Some wips

The undead! The undead!

While being at my parents home I took the opportunity to draw some things with traditional pens and markers... Almost forgot how fun that is... Relaxing too...

Props for 2D game

Been a busy week but here comes some props for the 2D-game I am working on at the moment

Mob, WIP

So, last time a modelled a humanoid mob for Dreamlords was about... 2 years ago... Awesome fun, I seem to have learned a lot even though I haven´t done anything like this for a long time.
Took about a day to get model and all UV done...

All I need is while modelling is coffee and good music! Looking forward to texture her, not looking forward to animate her! :-D

[She is a bit undetailed and has very large hands. Why? Because she´s a RTS-unit. I was thinking on letting her hands and hair be extremely red, while the skin will be pale. So that she stands out on the battlefield.]

Hero quick ones

Hero, gonna be much smaller ingame, 2D. Needed something that gave good followthrough, hat, hair, cape or something like that. Like the hair best... Looks like a pen-troll. Yes, I have an affinity for red.

Frog with axe

For Martin

Two legends are slowly shaping up 2

Playing around with proportions, shoulderpads and well, boobs.

Little store with Lego

Small demo made with Unity for upcoming project. Made a little store and placed some Lego (made by Stefan Ribera Olsen) in the scene.

To try it out, click the pic. You need to install the Unity plug-in for your browser. Look around the mouse, move with AWSD

More 2D work, room

Some work, for work

A new challenger appears!

So bro, is Tomato Quest HD coming soon? :-P

2Dgame wip

Some "proof of concept" to see what could be done for a 2D-Zelda/Gauntlet style game.

Also made a exe-with gamemaker to test snowfall, check it out if you like.

Zoomed in

Download Snowtest executable (F4 toggles fullscreen, no other interaction yet ;-)

Snowmen, Cats & Dogs

Two legends are slowly shaping up

WIPs

Paintover

Tried a paintover today, thx for the tip Jonas! Wow it was fast... 1 hour :-) Motif is the lovely Megan Fox in "Transformers"

No comment

Pixel art

Feeling retro, feeling pixelated

Moving on

So Lockpick is no more, and I'm out of a job. This happened months ago, but since I'm a bit slow on the personal posts I haven't gotten around to writing about it. Followed by this was couple of months of portfolio-making and pondering.

At the moment though it seems that I will be starting my own company, together with some former Lockpickers, so feel pretty excited!

Finally got my hands on a scanner, I have years worth of handdrawn images waiting to be scanned... Here are some notes from the lectures I currently am attending about creating my own bussiness. (It makes me listen better. Honest!)

Small Warjack 3D

Finally done with this model. Found myself in a bit of a slump during the last weeks, but hopefully that will blow away soon. What to say about this two-legged fella, then?

Well, he sure had a lot of clean surfaces that I didn't know what to do with. Didn't want to over-texture them with anything too noisy, but I couldn't leave the completely clean either. So found a nice way to do some scratches and holes. Some parts of him is still a bit to highres, like the underside of hos body, but the UV was still ok, to consist of so many parts. Too RED maybe?

Hopefully, the next thing will be more humanlike, I would really like to texture some cool faces, and muscle!

Warjack texture W.I.P 2

Finally got a version of the Warjack made in maya 2009 to work in maya 7. Remember kids, Delete History! Texture is coming along nicely, but the body and the back of the legs needs some more contrast work to stand out a little more

wow potion

So, using different versions of maya resulted in that I was not able to work with my chicken mech at the old office today. So I figured I´ll do something small today. I really love the icons in WoW, they are almost the reason I am playing the game :-D. I always liked the way all the potions looked, so I figured I'd do some of them in 3D. Biggest problem was if the flask would be transparent or not, since this almost always does something bad to your models ingame. Looks ok though, in Maya at least.

Small Warjack W.I.P

Have worked quite some time on this little pack-robot. Found inspiration in a pair of miniatures from the Warmachine Tabletop wargame again. This time it was a witch of sorts, that as a companion had a two-legged robot who carried all sorts of stuff and junk for her. He looked a bit sad by being so overburdened, in a fun way. Couldn't really see much of his body for all that junk, so I just guessed what he could be looking like. Really liked the face and his legs though.
The UV consisted of tons of parts! Took longer than I anticipated, but now I finally have started to give it a texture.

1-handed Axe

Axe all done! Again a lot of fun :-D. I have started to learn what to do with the lot of empty space i recieve on the blade of weapons and such, adding just a hint of noise and scratches to get a "texture" but not make it to grainy. Fast color variations are great when you don't have much time, but still want the player to feel change when she picks up a new weapon. Always make sure the time you are spending on something will be worth it in the long run :-P

Axe W.I.P

Started on a axe, also inspired by some Warmachine model. Starting to get up to speed with my modeling, which is fun. Finished a model, and the UV in one day, to start with textures today.
Should be able to make a model and texture it, all in one day :-P

Frosthammer Complete

Done with texture! Modified the UV during texturing, that is always a hassle... But the finished hammer comes pretty close to the original :-) These Warmachine miniatures are awesome, perhaps I'll use something more from that universe for my next model. If I can get this model into a Unity project, I would probably add some chilling particle effects that spawns from the blue parts of the hammer, small snowcrystals and such. Great fun!

Frost-Hammer W.I.P

So my computer at home decided to DIE on me, after four years of faithful service. Blast! Ordered a new one, but it will probably take a week or so... So I went to the old Lockpick Office to take some more books home ( I had a ton there...) And I started flipping pages in one while choosing which to take home this time. It was the Warmachine rulebook, tabletop wargame. Then I found this pic of some troopers with some kind of heavy hammers (pic above).

Looked real cool so I figured it would be cool with a lowpoly-version of the hammer, and now a couple of hours later the model is done and UV-mapped... :-D Texturing tomorrow maybe?

Short Sword version 2

With a bit of UV magic and nice painterly textures, the previous size of 512x512 (!) dropped down to a mere 128x256. And the smaller one looks just as good! Mmmm.... saving video memory... Made simpler designs for the sword/knife. Maybe I´ll try to press down the old 512 into this new smaller version as well, but I'll leave this model for now.

Evil Sword

So I did a low-poly sword with a not-so-low-res texture. Kill me.
Actually it started out as a mistake, I just took the size of the tower UV and started to texture the sword, and before I knew it I thought it would be a great idea to make some intricate skull on the hilt, and it kind of grew from there. The texture was just SO much fun to do, so I couldn't stop myself. I'll make some more versions of this sword, with just a quarter of the resolution from the old texture. But here is the first try, just for fun.

Tower

Ingame-model of a tower, textured with my own style, more painter-like. Awesome fun to do, especially the texturing.

Heretic detected

The blessings you are given signify your allegiance with us. We honor your preseverance with these gifts. Be ever vigilant, as the accursed Brotherhood tirelessly seek for the likes of you.

You have been warned.

Lectures and running

So, this will be my first "non-artwork" related blog post. Just trying something new, and keeping my writing skills intact.

This morning I held a lecture at Skövde University called "Making graphics for the player". The audience being mostly students that study Computer Game Graphics.

It was the first lecture I ever have held, and I guess I was a bit nervous about it. It all went smooth though, and only stumbled on my own words a few times.

The lecture focused on mistakes that were made during various projects I have taken part in during my time at the school and at Lockpick Entertainment. I have learned lots by backtracking and analyzing mistakes, and wanted to share some of that knowledge. Hope the students liked it, and hopefully I'll do it again.

Also started running again today, a new course. Felt awesome, even if it was a bit short. Just hoping the weather stays warm, so I can keep on running.

Forestlurker

Photoshop 2-3h

Walking Carcass

Random dead guy. 1h Photoshop

Undead Transformation

Photoshop 2-3h

Pixel-art

Stylesheet for 2D-game, Photoshop

Cargo Hover Truck [WIP]

Click the image to enlarge it
















Posting a "Work In Progress" so I don´t forget the lessons learned:

1. I have truly learned the value of good concept art, or decent blueprints.
My first doodle was on a napkin, but even if the one I drew in photoshop were better, it really lacks detail on many places. This led to lots of trial and error on places where the original sketch was undetailed. I finally print-screened the model as far as I had come, then painted a new sketch on top of that. That really helped. (the main problem was the truck, the cargo was much more easy)

2. The "hover" thingies were really tough, they still aren't very impressive, but I need to move on. I'm hoping that details in the texture and normalmap will help them look more interesting.

3. Doing my own splits, since you cannot always count on triangulate to make the tris lay themselves out in a decent way

This is probably the most serious model I have done, but I already have tons of ideas for the next model! Something with guns! :-P

Cargo Hovercar - Concept

Photoshop














Concept for a vehicle I intend to build in 3D, with next-gen realtime engine limitations.
As I drew, some extra functions for the truck came to mind, so I squeezed them in as well.
Would be cool if it could unload the cargo somehow, and this cargo could also be a prop lying around.

Perhaps I will make a smashed up version as well, games today seldom have working vehicles on the level, (if they are not GTA, or perhaps Battlefield) as it creates incentives for the player to be able to use them.

Ammo Crate

Ammo crate, Maya, Photoshop


















Lessons Learned:
1. Don't take too long between sessions of making the model, or you will forget what you were doing :-P.
2. Tried to make this crate a bit more interesting with stripes, lettering and stickers. Made too much of these details at first, making the prop nice when it is standing by itself, but placing several of these crates next to each other revealed the copy/paste-ness.

These kind of props are not supposed to steal the players attention, players should be aware of what the prop is supposed to be, perhaps use the prop, throw it, break it or similar. If the prop has a distinctive pattern, chances are that the player will find this strange or annoying. If this happens, you have taken the players attention away from the game, and thus, have made a bad prop.

3. Make an effort to ignore MSN while working. Disrupts the workflow.

4. I find no need to make a highpoly-version of these more simple props, the Nvidia Filter for normalmaps in photoshop works just fine. Next model will be more detailed!