Wanted to host some commissions I did for a friend named Corey. Mostly these were commissioned as gifts for the members of a certain Dungeons and Dragons group. They were all completed at different times but I got to almost fully concept them off of a general description with few key details. I really enjoyed playing with this black and white charcoal style look. The contrast of the heavy blacks and the white highlights was interesting to experiment with.

Concept Poses for an Elf Ranger...

These pups were concepts for a magical fantasy wolf animal. There were some other very rough concepts that featured wings, talons, and multiple tails, etc... We settled on this simpler wolf pup look with protruding scales underneath soft fur and a feathered tail instead of the normal scruffy canine tail. These were some of the color concepts, really pushing it with the high saturation and bright colors.

Again we went with something a little more subdued, a dark midnight blue with some twilight blues and purples thrown in. Also the heterochromia in the eyes was a conscious choice by Corey. I prefered some brighter warmer colors like yellow or orange and a cool green or blue... but the customer is always right!

Thanks for looking!

Looking through old artwork folders...

   
     Wow, long time no update huh? So the season finale of Breaking Bad was a few weeks ago, but I did this little sketch as a symbol of my undying love for the series. Referenced that same picture of Walt that is all over everything breaking bad.

      I get frequently invited to this weekly group event on Facebook. The group is for 3D challenges, run by people from the AI in San Francisco. I sometimes start them and usually don't finish them, but this last one just sounded too easy and too fun.
      Last week was favorite anti-zombie weapon week. I couldn't resist and had to make this bat. The idea was something easy to use, reliable, no ammunition requirement and versatile. I was going to add a kind of hammer claw/crowbar bit to the bottom of the handle, but attaching that kind of thing realistically would've basically ruined the integrity of the handle. The nails are for easy penetration in zombie heads, reducing the force needed to bash the brains if using the bat in its stock condition. The barbed wire isn't as much for zombies as for self-defense against the still living and intimidation effect. Anyway, I love zombie stuff and this was fun. The next challenge is a TF2 object. Not sure if I'll do that one, haven't played a lot of TF2...

Well that was nice. Hopefully I'll update again soon with some rehashed MURDERBALL sketches I've been working on with Jack in N.C.

~Jesse out

Portfolio

Hey everyone. Thanks for checking in. I've got a real treat here for you. Its midterm week in my final quarter at the California Art Institute of San Francisco. I recently completed cutting together a rough cut of what will be my graduating demo reel containing a set of characters I've made for different projects. My reel is focused towards low-spec game models for use in the growing mobile and social games market. So enjoy and feel free to send me and email or leave a comment on what you think or suggestions. Thanks.

Countdown

     So here's another art blog dump from me to the internets. The final countdown to Portfolio and graduation has begun. There are four weeks remaining in this quarter followed by a week "off" and then an 10 week mad dash to the finish line. I've got a long list of characters I want to work on simultaneously and I find myself mostly immobilized by the decision of what to do next or how to go about it while having to maintain work of decent quality for my other classes. My current lineup of classes is 3D Environments, for which I have posted work below, Game Programming, Senior Project 4 and Cultural Anthropology which is frankly bullshit.

     Here's a few things I made for my 3D Environments class:

     This piece here is for my dungeon scene which was the first project and midterm for the class. Creativity failed me in my environment but I knew I wanted to model a basilisk that could be a kind of mid-boss for the environment in this  MMO level of detail. This is just the wireframe, obviously, the texture I added onto it was just a simple tile-able stone-ish texture to make it a statue that was part of the environment. Anyway this guy comes in at just under 7500 Tris.

  
      This RV is a part of my second scene for the same class. It is modeled off of a 1986 Fleetwood Bounder, the same RV that is featured as a rolling meth lab in the popular tv series Breaking Bad. My end game with this project is to recreate a fictitious scene similar to the show where the RV has parked itself far out in the New Mexico desert for an epic meth cooking session.

      This picture is just a quick mockup of what the scene may look like in the final piece. Some side items accompanying the RV are an igloo water cooler, a portable generator, a 72-inch folding table, some gas cans, agave plants and cacti.

     These images here are some sample logos I painted up for our senior project game. This first one is for the red team, the courage wolves of somethings, the rest are for the blue team currently, The Bucketheads.

This painting isn't for anything really. Its a redesign of the character Griff from Disney's Gargoyles. Just something I sketched up while thinking of making a second attempt at a character sculpt.

 Time to get back to work. Adios.

Random Update Time!

Yeah Yeah Yeah! Go Go Go!

     Update time. So we think we finished the character textures for our senior project (MURDERBALL). They definitely took way to long but by the end the last two went pretty fast and the last one even faster! I think that one is probably my favorite and is what I'm posting up. As a team I think we learned a good deal about how important a solid pipeline is to game production. Ours was not as solid as we would've liked in hindsight but what're you gonna do with a team this small? Not fun to have people sitting on their thumbs waiting for textures y'kno? Anyway... Here's a picture of the sneaker class.

     Then on the side I found this sketch from another class where I was tasked with designing classes for a Dungeons&Dragons style CTF game. I really loved this rejected female rogue I sketched out. So I plunged ahead without creating any orthographic drawings for her and modeled her torso, arms and legs. I also started working out a face. I found it easier to model blindly with only a basic idea towards topology with the idea of correcting it afterwards.

      I think I'm coming into my own as far as character modeling goes. I still have a long way to go of course but seeing my progression compared to past models I've done is encouraging. I really want to rough out a few low and mid-poly detailed characters before moving onto some serious Zsculpting for my final portfolio. Also thoughts of my overdue website have begun to crop up in my head again...ahh! only a little over 6 months until my projected graduation if all goes smooth (and it damn well better!)
     So this is what I've been up to lately. Eventually I'll have to get a shot of the MURDER-BALL characters in game. My friend John Miller did an amazing job with the shader-networks in UDK with lights and a subsurface scattering shader. Really awesome work.

Long time no see...

It's difficult and scary to believe that it has been 6 months since my last update. Time is passing quickly and 2 quarters have gone by in terms of student time. I hope that this update will inspire me to be more progress-conscious.
      This first image is of an in progress Zsculpt of a male human torso. I suppose it's to demonstrate a basic knowledge of human anatomy and proportion.The image is actually a Maya screenshot of 3 versions of the base I started with with escalating polycounts displaying the same Normalmap of the in progress sculpt. I did this to more or less see the difference in quality between different polycount levels using the same "high"-detailed Normalmap. The images on the left, to me, are reminiscent of the PS1 and PS2 era game art. The last image on the right is more on the upper limits of today's game art (albeit probably too many polys for being just a torso).

This piece here (of the bird-man) is a shot of one of my first character attempts using Zbrush. I wanted to do a re-imagining of Griff from the London Clan of gargoyles from Disney's "Gargoyles". Having not looked at this in over 3 months I have to admit it is a bit embarassing. Perhaps a diffuse texture would help to convey the character instead of solely normals. The proportions on the torso are really out of whack on account of trying to bulk him up to convey the extra muscle needed to move his powerful wings. Of course a realistic rendering of a winged humanoid is ridiculous because wings are essentially a second set of arms on the back which would require a giant trapezius and a second set of pectorals located somewhere beneath the armpit or something else to that effect to get them flapping or hold them steady in windy flight. The overall character design is lacking in interest and does not do the original character justice in my opinion. This was done as a final for Advanced Game Modeling and Texture, a class taken from one Andrew Klein in the Spring of 2010. I hope to revisit this piece later or scrap it all together and try again at another point in time for a portfolio piece.

      I'll end this with another entry from over the summer. I did some character orthographics from my senior project class. Had to redesign the characters a few times and this does not barely reflect the style or appearance of the characters as they've turned out now. I'm currently dragging my ass working on the diffuse and spec maps for the four characters of our death-sport game.

So then this is me signing off for now. Let's hope for a more productive and determined me until the next post.