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.

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.

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.