Lecture with Uncharted 3 Lead Technical Artist

Great lecture on Environment creation from Teagan the lead Art Director at Naughty Dog theory and practice great stuff!!

http://www.gamertalk.tv/?p=501

Hard Lines

 After visiting Eurogamer the other weekend I bumped into an old work collegue Nicky Hunt who is now working on a great game app called Hard Lines by Spilt Milk Studios check it out this great game :)

For iphone ipad and ipod touch visit their site below!

http://www.spiltmilkstudios.com/

The Epic Adventures of Princess Moonface

 A fun and beautifully illustrated way to learn Chinese!!

My girlfriend Qian Qian is currently illustrating a Chinese language book The Epic Adventures of Princess Moonface. You can see details of the project here and also pledge support if you are interested in helping this fantastic project..... and you can recieve great gifts too! :)

"The Epic Adventures of Princess Moonface is a high quality, hip and modern language-teaching multimedia series for tweens, teens and young adults"

Check it out now!!

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1903349410/the-epic-adventures-of-princess-moonface

Great Max Scripts

Great Max Scripts, a very useful reference and fabulous tutorials too :)

http://www.scriptspot.com/

CryENGINE 3 Free SDK

CryENGINE 3 Free SDK

 Anyone can now download a full version of the best All-In-One Game Development Engine, for free and use it without charge for non-commercial game development. You can try out the fastest toolset for creating game worlds and use the power of CryENGINE 3 in your own games.

looks great have to give it a try!! :)

http://www.crydev.net/

TexTools

A great tool that a lot of people are using, havent fully tried yet but I have heard great things about this and should speed up my workflow when Uving and texturing!!!

http://www.renderhjs.net/textools/

The 3 Point Shader and xoliulshader

 I thought I should post this as these shaders are great allowing you to view your models with Diffuse, Normal Specular, Gloss and Normal maps in your viewport !

 This is great as you can preview your models on  how they will look in a game engine great for previews or screen captures for your portfolio shots saving the time of exporting to an engine like Unreal or such. Check out the sites for the free downloads or get the full featured versions.

http://www.3pointstudios.com/3pointshader_about.shtml

http://xoliulshader.com/

Chivalery: Medieval Warfare art test (torture device)...

I recently completed this art test fot Torn banner a great indie developer creating one of the most atmospheric and unique ganes Chivalery: Medieval Warfare check out their fantastic site, impresive videos and exciting game!!

http://www.chivalrythegame.com/index.htm

High poly

High/Low poly

Low poly

UV Layout

Help support the UK games industry and save jobs!!!

Help support the UK games industry and save jobs!!!

 Visit http://www.tiga.org/ for more information on how you can help and support their pertition asking government for TAX relief saving and creating jobs in the UK.

Business leader confirms Government policy costing UK jobs

http://www.tiga.org/PressReleaseDetail.aspx?id=faf4715a-8a0a-4687-aace-bad638f6a0be



TIGA has recently been praised in both Parliaments, watch the videos below:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bc68qTmoe-c&feature=player_embedded

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m8SE0jw4ykg&feature=player_embedded

My interview on Games of Experience :)

My interview on Games of Experience from the Netherlands take a look at this new gaming site!

http://www.gamesofexperience.com/?goe_interviews=james-morgan-artist

WIP Magic Rabbit prof of concept

 Here is the first environment proof of concept I have created using ink and paint in 3D Studio max then comped in Photoshop. The background is for Qian Qian Liu's and my short animated film we are creating in our spare time. The characters will be 2D Flash animated and then comped on top I will post more updates ASAP.

Splash damage art test WIP

To keep up my skills I have started the Splash damage Environment art test I will post my progress as I progress in this post. The test can be found at the link below...
http://www.splashdamage.com/envarttest

Tweaking and Hires complete 3D Studio Max render..




Blocking done starting the details also a couple of proportion changes needs fatening hah.....


Original concept by Splash Damage

Modular building

 Just a quick project following a tutorial from http://www.3dmotive.com/ good fun and worth a look for creating your background scene objects will update again as I progress.

All textures and materials in now.. I had a play with the lighting based from the blue bounce light from the floor giving a more scifi look variation.

Ok textures pretty much done there are a few tweeks needeed like under the arches but then time to create all the materials spec normal etc and after that lighting :)

Texture sheets 2x2048

Specular based off diffuse

A BW map used to generate a more crisp punchy Normal map

Normal map

One thing of note things that are rotated on the texture sheet will need to separated then rotated to their correct position and generated separately created in Shadermap Pro http://shadermap.com/ (Acheaper crazybump:)) separately and then recombined later. 

Diffuse map

Max Modular exampl building piece this is comprissed of many smaller sections.

Reference

Image taken from the great texture site http://www.cgtextures.com/index.php

Latest level screenshots Warhammer "Warpub"

Plants and foliage for the Warhammer Warpub scene.

I first created my grass texture a mud texture and a merge texture grass to mud UDK is great at blending textures but wanted an edging texture which I could lay pebbles etc on later. I then creted a grass blade texture and object to be used as a foliage layer allowing me to paint on the grass where needed.

 I also added a sky dome using a panoramic photo from http://www.cgtextures.com/index.php edited in photoshop and mapped to a hemisphere. This uses emisive lighting to give a nice starting point to the lighting. I also added fog to get the mood of the scene taking a break from modelling and keeping things interesting.

I also had some problems with shadows on the grass but lighting it independently of the scene and turning shadows off sorted it ..

 

 When creating the trees I started with speedtree to see the kind of results I could achieve. It was very fast and convenient but slowed my machine it had nice animations but also couldn't control the blending of texture at base of trunk as trunk texture was tiled looked pretty good though.

 Using what I learned from Speed tree I constructed my own fantasy tree from some warhammer Fantasy reference first creating the trunk, mushrooms and surface detail and then unwrapped.

Then I created a separate cross plane object for the small branches and applied an alpha texture which was on a separate smaller 512 texture sheet.

Next I tested in unreal to see the scale and how the textures were working..

After getting the grass in I decided to add more dacal objects first a kind of Hero Decal object with the Toadstool. These were created in a small group as they seemed to grow like this and seemed to make sense the size and rotation could be varied for each object in UDK.

Then to add some colour and variationn I added flowers and changed the Alpha on one of the grass objects. this was a quick fix but added a lot of detail making the scene more natural. I think adding a slight transparancy to the end of the grass material may soften it further. Also I think bushes and brambles need to be added to give the ground a more wild feel and give more variation to the ground.

Environment objects for the Warhammer Warpub scene.

 After finishing the Warpub model I wanted to learn more about UDK and its tools so decided to create an environment for the building to go in...

The Concept

 After creating a reference/mood board I created a quick concept covering the layout and mood I wanted for the scene.

 This then gave me a clearer idea on what objects needed to be created and rough scale. It also was useful to plan what objects could be instanced to fill the scene.






Objects and scene elements

Generic Barrel

The first object I tackled was the favourite in FPS games the generic barrel again modelled in XSI in 3 sections and sculpted in Mudbox. After creating the textures I did a quick test against the emissive light to see how the normal map was working OK.

Later when finalising the textures I think the wood parts the door and barrels need a little de saturation...

Wooden cart

Next I tackled the cart using the same method as the warpub building remembering to add smoothing edges before subdividing!! to make sculpting easier in Mudbox.

I only exported half of the elements needed for mudbx as these can be duplicated and the repetition removed in the texture.

  

Testing the rendermap results the handles lost some detail when generating the maps but I will resolve this with Crazybump.

 Also the emissive material was a worry so had to be tested and textured now Im happy with the results created with an RGB Mask emissive specular texture. It looks a bit weird too with all the windows being lit so will amend the final texture when detailing.

 The scene so far now I have tested each element and material in the scene and pretty much got it to where I want it I will continue to construct all the final scene objects and could do with some trees!!