This shotgun is based off a series of weapon concept arts that I found online and so far have created three of the six in the set. It may probably be a few weeks before I can post new content but I am now in an intense art mood and I plan to rework the other two weapons I had already made as I learned a bit more from this piece.
Again the aim for this was mainly improving my specular map creation skills and learning to use the Marmoset renderer and using Crazy Bump in my work flow. Secondary objectives were continued refining of my diffuse map creation abilities and now am at a 50/50 mindset of photo-sourcing and hand painting. Maybe in the next few projects I'll aim for a 100% hand painted prop but sticking to a more realistic look and venture into stylized territory, that though is for another day.
I'm revisiting another project I worked on awhile ago and plan to texture it differently than I have before. I made this model a few months ago and am in the process of texturing it again after redoing the horrible UVs that I had made in the past. The aim of this project is to get the metallic parts to look metal and to get that I have to work at the specular. I'll spend quite a bit of time on this but I have to learn to create better specular maps to be able to sell this shotgun to look like one.
Something I've been working on based off a reference image of a hallway and inspiration from Mirror's Edge. It took me about two weeks to model, texture, and light. The main aim for this project was to continue to learn UDK and build on what I already know.
The main learning experience is that diffuse textures will be about 21% darker when imported into the engine because of the switch to using Lightmass. Before I would create darker diffuses and keep the spec to be brighter but after reading the documentation here at the UDN website I found that it should be the opposite. If a diffuse is dark than the engine cannot utilize the full lighting potential of that texture and thus impacting Global Illumination.
Now I can move onto another project and I'm thinking of Sci-fi as I may as well join the bandwagon with everyone else I know.
The latest piece that I have finished in my spare time. This environment is based on a reference image that I have but tweaked around a bit. The idea that I had for this is an abandoned office building that is utilized by a shady organization as a base of operations. These men of the shadows only use this place once every three months in case of being followed by prying eyes.
Over the weekend I attended a Game Jam at Cal State Fullerton to create a working game in 48 hours with the theme of "growth." With a team of 6, and myself as not only a prop modeler but art lead, we managed to finish this game using a piano keyboard as the game controller. The game is a co-op and the objective is to get your torpedo past the other player's submarines once. Various obstacles hinder you like the sea life, opposing torpedoes, and a squid that obscures the field late game.
Using the keyboard each player had a set of 5 keys that are bound to each sub to fire. We disabled the two on the right of the screen as those are meant for higher difficulty levels; that may be implemented in the future but at the moment that is up to debate.
To tie into the theme of "growth" our game used a green bar to signify how much energy you had. The more torpedoes used the lower the bar goes and will gradually refill. The harder the keynote was pressed the more energy used but the faster your torpedo flew through the field.
The goal here was to create a high poly scene based off of a Feng Zhu concept piece. Created near the end of my school term and to see how far I had come in my time at school.
