Level up as in I need to get a damn job! It's been over half a year year since I graduated and I've been away from game art for alot of that time. But I've also been doodling away at a few programs and hopefully picking up a thing or two, and I need to get serious, get back into the flow and work on something that will actually get done and revamp my poor student folio. To that effect, I've been hitting the tutorials hard since January as a kind of motivational kickstarter, and it's really worked!

So here is what I've been working on since Febuary, and a little todo list:

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The first thing I needed practice with was foliage, so... (click for larger)


I love the mood of this concept. I'm going to be taking liberties with it, but this will be my main inspiration for a forested ruins scene. Concept by Ioan Dumitrescu.

Overview of my scene for this project:


...and a paintover I did of where I want to take it.


Lighting foliage is definitely proving challenging, and so far it's looking like I'm going to need some kind of depth based Post Processing to get the background light and golden glow.

Tree Wireframes:


And once more in the default UDK map:

I'm planning on another, larger, tree and a few small bushes to complete the set. In the mean time I have alot of ruined stone bricks to sculpt.

Edit: Oh yeah, One big thing I need to improve is my texturing. I can't seem to get a consistent style between Photosourced, Mostly Baked, and Mostly hand painted textures. Texture painting is something I really want to practice, which I will try to do with my vault scene I think. Here are some from this scene:



The two images on the left are my own photo sourced and painted textures, whilst the two on the right are the result of following in the direction of tutorials, so that accounts for some of the difference in style, ha.


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The second project started off as a Modelling practice session between myself and bbob - the plan being to give each other pictures to tackle each week. Here is what I got... http://i.imgur.com/C7wpu.jpg And here is my High poly.


The low poly is pretty trivial to make, but I'm having to do alot of small baking tests as I go, because these bloody cylinders! URL="http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=81154"]This thread[/URL] has been my bible!

Anyway, I'm hoping to put this into a very small coridoor scene as a hero prop. Sketch of that to come...


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Anyway, I have alot to do! My aim is to update this thread with something at least once a day - and find some time to enter the darksiders contest. Crit me!

Oh, and thanks/credit where its due: Thanks to Damien Lazarski(teaandcigerettes) and Ryan Smith(virtuosic) for their excellent 3dmotive tuts, and once more to Ryan for TreeGen, which I used as a base for my tree! Check it out.

Phew...