Ice Wall Sculpt

Did this the other day for an environment I'm starting to work on in my free time:

Ice Wall Sculpt

Its meant to be melting wall of glacial ice mixed with some snow.

I haven't used zbrush in a while so this was a fun little sculpt to get back into it.  The wall is meant to be modular, so I had to find a way to make the sculpt tile.  I ended up just setting the wrapmode of any brush to 1, and turned off the z axis modifier, which worked out pretty well.

I'm bouncing between this environment, some props for an indie game, my day job, and trying to get some drawing in..so I'm hoping to free up some time over the next few days to do more work with this scene.

Website Update

Got my portfolio website updated last week.

New Website

Old Website

Not too different looks-wise.  I realized that the vertical thumbnails were a terrible idea for showing vehicles/environments, so I changed that up.  The rest of the updates are all behind the curtains.  A good friend of mine completely rebuilt the site for me.  Much better than the previous "make a layout in photoshop, slice it up, throw it in dreamweaver, then upload it" method.  It loads much, much faster now, and my galleries all work off of a single text file, so its super easy to update and add new pieces.

If anybody is interested, the guy that set this up for me does freelance web design on the side.  You can contact him via his website: www.roryjones.net.

Jet Bike

Started working on this a while ago...finally decided to finish it up and move on.

This started out as a little group project I was doing with some of my coworkers.  We had toyed around with the idea of making a little game...or part of one at least.  We initially started out with the idea for a Jet Moto style game, but with customizable/upgradable bikes.  I came up with a unified template for the bikes and jet engines so that we could each swap them back and forth.  We could have the player pick a bike style, then select an engine...or start out with a base one and upgrade to better ones.

This fell through rather quickly...bike physics were a pain to set up, so once our coder quit..things fell apart.  I decided to follow through and at least finish a bike and jet.

I kept the theme of customization in mind.  Mainly, I kept in mind a way to pick your own bike colors/paint jobs and decals.  I ended up making a couple "paint job maps" that use the rgb channels as masks for the different colors of it:

Paint Job map

 I set up a master material in UDK that allowed instanced materials to pick a paint job map, then use a color picker for the different parts of it.  Also, If a matte paint is desired, dropping the reflection parameter down activates a few other parts of the material that helps the matte paint look nice.

Also added some different decals into the mix as well.


With all these things combined, I tested out the flexibility of the master material.  These were all made with material instances:

Sample Variations

This is what my Master Material looks like in UDK:

Scifi Truck

Ok, so I guess that I should post something.  I'm currently finishing up this scifi styled pickup for someone for an indie game project.  I worked off of a concept that was provided to me, and I stayed pretty close to that.  There is a topper that can be placed on the back of the truck as well.  

Scifi Truck

Oh Hai!

Hello Internets!

So...I've been thinking about starting a blog for a while now.  This is primarily going to be a place for me to most some of the art that I do.  Not really sure how this is going to turn out, so we'll just see what happens.  Its almost 6am, I really need to get to sleep.  Hopefully tomorrow I can work on the layout of the blog and conjure up some work.