmoset. Next asset I'm working on is a kitchen ventilation exhaust.

S.T.A.T. stadium

I'm taking this class called Senior Project 1 and it's been a pretty great experience so far. Our class is creating a game named Steel to Ashes. It's abbreviated to S.T.A.T.(Steel to Ashes Tournament.) It's a car combat game kind of like Twisted Metal or Vigilante 8. The backstory is pretty interesting. Three intergalactic species participate in destruction derby sports event that broadcasted all over the galaxy. The whole class is working very diligently.

I'm creating stadium assets.

Some level I designed

I haven't posted in forever. This blog should be something that shows my progress as a 3D artist but I'm not doing a good job updating it with new stuff. But I have an idea of what I'm going know to put up next so I guess that's good. And I'll be doing that soon in the next couple of days.

Last quarter I took this class called Advanced Level Design and I feel I got a lot out of it. In 12 weeks, we were tasked with thinking up a level for a type of game, researching games of our chosen genre, drawing level plans, writing a design document, creating models, creating textures and putting everything together to make a level in Unreal. I even did a little scripting which I'm putting to use in another class. What I really like about the class was learning how to think "modularly". I think the class was more about design then creating art but I increased my understanding in both areas.

So I made a desert level for a game I dubbed " The Order of Vulcan." I looked at the areas of Jordan and Israel for reference and inspiration. Petra in Jordan was particularly wonderful reference. I "created" The Order of Vulcan in my first level design class. The level I designed was supposed to be one of the final levels for the game. I imagined the game being a action-rpg game similar to Zelda and Final Fantasy. The player would be a sort of James Bond of the ancient world working for a secret society called The Order of Vulcan. He would travel the ancient world with crazy ancient technology and even crazier futuristic technology. Vulcan is the Roman equivalent of the Greek god Hephaestus. They were both the gods of technology, metal, blacksmiths and other stuff. Hence the name. It's more than a far-fetched story, it's pretty ridiculous. But what game doesn't have a fun, asinine story?

All the models and textures(except the sky and trees) were made by me. Since the class was more about design then art, not all models and textures are at the quality I want them to be. There are some weird graphical shadow artifacts here and there too. I really like how the cliff-sides came out though. Anyway, I plan on fixing a lot of the artifacts, re-texturing some stuff and overall just bumping up the quality to make it a nice portfolio piece.

Is the new Pirates any good?

The previous three were pretty solid. I did this for my character modeling class and I kinda like the way it came. It's a low poly model of Pintel (Lee Arenberg) from Pirates of the Caribbean films. A couple of more additions like the a beard, sword and scarf and I'll start uving and texturing.

So does anyone know how to render quads in Maya Vector?

This is my blog. Welcome.

Woo hoo. I have a blog. I'll post a collection of my 2D and 3D art work here soon.