i now understand just how much i have changed since the start of year one, i now understand why i need to be looking at everything even things unrelated to games, art or even gameart. to create anything you need knowlege and understanding of it you cant just rely on your knowlege of max, photoshop and leave everything else up to google. i need to be out there experiencing the world so i can be a better artist. this accured to me quite a while ago but i did not fully understand why or how important real life experience is until i played left 4 dead, i know that may sound stupid but its true.
I played through left 4 deads commentry mode to see what the makers of the games did and the amount of things they new and used in that game to get things just right was quite amazing, there knowlege of unrelated topics made that game what it is. from this i have realisedi must keep looking into everything i posibbly can to improve my creativity. so through these past few years i finaly understand what creativity is, and how its formed, its using everything and anything you have at your disposal.

update

these are a few updates on my character progress at the moment iam working choosing my final colours for my pilot. ive gone for a quite red rosy face as the characters face would be open to the elements quite alot, for the goggles i may add scratch marks in the normal map to portray speed, as if peices of debris have hit her as she was flying.

old stuff

most of these models are either work in progress or have been scraped alltogether but i thought i should put them up anyway.
this is an iveco truck as you can see its not finnished but modeling this vehicle was a bit hard as it was my first modeled vehicle in quite a while.

these are a couple of structures i built for a scene i was creating in unreal it never got finnished but it was great practice as buildings are not my forte.



these are screens of a mustang i was creating for my first scrapyard but i scraped it as i didnt like the feel of the area, but i did like this model and as soon as i have time iam probably going change this model to its original state and make it drivable in crysis or unreal.

pilot

for my character project iam creating a ww1 pilot, the head iam using in this picture is a head i created a wile back but i ave edited it to be at the standard iam at now, there was a few bugs in it, but this shows how much i have learnt over the past few weeks.

scrapyard

these are a few shots of my scrapyard as it stands to date, i have focust on creating a large authentic pile of rubbish without having to actually create alot of models, to save polys i made pockets of rubbish and placed them in areas that they would be most effective in giving the feel of the area bursting with junk.

cv_ wip

these are a few screenshots of my citreon van so far, i tried to keep my wireframe as neat as possible and it came out pretty well. to make my vans metal look more realistic i spent more time editing the spec map to give the right kind of shine. the whole thing is painted except for the wheels alloy and one overlay texture for the shine. tri count so far is about 4000 for the outside.

my work is coming along now i have modeled my van scetched a few ideas for other projects and now ready to start texturing i have a few ideas on style and i will defenatly create many versions from poly count to textures and i may even do a few of the projects instead of just one, as last year i was told my work is good but theres just not enough of it. So this year im going to model anything and everything i can in the time i have and i will model them in as many different ways as i can fit into the time frame. i also want to concentrate on drawing more this year because i have modeled myself to death over the holidays, if it was interesting or fun in anyway i would model it. ive created fantasy villages, country lanes, modern day vehicles and people, i have improved alot from previouse work and this year is the time to show it. i am now confident on modeling people and i can now model vehicles easily. the latest vehicle i modeled not including the uni work is a bigfoot army truck, i descided to model it because it looked interesting and i wanted to get a nice looking vehicle into the crysis engine. i now have a fully working drivable bigfoot in crysis it even has smoke bellowing out of its exsaust.



this is my third character, i made this character to see how well i could produce a character with just painting in photoshop i also wanted to improve my edgeflow from my previous attempt. It worked out quite well, i improved on many aspects of my character modeling, which will help me in my up-coming uni work. Theres 2 areas ive realised i need to focus on to improve my character creation, one is to spend more time on clothing textures and the other,"Major" area is hands, i seem to give up and get bored of a character by the time i reach this vital area, for my next model iam going to make a nice set of hands.

this character is my second character i made and i didnt like the edgeflow at all thats why i created my woman character. you may be wondering why he looks ill, this is because i was asked by a friend to model a character which happened to be ill. also its partly down to my lack of photoshop practice.


these images are of my bigfoot truck again i used this model to practice my painting techniques on a 3d model, i tried to keep it simple as possible even though it was going into the cry engine, i tried to make fit with the style of the cry engine and when i put it next a crytek model it looked fine even though i hadnt put normal maps or spec maps on it.


i did this bus one day because i wanted to build a big vehicle with a detailed interior, i dont like the texturing on it as it lookes quite rushed because the rust is all over, there is no hint of the original look other than the shape, i may go back and produce a less rusted version.






these are a few other images i produced over the holidays. The bin was used in a street sene i created, the bed was for a friends mod and the last is a rabbit house i made to releive bordom.

scrap

i decided to go on a walk around leicester to find any sorce of reference and choose my scene depending on what reference were available. i found some interesting scrap yards, even though i wasn't able to get into all of them i finally got some photos of some interesting peices. the amount of textures and varied shapes made the scrap yard option the most appealing. I went from scrap yard to scrap yard to find as many different textures as i could as most of my models i have created in the past didn;t have much variation as i would like. so im trying to improve on that with year 3 models.


mostly these photos will help me with layout so my scene will not look face and organised as a scrap yard is usually quite messy except for stacks of vehicles.
the way i do rust on vehicles has completely changed since ive seen these scrap yards, the places rust populates on metal and the damage it does is quite interesting and the way weather causes damage to man made objects will be a focus in my scrap scene. After watching a documentory on wildlife while modeling my vehicle i saw a section on how abandoned cars reacted on its surroundings, for exaple the way elements from rusted metal polute and change the colour of water. it causes masive changes to the ecosystem of the area. this will not massivly change my scene unless there is large amounts of wildlife in my scene but it would be fun to incorparate it.
from these two pictures you can see the way the rain has fallen on the metal creating drip marks of rust, the cracks of paint create more detal texture and from all my work in the unreal engine i have found a nice way of creating detailed textures by tiling a normal map in a certain type of unreal material, which is greate for things like stone or rust and with a mask i can localise it to certain areas.

hobo

here are a couple of drawings i did in an unusual way that works quite well. i found that the way in which the artist applies colour is a great and effective way of producing a nice tone throughout the image without over painting it makes colouring a character quick and simple.
this character is for a project titled"interesting person" i chose one of my tutors (jack) and turned hm into a hobbo

the rush

everyone does it once in a while and most people do every time but i keep asking myself why do we do it its so much stress and the end result is never as good as if you had done it in advance, what im talking about is the rush to hand in work where we cram aload of things to do in the last few hours of the deadline.
we all have dead lines but most people dont even plan for them, they fall into that spiral of "ill do it tomorrow" and almost always never get out of it except for when the deadline is like to weeks away. even though pushiing so much work into one weekend maybe a bit rediculous some people get better work out of it for example i created my speed paintings which i never would have done if i didnt have a looming deadline. in short i guess the answer to this question is we are just unmotivated at times.

this is in order of when i did them each speed painting took me about 2-10 mins to complete.
i was just playing with colour but i quite like them my favourite is the bottom image as it shows how much i progressed in my ps skills in such a short time